We were a bit over confident last week regarding progress on the house build. The plumber only lasted one visit as, on arrival to take a detailed look at the plans, he was drunk and became quiet abusive when Jeff questioned some of his ideas. So we have another plumber called Starry who appears sober and keen to be part of the team.
The weather held out for the past 3 weeks and today we should have been casting the basement floor. However it is raining hard and we will now have to wait until Monday to try again.

St Lucia hosted one of the World Cup Cricket semi finals between Australia and South Africa on Wednesday so the place was very busy. Our small bay had 8 super yachts tied up, some of which were hosting the South African team. Their post-match party was understandably a little quiet, whereas we were on big motor yacht called Java where we had a very noisy party as all the crew were aussies! We had been invited to join them at 5am that morning for a pre-match ANZAC day sunrise ceremony. We dragged ourselves out of our bunks and crawled along to their boat, barely washed or dressed only to find an Australian TV crew were there to film it. The crew blasted out a recorded version of The Last Post and the Reveille from the top of their boat whilst we stood, looking suitably sombre, and afterwards Jeff said the bit about “They shall not grow old etc ” We then had ANZAC biscuits and tea whilst the TV crew did interviews. They gave us a copy of their piece but I think it is probably best that it was never aired on UK TV - bearded, T- shirted Jeff at 5 am doing ceremonials is not the way forward; especially as they had his name and rank etc. All very surreal. Soon after that most people left for the game and the bay was like a ghost town. The party at night was great fun as the crew had made their top deck look like a disco with rotating lights and thumping music. We danced and drank the night away..isn’t it great partying with winners?!!!

It was back to work as usual the next day - me doing boat and admin and Jeff on the lot. Next weeks tasks are mostly to do with paying people large deposits for wood, tiles and windows orders.

It is mango season and Jeff is given bags of them almost every other day. They are very sweet and juicy but there is a limit to how many you can eat and we have no facility to store, freeze or bottle so shall end up passing them on to other people. I have heard that this eventually becomes hard to do as there are so many around everyone is trying to off load them. I did manage to use the honeycomb that I mentioned last week. After I drained all the honey, I micro waved the comb on high to separate the bits from the wax and then added citronella to the wax and made some small night light candles that keep the mossies away.