What next?

I can't believe we have now been in Lagos for 10 days and have to head home tomorrow. We've managed to slip straight back into boat time, where everything takes a while to complete (the famous 10-minute job takes at least two days) and we sleep a lot - not always well, as both Sam and Ben have had awful colds and racking coughs, so nights are not exactly peaceful.

Up to yesterday we'd managed to spend a week here without ever going into town - though we remedied that with a stroll in to Lagos to do a bit of shopping and eat a pizza. I walked on to the end of Ponta da Piedade, which was so stunningly beautiful I made Ben and Sam come & visit it with me today.

I think we now have a plan for our next steps. At Easter we'll take the boat down towards Gibraltar, possibly to Ceuta which is the Spanish enclave on the Morocco side. Then it looks as though Sam will stay on board a couple of weeks to be joined by Paul & Val from Intemperance (Sigma 400) who we met in Gijon and Cascais last summer, and they'll skip along the most built-up bit of the Costa Brava to the Balearics. In the summer we'll all be out again to explore Menorca etc with a view to over-wintering possibly in the south of France. (Costs likely to be somewhat higher than this year due to the staggering prices in marinas inthe Balearics!)

Then we have the option of bringing Kalessin home early in 2008, either through the canals if it's been a wet winter, or back round again with a delivery crew, or even shipping her on a big ship - expensive but less than all of us living on board for several months! I think we're coming to terms with the fact that as long as Ben is at school we aren't all going to be able to sail together for months at a time, which is a shame, but also we really miss having Kalessin back in the UK.