We're sitting in the cockpit in the dark, waiting for the full moon to rise, listening to the frogs and crickets and other critters singing ashore. Once in a while a big fish or a ray will jump near the boat. Who needs tv.

Last weekend, we spent a few days in Green Island (on the southeast corner) and had some great hikes and swims, then back to Falmouth Harbour. It's suddenly off-season: we counted only two dozen boats in the harbour, instead of the 100-200 that we're used to dodging. In all this peace and quiet, I celebrated my 25th Mothers' Day with a champagne breakfast and calls to my old babies.

We had high hopes for fresh fish on our final sail from Falmouth to Jolly Harbour. We even sailed outside Cades Reef to maximize our time in deep water. At one point, Randy spotted a splash in the water ahead and we figured it was fish feeding, so we headed that way. Fish would have been nice, but what we got was even nicer -- a pod of porpoises (aka bottle-nosed dolphins) - about two dozen or more, big ones, little ones, and all just having a whale of a time surfing on our bow wave. Usually, the visit just lasts a minute or two, but this group stayed for long enough for me to go aft to get the camera, take a million blurry photos, and then relieve Randy at the wheel so he could go sit on the bowsprit and watch them too. They're so beautiful and they have so much fun.

This is our final week afloat. We took the main, the staysail and the mizzen off today, flaked and bagged them ondeck, and I'm told that I'm to get up early tomorrow to take the jib off before the breeze picks up. We're anchored in the outer harbour still, so I'm rowing twice a day, over to the beaches - one on the north side, one on the south, and one on the east - the best shelling beaches we've found in the W.I. Randy can watch me from the boat while he varnishes. He's been doing a lot of that.

This year has been different than our first two years -- we really slowed down and spent a lot more time on maintenance. It was time - we needed a rest from moving around so much, and the boat needed attention, and now she looks great. We're not sure about plans for next year -- Do we enter Nancy Dawson in Antigua Classics? go to Cuba? back to Grenada? Venezuela? We got to know Antigua a lot better this year, and it started to feel like home base -- we did get back to St. Barths, St. Martin, St. Kitts, Guadeloupe, the Saintes, and we visited Anguilla, Monserrat and Barbuda for the first time. Who has more fun than us?

Work will pick up tomorrow as we start to tear the boat apart. Cleaning and chucking. Next blog will be photos of our Toronto reunion with Kim and David (Amanzi) and Tara and Stewart (Mange Tout) who are flying in from the UK. All the photos fit to print that is. I've come to realize that pictures that you take of people dancing, like pictures of dolphins, just don't seem to quite catch the spirit of the moment. Live and learn. I'm thankful I've got a digital camera, or we'd go broke. I'll post lots more photos when we get a better signal.