Tropical life continues, with its charms and challenges. I wake every night at about three am (after nearly seven solid hours of sleep), scratching phantom and real bites, and then dozing off about five to dream of ants in the bed. We're still battling ants. I'm into the third tube of French ant poison, chockablock full of warnings that I can't decipher, and the ants are definitely on the decline. Or maybe incline - they seem to surface to die. Every trip to the head, I look up and wipe a dozen dying ants off the ceiling. You can just leave them there, but they tend to drop off onto your toothbrush, the toilet paper, the toilet seat.

Really, life aboard can be disgusting. But mostly, it's okay.

We're still in St. Lucia, and we spent three days in the marina for a couple of reasons. Uno, we decided to get our dinghy repaired. We've been looking for a better used dinghy, but the dinghy fella here, expat Brit named Francis, nice chap with wild white hair, showed us what he had on offer, and it was sort of what we had, only slightly better. So we opted for the devil we knew, and three days later, Francis's lovely lads returned our dinghy, only with a proper floor, 22 leaks patched in the bottom, transom expoxied, and proper "rowlocks" installed.

The three nights at the dock were smashing. We did all those jobs that require piles of fresh water (laundry! scrubbing grotty corners and scouring sinks) and electricity (vacuuming! I used my hairdryer! etc!) and enjoyed stepping on and off the boat and walking to the grocery store. Second reason for hanging at the marina was to rest my sproinged back. Combo outboard-lifting/anchoring injury. Ice and ibu and marina life for a couple of days seem to have sorted things out. I still make old-person noises when I move around in the morning, but perhaps that's a permanent thing.

Day two at the dock the Bickersons arrived at the slip next door after a trans-Atlantic crossing, and proceeded to clean their boat from stem to stern while letting everyone in earshot know just how bloody sick of each other they were after 16 days at sea. Politely. Passive-aggressively. There's no missing all this when they're only a dozen feet away. After a few hours and some heavy eye-rolling on our parts, Randy and I made sure to embrace and kiss and murmur a sweet nothing or two when we passed on deck at our various pursuits. It's performance art, really.

Speaking of, and I've spoken of it before, the evening anchoring festivities are rich in anecdote here in St. Lucia. I hate to make vast generalizations about nationalities, but here goes. There is one nation that is known for their great sailors and great racers, for good reason. But perhaps all their training has been about speed and tactics on the move, and at the end of the day, they return to the marina? Or to European harbours that are clotted with boats? Because when they sail into a Caribbean anchorage, they find the two boats that are anchored fairly close together, and they try to slide into the narrow space in between, or just in front. Never fails.

Randy sees a boat (or four) coming in at sunset, and he says Ah, yes, zee black boat, head for zee black boat and anchor zere, eet eez such a nice boat, and we want to be so close to zee black boat. And lo, it comes to pass. Rodney Bay is a huge harbour, could easily handle four or five hundred boats, and wherever there's a clump of about a dozen boats, that's where these guys will head.

And then there's the boats that seem to have a policy of putting out 60 feet of chain, never mind the depth or the wind or the swinging space or the complete failure of their anchor to hold after six attempts. How do they keep on cruising, day after day, week after week, living with this kind of frustration? If it took us two or three hours to park and re-park the boat everytime, I'd be a single woman living in a furnished apartment drinking cooking sherry and banging the salt off my boots. As Randy says, those guys need to read the book again or buy a Winnabago.

But that's just a few boats - there's lots of competent people on a variety of boats from an incredible number of places - lots of Scandinavians here just now - and lots and lots of Canadians. An American aquaintance remarked on the large number of Canadian boats and wondered why so many. Well, we know why, don't we?

The winds are continuing to honk, and our next hop south won't likely be until the weekend or next week. In the meantime, we have Lots To Do. On New Year's Day, we finished our champagne and sent in our preliminary entry form for Antigua Classics Yacht Regatta. Didn't think much of it, until a white-bearded guy showed up here on the dock a couple of evenings ago, and said HI, I'm Kenny Coombs. He runs the show at the regatta, and he just happened to be delivering a boat and was overnighting in St. Lucia and noticed Nancy D and remembered our entry form. So he came aboard for a rum and gave us his approval on the spot. I'm so glad I'd taken the laundry off the life lines and cleaned the chip bags off the deck.

So there's lists being made and added to, and they're mostly about varnish and cleaning. Great news is that our friends from Cowes, Tara and Stewart, aka the Touters (from Mange Toute) are coming to crew for us. One of the things that now occupies my head in the hours between 3 and 5 am (when I'm not killing phantom ants or scratching mosquito bites) is our crew uniforms. Wouldn't it be great if we could all wear Nova Scotia tartan kilts? How to pull this off is a bit of a head-scratcher, so if anyone has any ideas, LET ME KNOW. bigsue58@hotmail.com

If you too want to get all excited about the regatta, all the info is here: http://www.antiguaclassics.com/index.html