We’ve been in Antigua over a week now, and there are a few thoughts I’ve wanted to add about our trip.

First, I think you might be interested to know that while we were underway and sending blogs we never saw them. We were emailing each blog to the web site. Any photos were emailed to Ben, who posted them on the site. So once we got our internet going we were surprised and pleasantly pleased by the site and by all the comments! I actually wrote this blog (or something similar) 2 days ago, but it got lost in internet space.

For those of you who were intrigued by the “disco stars”, I hope you will read the comment by our friend Marc, who is an astronomer in Montreal. It follows the Nov 29, “Lumpy, Bumpy, Breezy” entry. According to Marc we aren’t headed to the looney bin after all.

Jake has asked me to expand on the Dec 1 “Swim Call” paragraph describing the squalls. We had squalls that we could see on the radar and on the horizon eight miles to the east of us and six miles behind us for the entire night. If our navigation hadn’t been this precise (or lucky), we would have been soaked. We could watch the squalls coming in from the east on the
radar as they marched toward us, then dissipated and dried up. There was something about the dry air around us. The ugly stormy weather just couldn’t get to us. Had we been 8 miles further east or 6 miles slower, we would have had an ugly night.

Many people have inquired about Peter’s cut finger and how bad it must have been for us to turn around. (If you are interested, Ben has posted photos of the wound on Nov 24 “Great Fishing”.) I would say that if Peter had cut himself in his wood shop at home an ER doctor would have stitched the wound, given him a tetanus shot and told him not to use it or get it wet for a week. Apparently the opportunity to make a difference in closing a wound with stitches is best within 24 hours, and Peter didn’t get to the ER until after 28 hours. Kim had done a fine job closing the wound with the steri-strips so it didn’t make sense to try to stitch it. With Peter’s wound, the danger was not with the cut itself, but with the possibility of infection because the knife had been used to filet fish. The DAN doctors on the phone, the ER doctor in Bermuda and Peter’s doctor at home all emphasized the seriousness of infection. If he got an infection it would be sudden, likely within 4 days of the cut, and it could kill him! Peter had to be close to a hospital. That’s why we had to turn around and that’s why Peter couldn’t continue with us. We’ve talked to Peter since he got home, and he says the finger is healing well and he can now use the hand as long as he doesn’t get it wet.

The last item of note is that Kim taught us all how to make toast and eggs at once in a pan: put the slice of bread with a hole in the middle in a pan, break an egg into the hole, cook it the way you like it and you’ve got breakfast in one shot. Ben has posted a photo of the egg & toast breakfast (and I suspect there’s hash underneath it all [there was!]) in his photos. It was probably part of an “O dark thirty” breakfast [it was!!!]–any breakfast eaten before sunrise has no calories, no carbs and no fat! [When Kim suggested this, I knew what she was talking about immediately. I’d seen it on TV somewhere before. I said it was “egyptian toast”. When I got home, I looked it up. Turns out it’s “Egyptian Eggs”. There are a million other fun nicknames out there for it. Either way, it was an excellent suggestion, and an easy way to keep the eggs behaving on the stove on a rolly morning.]

All the best from the remaining crew of avalanche, Jake & Marnie.

[Ben Here. I’ve added 3 clarifications in these brackets within the post. I also linked the 2 posts mentioned so it’s easier to go back and double check]