The Mona Passage was relatively quiet, but as we cleared Punta Higueroa, at the northwest corner of Puerto Rico, and set our course for Bermuda, the sea picked up. We throttled back a little and headed a little more to the eastward for a more comfortable ride.

As usual, the ocean just north of Puerto Rico was full of ships, coming out of the Mona and Windward Passages and headed for Europe. We saw, at least on the AIS, Marguerite, for Gibraltar, Glasgow Express, Eternity Island, Star Prima, among many others.

We settled into our regular passage routine: standing our watches, getting a weather briefing from Herb Hilgenberg every afternoon, transferring fuel from the main tanks to the day tank, checking the engine room every half-hour. It was a slightly lumpy but otherwise completely uneventful passage, and late at night on the 25th we made VHF radio contact with Bermuda Radio.

The weekend passed quickly, with much conviviality, and on Monday morning we worked our way into the tight confines of the marina at Dockyard ("Pier 41") and filled our water tanks, thanks to Willie Freeman, the manager. By 1:00 we were back in St. George's, at our old berth on Penno's Wharf

We had something new to look at, however -- Penno's Wharf doubles as a commercial pier and a bulk cargo ship had pulled in astern of our berth and was unloading a cargo of sand. Talking to Sandra Soares, the Dockmaster, we discovered that another large yaccht was due in and that our berth was needed for her, so we moved east a few feet to a space in front of the Heritage Center.

We walked around St. George's a little, enjoying the beautiful weather, and smiled as we passed the Hillside B&B, where I spent my first night ever in Bermuda, years ago, when I flew down to help Dodge Morgan with his autopilot problems on American Promise.

We would go for long periods with no ships anywhere near, then we would have several, sometimes at the same time. It is all a matter of where they are coming from or going to in the US or the Caribbean. There are only a couple of exits from the Caribbean (which is why pirates had such good luck preying on Spanish treasure ships), then any traffic bound for the Gulf of Mexico (New Orleans and the Texas ports) from Europe pretty much has to go through the Northeast Providence Channel in the Bahamas. Then there will be another bunch heading for Charleston / Savannah, another for Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, and finally a group for New York.

Jason, the chief mechanic at Front Street Shipyard, made short work of finding the generator problem (loose wires in the control box), and Wednesday morning I put Barbara into the travel lift slings and by 11:00 she was blocked up in the huge new building for painting. Our friend Nancy Cline picked us up and drove us back to Chebeague, where we whiled away the boatless time by painting the living-room.

We had been having intermittent troubles with the navigation computer, and as everyone knows, intermittent problems are the hardest to solve, as they cannot be counted on the show up under testing. I thought we had the problem fixed, but irecurred, so back we went to Rockland (by car this time) and Doug Barnes at Navroc hung in until we finally had it acting properly.

We decided to move Barbara for hurricane Sandy, so we went to a more sheltered harbor and stayed aboard. We actually had it better than most people, as we never lost power. We did lose our internet connection, however, since the island was without power for a time. Except for that, however, work on the boat continued, thanks to the very mild Fall, with warm weather right up through November.