Today was another day of saying goodbye to cruising friends; this time it was Roger and Lucie, off Catamini, who are putting their yacht on the hard and returning home to Belgium. We had hoped to wave them off too, but somehow missed them. When we looked again their berth was empty. Regardless, we wish them safe travels.

We’ve also had a number of other cruising friends make the difficult decision to give up on their circumnavigation because of the pandemic and have, instead, shipped their yachts home. We trust by now Blue Summit has arrived safely and we wish Hakuna Matata and TiSento a safe journey home. Of course, all of this activity has set our minds racing again on what to do, especially with the visa amnesty period possibly coming to a close, but we’ve decided to do nothing! Yep, absolutely nothing! We’re leaving this decision in the hands of fate and will make our decisions as and when the cards are dealt.

The good news is that Keenan eventually got an appointment to have his first COVID-19 vaccination; just a tad overdue, considering he’s being flying for a few months now and a definite worry for us.

The second piece of good news relates to the hard work and dedication of Captain Roy. For months we have reported that, besides working on the numerous yacht projects, he was also working on some major enhancements to the “Anchor Plus” application. Well, this effort eventually came to fruition today after he received approval from Apple.

We originally designed and developed this application as an anchor assistant, "Anchor Basic", a free app on the App Store, since we were tired of cruisers anchoring on top of us, but, over time, it has been expanded to be a “one-stop-shop” for cruisers, which can be downloaded to any Apple mobile device running Version 12 and higher and includes features that allow you to:

• Use Siri Shortcuts and voice commands to set the anchor alarm
• Set the alarm during anchoring (current position) or afterwards (bearing & distance) or coordinates
• Support for iOS14 Home Screen widgets
• Day and night theme, metric or imperial, various alarms
• Apple Watch remote control, set the anchor from your watch
• Receive email status updates and alarm alerts on another device
• Scan the QR code and monitor the anchor status from another device
• Man Overboard provides bearing to steer and distance back to MOB point
• Map view with drift history
• Current and 7 day weather forecast with wind alerts
• Tropical weather from the top severe weather providers around the globe
• Compass and anchor retrieval tool with bearing and distance to anchor
• Support for MFi external bluetooth GPS on WiFi only devices
• Use the anchor assistant to determine the correct scope and provide a visual representation of where your vessel should be after the anchor is set
• Barometric pressure trend for up to 7 days Sun & Moon azimuth, elevation and illumination

We trust you will find this to be a very useful tool to have onboard. We do! Enjoy!