Our UK, “work – family – friends’ triangle is complete. When I say complete, I mean it’s over and resides in the history books as we’re now back in Canada. It was manic and lovely. Time, four week’s in fact, passed at an alarming rate and we always seemed to be playing catch up.

Maybe it was because we missed our flight from Boston to Heathrow as the Air Canada connecting flight from Halifax to Boston was delayed. Seeing a man with a spanner and the cowl of the engine removed is a bit of a give away as you get onto the plane, only to be be told to get off again. We were told it would take 45 minutes. I knew instantly this would not be so.

My interpretation of how long a job will take is to double the time and add 30. It’s a bit like a rough calculation of Celsius to Fahrenheit. Any man with a spanner saying 45 minutes actually means 2 hours. I will allow myself to be smug here. Please forgive me. I was bang on.

My experience of the length of spannering time comes from living on a boat. I’m going to leave it at that. Dave will read this!

We were first off the aircraft when it landed and started legging it from terminal x to terminal y. I don’t recall the exact detail but I do know they seemed to be the two furthest away points in the airport. The Virgin Atlantic check in desk was in a tucked away corner of terminal y and had closed about 5 minutes before we materialised in our dishevelled panting and sweating state. Oh, how lucky our seat neighbours would have been if we had actually got on the flight.

It wasn’t to be. Even after persuading a friendly American passport officer to go and chat to the Virgin Atlantic representatives as the gate, we were left standing flightless in Boston airport without a boarding pass at 10.30 at night.

The ramifications of missing that flight were mostly financial but getting into the UK 24 hours after we had planned to, we never seemed to catch up that lost time. Although I have been to Reykjavik (airport) now.

Grace was in really good shape after a month in solitude on a mooring in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The trees are just starting to turn here and show their full red glory…..third week in October a local told us.

We plan to be around for at least a week. Sails come back from a service today. We are meeting a friend of friend, who I last saw in Namibia many moons ago, for a catch up tonight. Then dinner with some local Nova Scotia sailors at their house on Thursday. So boatlife eases back into becoming the norm and heading south will our focus.