We had a few hours to ready the boat for the arrival of our guests. First priority was to gain access to the washing machine, only one and one dryer but here they have the attractive bonus of being free to use so naturally yachtsmen are keen to take advantage of this, so there tends to be a queue. The best way of beating the queue is to be early and as we naturally wake up at ridiculous hours, that wasn’t difficult but by the time our second load was in, there were two more washes lined up behind us. Our other chores were to wash the boat inside and out and basically tidy the guest areas to make them habitable. The only way to achieve this is to move items such as deck cushions, cruising chute, cockpit canopy etc etc out of the aft cabins and place them in ours and the only real place to put them is in our heads, rendering the shower unusable but as we tend to stay in marinas when we have guests that is not an issue. Finally, we went to the Kwikly supermarket, a large one and with the added convenience of being close to the harbour and there we bought the makings of tonight’s supper. We planned a variety of meats, fish, prawns and cheese to accompany salads as the welcoming meal for our four guests for dinner.

The Ystad ferry was due in at 15:50 and by 14:00 we were ready for our guests. Rather than just sit around I suggested that we go to the chandlery about a mile away to see if they had any briquettes for my Cobb barbecue. The ordinary ones that I have don’t seem to want to light so I thought we would try to find the proper ones, designed for the job. We were on the way there when we realized that we hadn’t really left enough time to make the journey there and back.  However we would now be ridiculously early for their ferry but fortunately, there was a brilliant distraction in the main harbour near to the ferry terminal, in fact three of them. Moored against the harbour wall were three Royal Navy ‘Archer’ class patrol vessels and as there were crew members milling about, we thought we would go and have a chat to find out what they were up to. Most of the people present were very young, under 20 but there was an older man present who seemed to be in charge. Rob explained that all three of the vessels present were on an extended training run in the Baltic and had been here for several months. Most of these patrol vessels are now assigned to the University Royal Naval Units, a ship to one, or more commonly, a local group of Universities. For instance the three here were assigned to Portsmouth, Birmingham and Edinburgh. Undergraduates who join these units are given the rank of honorary Midshipman in the Royal Naval Reserve, midshipmen in all measures with the notable exception that they can’t be called up for duty in time of war. The youngsters on board had been flown out to join their allocated vessel and had a tour of duty of a couple of weeks, to be replaced by a fresh lot. Whilst we were being shown around Archer by the kind Rob, who incidentally was the engineer in charge of the two engines and all other equipment on board, various midshipmen of both sexes were busy cleaning the boat – apparently they were due to receive visitors at 16:00 so there was much to do. We took the hint from Rob and after thanking him for his generosity, we headed for the ferry terminal to await everyone’s arrival.

We didn’t have long to wait and pretty soon, we were heading back to CW, all talking at once, excited and pleased to be reunited. Elaine and Jon are on board with us for a week and we aim to drop them off in Ystad in Sweden at the end of their stay. Richard and John are to stay in a nearby hotel, joining us for the day and they will be with us until Tuesday evening, they return to the UK on Wednesday. There isn’t much else I can say about the rest of the day, it went quite quickly in a haze of alcohol and conversation – nice to have a crowd on board again!