Still in St. Thomas

Just a quick update to let readers know that we are still in St. Thomas.  I know, we originally only planned to stay 3-4 days.  Why do we even plan, we never stick to it!  There have been several reasons for the delay but the primary one is the backstay in the picture below.  If you look closely you'll see a wire strand hanging from the stay.

On the trip from Leinster Bay to Salt Pond Bay, St. John we heard a Boinggggggg!  That's never a good sound!  A wire strand in one of our backstays (Merengue Has 2) broke and was unraveling, floating in the breeze.  We've been told that it is very unusual for one to break in the middle.  They usually break at one of the fittings.  We've spent the last week getting price quotes from riggers here and in Tortola for 2 new backstays.  We are hopeful, although not completely optimistic, that we will only have to replace the backstays.  Merengue's rigging is old and we're sure it will need to be replaced at some point in the near future.  But at thousands of dollars we'd like to delay that for as long as possible if we can.  Seeing as how the rigging holds the mast up it's not something you can really ignore!  Luckily our problem occurred on an island where we have lots of options for repairs so we should be able to get the rig fixed fairly easily, we hope!  Stay tuned!