I’m beginning to get the hang of Hurricane Season in Grenada. Nobody tells you about this, but it can all go downhill fairly quickly.

For one thing, nobody wants to go anywhere in case a hurricane comes along, so everybody has time on their hands.

This is why I spent so much time sitting in the cockpit with the man from the next boat drinking beer.

Well, not all the time, obviously. This afternoon I helped him put his mainsail back on – well, we tried to put it back on, made a total hash of it and then sat in the cockpit drinking beer.

This was not a particularly good look because it meant me tying my dinghy to his boat and leaving the crate of Carib lager I’d just collected on public display.

Yes, a crate – 24 bottles. When I presented 18 bottles at the Marina Mini Market checkout, the man behind the till asked why I wasn’t buying 24.

Well, the answer was that I had 18 empties for the recycling (except they don’t have recycling here).

But 18 bottles cost $81, he explained as if speaking to a five-year-old with their first pocket money, while a case of 24 is only $82 – and since these are East Caribbean dollars – a bottle of Carib “Premium lager from the heart of the Caribbean” works out at just 98p (and if you have a crate and bring it back full of empties, they’ll give you $10 as if this was England in the 1950s – which means your next bottle costs only 86p!)

Yes, thank you, I don’t mind if I do (and really, I couldn’t care less if we should have adjusted the grub screws on the mainsail batten tension before installing the luff plates.)

By the time I had rowed the leaky dinghy back to Samsara, there were all sorts of things, I really didn’t care about.

One of them was leaving the crate on the cockpit seat.

The boat rolled.

Gravity came into play.

… and, as I say, everything went downhill.

I think I’d better lie down.