Greetings from La Rochelle part 2

Ok now that I have the post I wrote in Pornichet posted, I can get on with telling the current story. I sailed down here on Thursday night, Friday morning, having a nice leisurely sail. Off of the Island of Yeu I managed to find a pretty good squall that was pretty much privately mine. The folks closer to the island got less wind and those outside got no change. I got a big blast, a big shift and a bunch of rain.
Since I have been here in La Rochelle, I am still waiting to hear whether Classe Mini will allow me to race the Mini-Pavois. I am hoping that they will. To that end I have been working on getting all the proper inspections and other required details done.
This race has a lot of the same boats which sailed in Pornichet with a few not here and some new boats here. According to the race director, there are at least 11 different countries represented here. Last night at dinner, our table was two English, two South Africans, one Norwegian and myself an American. As I sit writing this in my boat, I can here the Italians talking in the boat next to me. I am really enjoying meeting all the new people and making lots of new friends.
Also since I have been here, I am getting some of the problems taken care of on my boat. Today, Thomas the builder and I removed the rudders and their fittings and completely rebedded them and then reinstalled with nylock nuts so this problem should not arise again. Tomorrow, Thomas willl be back to do some work on the bow pulpit and fix a number of places where water is leaking in around screws. The folks from TEEM will also be here to install my proper sleeping timer and add a data port to the GPS. The data port will allow me to setup waypoints on my computer and then electronically transfer then to the Furuno GPS versus having to manually input them on the GPS' keypad.
The weather models for the race as looking rather interesting at this point with potentially north east winds to start,swinging to the NW later and then becoming highly variable. As the start is still 4 days away, I expect the models will change and then change some more before the start.
So, things are a little on hold as to whether I will be racing, which is tough, but the sun has been shining and I am getting the itmes that were problems taken care of on the boat so I am feeling a lot better because of boat