Small is beautiful !!

This is exactly what describes the smaller expeditions I've been to. They're fun !  Needless to say that my HST training helped me heaps for my CW operation; it felt smooth and relaxed. I really enjoyed it !  Actually this was the first expedition that I seriously operated CW instead of sideband. I think I made only a handful of SSB QSOs while relieving Col MM0NDX to go to the toilet (the big one, outside !! :-P)
I also made a new friend, Al VE1AL. A kind soul from Cape Breton. We visited the Subway together, enjoyed excellent gourmet meals, consumed few thousands calories while attacking without mercy the dessert menus, went shopping (yepp, I do that from time to time !), watched a baseball game (didn't catch the ball though), and broke many stones at the beach while looking for fossils inside (was unlucky, found none).

St. Paul is gorgeous. I expected it to be a rock at the Atlantic Ocean. Little I knew since it had such a rich vegetation which was actually the reason that none of us had the opportunity to hike. The branches of the trees were so tangled together that were forming a natural wall. I think I managed to crawl 50m into the forest and this walk lasted about 30' because of the tree branches' architecture. This is my only complaint. That I didn't have the opportunity to hike. Since the island is volcanic, there exciting stones everywhere around to explore.
My view from my tent towards "Atlantic Cove" with my stinky sneakers ontop (ναι Γιάννη, είναι τα παπούτσια που είχαμε αγοράσει μαζί, ακόμα υπάρχουν, αλλά είναι σε τρισελεεινή κατάσταση !):

I think I'd even go to hell with the same team. Everything rolled so smooth and was fun. Nevertheless, below you can enjoy a memory from a conflict between the two sunshine team-members, Gorka EA2TA and Christian EA3NT :-)))  Note the governor's house in the background as well as how the coast looks like. Yepp, the boys had to lift EVERYTHING (and the generators !!) using ropes.

CW-talking, although I was operating the code every single day (regular, not HST) when I came back home and tried to come back to my original HST training, my performance was signicantly lower, since for 2 consecutive weeks I didn't touch neither rufzXP, nor MR. Please stick with your training and don't do the same mistake I did; keep in touch with CW every day, even for very few minutes. Consistency is the key. While 1 or 2-day pauses are great and sometimes help loads, 2 weeks is a huge gap. Now I am slowly crawling back to my regular scores, however I really regret that I left my training and now I have to go through this..

ANYWAY !!  Enuff whining !!  Thank you gentlemen and YLs for calling !  Now let's get back to our morse code practicing routines !!  Di dit !!