Monday, 6th December 2010
07.00hrs We woke up to a bright and breezy morning here in Cape Town. The gusts were reaching 40 knots as all the boats on the marina strained heavily on their marina lines.
They say here that Cape Town Bay is the wildest Leward harbour in the world and over 2,700 boats and ships have been lost along the coast here since records began, frightening statistics......
Aileen went off exploring more of this wonderful place (remember, most places we visited on this extraordinary trip were wonderful places). Skipper and Neil decided to have a final shot at fixing the forward loo. We decided that we have tried everything and the only other possibility that could cause this problem is the internal pipe in the holding tank. It must be choked, despite all the caustic soda poured into it a few days ago. We bypassed the tank with some new pipes, bends, reducing couplings, etc. All this took a couple of hours, but when we pressed the red button.............BINGO............. working perfectly. Gawd! it took us almost 3 solid days to sort this out, and now we happy and proud bunnies.
17.00hrs The loo looked almost new, so to reward ourselves we took off up to the Cape Grace hotel, well to the bar in the lower (or marina) level for a few scoops. The weather was still windy and sunny, so for the first while we sat outside with Sean from Wild Tigris. Later, we retired inside and were joined by Richie and Charlie from Grand Filou and we had a real Irish time there. Later still, Skipper returned to the boat while the rest went off in search of food.
Beyond later, Udo from Destiny joined us on A Lady for a night cap and then Neil returned, so we had a late night.
Neil returns home to Ireland, Skipper and Aileen are off touring until the 4th of January. So there will be no more Blogs until January.
We wish all the readers of the Blog ........... A HAPPY CHRISTMAS.
That's it,
Signed :- Stephen Hyde (Skipper)