Tuesday, 16th November 2010
07.00hrs A slow start to the day. Aileen had the washing machine going from the start, while skipper had breakfast and did the blog and emails. It was a calm morning and the sun was shining, so it was a warm day.
Aileen and Neil went off on a tour of the 1000 hills, about 40 kms away to the north, which later they said was only so, so, nothing like what they expected... Skipper remained on board with Lolly, while he sorted out all the lighting in the clocks, plus replacing the up and down anchor switches at the bow, and a few other things. He was good at his job.
The rigger tried and failed to re feed our spinnaker halyard into the mast, so he will have to try again tomorrow if the weather is ok. The day wore on slowly while all this stuff was going on, but in the end, thats apart from the halyard, everything on the list was fixed.
At one stage during the morning, the wind went from a flat calm to 52 knots in about 10 seconds, Skipper got a fright, he was down below in the boat when suddenly there was this violent squall and A Lady slammed back onto the marina
with a bang, adding more chips to the transome.
18.00hrs We got a weather report and it seems that we would still have favorable conditions to sail tomorrow for East London or Port Elizabeth. However we have the refrigeration man coming at 10am so we will have to wait until he is done.
19.00hrs We went to the "Fish Club" a restaurant on the other side of the marina, where we met some of the other World ARC sailors and after some chat, sat down and had a good meal, Skipper even had a "bonnofie pie" for desert, yum, yum!
We strolled back to the boat and chatted for a while before retiring to the scratchers.
That's it,
Signed :- Stephen Hyde (Skipper)