Wednesday 24th January

At sea

As we were leaving in the afternoon we spent most of the day doing last minute things. Gerry decided to tighten the gen set belt which meant taking the nav station apart again to be able to get to the belt, it also meant that the whole salon was covered with bits of equipment and tools – what a mess. I stayed out of the way and cooked up some food for the trip. Once the belt was tightened and all the gear stowed away again we decided to go into the marina one last time and have lunch there - at just over a dollar for the lunchtime special it’s cheaper than I could make it and less trouble for me! The special on Wednesdays was lasagna with garlic bread and salad – it was worth the money and could possibly have been the last hot meal for a couple of days. We had planned on collecting our last load of washing and trying to go online after having lunch but the internet office was closed until 14.00hrs. We finished lunch collected a couple more bottles of water and then dinked across to the yacht club dock where Gerry waited in the dink whilst I climbed the million and one steps to the top to take a couple of photos of the harbour, and us at anchor there. Once I’d taken the photos we returned to the boat emptied the water into the tanks and stashed the laundry away by which time it was almost 14.00hrs so we went back to the marina and checked out our email, loaded the blog and said goodbye to the barflies there. Then it was back out to the boat where we hauled the outboard motor onto its storage plate, locked it in place and covered it up, stowed the petrol can away and emptied the dink of the other things we keep in it – bailer, chain and locks, shoes. We then hauled the dink up onto the foredeck, washed it off as much as possible and lashed it down ready for the trip. By now it was going on for 16.30hrs and 2 boats were making their way out of the harbour, obviously we weren’t going to be alone on this trip! We did a final check of the equipment, making sure we had all the safety gear to hand, donned our life jackets and head sets started the motor and let go the mooring buoy. I steered out of the harbour whilst Gerry unhelpfully gave advice. Once clear of the harbour the sea became very lumpy, as predicted, we pounded away through the waves for the next couple of hours and Gerry began to get antsy about how long it was going to continue like this. The boats that had left in front of us were a good 6 miles ahead of us and we could hear on the radio that the weather wasn’t quite what they expected either, however we were certain that it would calm down as we got further around the coast and sure enough as night began to close in around us the wind dropped and the waves gradually became less vicious. We began to take turns in trying to sleep, neither of us seem to do this very well but we managed to cat nap enough to get us through the night. At one point Gerry even managed to have the jib flying for half an hour, it was short lived though as the wind was on our nose. So we motored for most of the night.