Saturday 5th May

At sea

12 03.000 N
68 56.000 W (at 00.00 hrs)

Well the day started out with Gerry making the trip into the marine store to collect the auto pilot hydraulic cylinder, then to the marina to pay for our night on the mooring and dump the last of our trash and lastly on to customs to check us out – we were going today no matter what! I prepared the boat as much as possible for leaving but there were things that couldn’t be done until Gerry returned. One of the things that we were a bit cross about was that as we had stayed on the mooring for so long the entire boat was covered in a film of orange dust which blows continuously off the land and we had no way of washing it off before we left, it was over just about every thing on the boat and then some, we were going to have to try and clean it off somewhere down the track. When he arrived back we stowed the dinghy on the foredeck and then undertook the task of seeing if the new cylinder would fit. Of course it didn’t – what did you really expect? It’s going to take a bit of time and some tools that we don’t have to fit the darned thing! So back to square one – we refitted (that’s the royal WE) the original cylinder and mentally prepared ourselves for a trip of replacing hydraulic fluid frequently. Surprisingly the language wasn’t too bad - I think Gerry had realised that probability of it all working in our favour was about the same as our chances of winning Lotto. We decided to have a “snore o’clock” prior to the overnight passage and woke up in time to cook dinner and eat it before dropping the mooring lines and heading out to sea. We waved good bye to our neighbours and as soon as we were clear of the mooring field we raised the main sail and began sailing towards Curacao. We were really sailing off into the sun set this time. The swell was pretty horrible and we seemed to be doing death rolls for the entire night, making sleep very difficult / impossible. We were both on deck as we reached the coast of Curacao, we weren’t stopping here as our destination was actually Aruba some 70 odd miles further on, however at midnight we were startled by a couple of loud bangs from the shoreline then the sky lit up just outside the harbour at Spaanse water – they had put on a firework display to welcome us! (Well actually we think it was to celebrate Cinco de Mayo but we aren‘t sure so we’ll accept that they did it for us!). The firework display was terrific, it was followed by some very loud music, it was a pleasant distraction for a short while then we were back to taking turns at trying to sleep.