Wednesday 27/1/10

Yesterday had a great time exploring the old fort St. Philipe and the Convent La Popa in the morning, lunch on a roof terrace in the old town and then a look around the Naval Museum which gave a very good idea of the history of the invasions the Columbian/Spanish had to put up with from the English and French and how they set up the defences.

This morning up early, shopped at the very good supermarket for fresh food for the next week, also bought 5 gallon containers of water which we will use to fill up with fresh water when we can until we have our desalinator mended. On to the fuel dock to fill up with water and some more fuel and off we set for San Blas, about a 24 hour sail.  We had a fantastic time in this beautiful city with very friendly helpful, honest (not one taxi driver tried to cheat us) people and NO pirates, it is amazing how one incident of theft on a yacht can put off so many people visiting and missing out.   John the English manager at Club Nautica was also very helpful with finding engineers for the desalinator, sadly it would have taken a week to get the part we needed. 

THEN disaster struck about an hour out to sea, I opened the cupboard under the Saloon seat to get some kitchen paper to find water pouring out of one of the pipes at quite a rate.  Jonathan immediatley switched it off at the mains, it was fresh water and so we only have 1 and 1/2 tanks of  fresh water, oh frustration.  J refused to turn back to refill as we were already running late to pick up J and T.  So now we are really on water rashions or at least just being very careful about how much we use as we are not sure that we can pick up fresh water easily in the San Blas although we have heard you can on the main land.  The up side is the bilges did need a clean out so at least the fresh water has done that.  We don't seem to be doing too well with water and pipes recently as a burst pipe has happened in our annex at home as well this week.  The reason the one on the yacht went was that J had knocked it but didn't think he had loosened it!

We are now sailing at about 8-9 knots through a huge sea with wind averaging 20 -25 knots.