Between a rock and a hard place...
Aquila
Alan and Sarah Bennett
Thu 6 Jul 2017 17:40
Much has happened since our last update, not least that The Mate has arrived. The key serial prior to her joining was ensuring that her yacht was in top condition, and George having gone on strike was detracting from that somewhat. The Skipper therefore spent most of Wednesday morning in configurations a contortionist would be proud of, both upside down in the starboard after locker and resembling a pretzel in the aft cabin. After many phone calls, a lot of diagnostics and not a small amount of ingenuity - success! A broken wire was discovered to be the culprit: blow torch deployed and George is back in business.
Other key events of the morning were a good food shop and a bit of a spruce and polish, then we set off to do a few tourist bits (a silent chapel made entirely of wood, and a chapel built into an inland snurgly) before Sebastian collected The Mate from the airport. In the evening Sebastian resumed his duties as unofficial tour guide and returned us to a Finnish restaurant he visited when here in February. We opted for the five course tasting menu, and are still debating which course was the best - but I think it's hard to beat spruce sorbet...
This morning our tour guide roused the crew at an ungodly hour (which automatically bars him from retaining his title as "crew of the day") and we hopped on a 15 minute ferry to Suomenlinna, an old fort that has in its history swapped hands between the Swedes, Russians and Fins - fascinating.
We finally sailed from Helsinki at midday, and covered 32 miles to our current anchorage. A rain-laden trough line forced First Mate and Sebastian down below while the true stalwarts dealt with the inclement weather, before sunshine and a following F3-4 breeze nudged us into our anchorage. The astute amongst our followers who may have noted the subject line of today's blog with some alarm should be reassured that it does not reflect an event that has happened, merely one that may, as somewhere off our port quarter in this otherwise ideal anchorage is a submerged rock. The Skipper is convinced we're not going to swing into it overnight, but if we should perchance swing the other way there's an underwater cable that will finish us off instead...
Here's hoping we'll be in contact soon.