At last, on Monday evening, 6 brand new Trojan deep cycle gel batteries arrived at the marina.  You could see the grin on IOLA’s face as she looked at them on the dockside.  This widened as she contemplated her skipper picking each of these 15kg batteries up to bring it down the ramp, along the pontoon, and into the cockpit.  This makes a total of 90Kg, and I used to weigh as much.  “used to” are the key words here as all this running around on bikes to chandlers and lighthouses has taken its toll.  I digress – having brought the new batteries on board, now came the task of disconnecting the old batteries and taking them off.  I lined them up on the pontoon, ready to take them to the recycling bank, and attracted comments from fellow catamariners such as “Oh, I see you are taking extra ballast on board”.  In retrospect, I should have advertised them on ebay when we reached La Coruna as a ‘buyer collects’, but having failed to do so, it fell to me to carry these back up the ramp to the waste station.

 

A couple of hours later, the new batteries were safely in their locker, and all wired up.  A quick check of the manual about how to reset the battery monitor, and the switch went to “on”.  All worked normally.  A little later, whilst Lesley was preparing supper, she closed the saloon door to stop flies getting in.  When I next opened it to come in, all hell broke loose.  The siren was wailing, the strobe was flashing.  I was busy punching the keypad to switch the alarms off, and it was only once we had done this that I realised the burglar alarm had been reset by disconnecting the batteries, and Lesley had “set” the alarm by closing the door!  A few red faces, but no harm done.

 

The plan is to set off earlyish Tuesday and get as far South of Cape Finisterre as possible.  The barometer has dropped, and strong winds kick in from around Friday, so now would be a good time to get round this headland.  We all well rested, so might keep going for 24hrs or so, we’ll just play it by ear.