Jobs to do and helpful people

Serenity of Swanwick
Phil and Sarah Tadd
Fri 20 Nov 2015 08:39
Our time in Tenerife has been used doing work and a bit of sight seeing.
The work first:
Our rig for down wind sailing needs a bit of refinement to make it easier to set up a controllable, efficient sail plan. This needed extra control lines for the spinnaker pole to be bought and fitted.
Our fridge is not coping with the heat and needs more insulation or a better cold plate. We found a supplier of insulation and and other plastic and an extra layer of insulation has now been fitted.
The SSB, long range radio fitting needed, to be completed, this will give us access to weather forecasts, email, communication nets, almost free of charge, better than £1 a minute with the satphone!
We want security bars for the hatches to deter possible burglars in the places we might visit from here on. This looks like being completed soon.
We need to decide how to fit our extra solar panels to enable us to use all the kit we have, and check the other charging systems.
Helpful people:
We have generally found the people here really helpful, if they don't have what you want they will go out of their way to suggest or find someone who does. There is a lot of "mañana", and sure enough next day things are available.
Given that my Spanish is just about enough to order two beers, shopping in Santa Cruz for technical bits is interesting to say the least. A lot of kit can be bought in Ferretaria, hardware stores, but you have to find the correct one as they tend to specialise. There are three chandlery shops in town close to the Marina, all with limited stock.
We found the most helpful chandlery, he didn't have what we wanted in stock but got it from store and delivered it to the boat. Same day service and good prices. He also pointed us in the right direction for electronic parts, this shop was most helpful in supplying specialist wire and connectors.
We had been trying to contact a company regarding security grills for our hatches with no success so the lady in the Marina office made some calls for us and came up with Fred who makes things for boats from stainless steel. He was on board within quarter of an hour and measuring up the job. His quote sounded quite expensive but not really when you consider that he is manufacturing one off items in stainless steel. He has been on board a number of times to check and discus design and he seems to be trying to deliver quickly.
While walking around Sarah saw a small, 10Litre, electric oven, which we bought to save gas. In marinas the electricity is generally included in the price so if we can use that rather than bottled gas it's got to be good.
The making of mosquito nets for the hatches is underway, with netting from a warehouse on a local industrial estate and lead weighting from a curtain fabric store. Hopefully our empty gas bottle is being refilled, at some point we will need to buy local bottles and connections but we will refill the Calor ones while we can, and have camping gas in reserve.
Sarah worked out a shopping list for 80 days food and we have had a hire car for two days and used it to provision the boat with staples for two or three months cruising. We will buy fresh when we can. We have also been able to see a bit of the island.
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