Horta, Azores

PASSEPARTOUT
Christopher & Nirit Slaney
Mon 14 May 2012 13:29
A few snippets of info from Horta.
 
While I was clearing in at the port the officer looked at the passports, glanced at Yael and Shmulik's details and asked, "These two behaved themselves okay for eighteen days at sea?" I told him that all was well and proper. "Well," he said, "you're lucky one is Irish (this, he decided was Shmulik's nationality) and the other a German, if one of them had been French you would have had one helluva headache from them by now!"
 
The marina here is busy with yachts arriving from the Caribbean, and this despite Nirit's prediction that because we left St Maarten early in the season we might be the first one's here. In fact we were arrival number 251 of the season. The marina office told me they'd checked against last year's records and found that at May 1 there were almost one hundred arrivals more than by that same date in 2011. I surmise that the tactic of leaving from the eastern Caribbean - and leaving early - is catching on. At least three more yachts pulled in over night, all having left the Virgin Islands around the same time we slipped out of St Maarten. This morning I watched two others leave for Falmouth, U.K.
 
Rain and cold. Reminds me of a bad day in Scotland. Most of our stuff is in the laundry and what we have left is soaked from walking to and from the marina office and the laundry.