Sold!

Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Fri 27 Sep 2013 17:45
For those who are interested in Blue Marbles adventures... she is now sold to a French couple.
Yesterday there was an auction on the boat and it became a bidding between a local guy on the island who wanted to convert her to a "bed&breakfast" ashore and the French couple who wants to take her to Tonga or Fiji and shape her up again.
The bidding was moving from 30 thousand something to the final price of 52.000NZD, about 25.000 Euro. Or one tenth of her value before the reef.
 
Our own adventures? We love this place! Now it is six in the morning, Ellinor has gone to the fruit and vegetable market with Olof and Emil on Miss My. You have to be there between 4 and 6 in the morning to get anything. I had just a bowl of home made yougurth and home made muessli. The kids are still sleeping. The kids yes, we have Gustav from Miss My sleeping here and Erika sleeping there. Thats an adventure for the kids!
Yesterday we where mostly on the boat. I fixed the spinnacker pole (it takes a LOT of beating in downwind sailing), I fixed a lamp that was broken from me hitting it with my head (yes it hurts) etc etc. Ellinor had school with Erika and cleaned the boat. From the first day we got to Nuie we just went ashore and only came back to sleep on the boat. We fixed a lot of food, packed it in backpacks and went ashore.
One reason that you do not run back and forth with the dinghy is that there is no place to let your dinghy float while you are ashore. The swell and the dock will tear it apart... So there is a crane by the dock. You unload the people, take the hook to lines you have prepared, get yourselfe off the dinghy and then you simply lift it 4-5 meters up from the water, unload on the dock on a HUGE Pizza spade with weels underneath.
You roll the "Pizza spade" to an empty parking slot and take off the dinghy the same way you get a baked Pizza off the spade.
Once ashore you simply dont want to do the whole thing again to get some coffee.
There is a "yacht club" that becomes your second home ashore. Yacht club sound like something fancy. It is not, it is a backpackers place with all the wonderful facilities you might need. A big fridge with beer, sodas and cold water. Furniture where every piece is "unique", there you can sit and play chess, check your email or simply socialise. Now the TV has been on when the Americas cup has thrilled all the sailors. Imagine, those racing machines that sail over 40 knots at times, could sail the Atlantic in THREE days! The yacht club, has a wonderful staff that really serve your needs (if they are simple). Wifi is free but slow like the first modem in the world. All communicaion is done with VHF. So everybody is carrying handheld VHFs. You actually do not see any islanders with mobile phones here. Their phone numbers by the way are 4 digits!
Being ashore is very relaxing but yesterday we felt we HAD to take care of the boat after the passage. And we needed to have some schooling with Erika.