Monday 8^th and Tuesday 9^th November

Monday started badly when we got up at 5.00 am to find torrential rain lashing the UK. Things did not improve when the taxi booked for 5.30 am failed to show up and a call to their office at 5.45 am revealed that it wasn’t going to show either!

A frantic call to the first name we saw in Yellow Pages produced a car in under 5 minutes. This was just the job and our anxiety was distracted by the performance of the driver during the next 20 minutes or so as we hurtled up the M5 heading for Birmingham Airport. It turned out that our driver was actually the duty controller who had jumped into his car whilst running the business from his home. He proceeded to drive the car and juggle the radio handset and a telephone as he re-organised all the jobs that were in place for him to cover, to other drivers. He despatched cars all over Worcester and handled incoming calls from new customers, who like us needed a taxi straight away. How he held all this information in his head and talked to us was a mystery and we were most impressed. Finally his boss arrived in the office and took over the phones leaving our man to concentrate on not getting caught speeding. All went well and we arrived in good time. Sarah had a small mishap when the boxed sandwich she had bought for the flight opened up inside her hand luggage and she found herself picking out the food from amongst her things. I was not to be left out of the fun and managed to drop a full cup of coffee from a tray in the cafe.

Good flight with tail winds which got us to Lanzarote 40 minutes early and we seemed to be on the only Ryan Air flight with decent leg room for a change.

Serafina was looking dusty but well and an hour with a sponge and hose soon had her restored to her glory.

Spent the afternoon sorting out the gear we had brought out and catching up with the news from other yachts around us.

In the evening we went for a quick pizza with Chris and Steve of Scott Free and were in bed fairly early.

On Tuesday we set about the various jobs we had now to complete before leaving here and in the afternoon James Robinson arrived from the UK to spend two weeks sailing in the islands with us.

We have been waiting for 3 weeks for a package that was sent to us from the USA but had dissapeared into Spanish customs. Nothing seemed to be known about it or even where in Spain it was. Heard today that unbelievably the package had arrived in Lanzarote but instead of being delivered, it was sent back to the USA! This might have been OK if it had gone back to the supplier as they would have held the package and refunded our money, but the US Postal service simple re-sent the parcel to Spain again and to date no one has a clue where it is.