Drying out and prize giving.

Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Wed 25 Jun 2008 14:27

Tuesday 24th June

Hot and busy day cleaning, rinsing and drying stuff from the forepeak. We have to be the only boat in Lagos with a 2kw fan heater running on full heat inside the lockers! Not too much real damage, although we will have see what state the seat and bed mattress covers return in from the dry cleaners. We soaked the foam mattresses with a hose until they were fully saturated, to rinse out the salt and they are strapped on the coach roof drying in the very hot sun.

 

Final dinner and prize giving in the evening which was great fun, and of course tinged with sadness as many of the crews are returning home now. None of the fleet are returning to UK this year although we all seem to heading to very different destinations. One of the fleet will be heading out to Madeira and then later to the Canaries prior to crossing the Atlantic with the ARC in November. Most of the boats seem to be planning to stay here in Lagos for most, if not all the summer and a few of us are off to the Med and a range of planned (and unplanned) destinations. Email means that it easy for us all to stay in touch and of course those of us with the regular web logs can be tracked on Google earth.

 

Every boat picked up a prize for something real or imagined, but we were more than a little surprised to be the very final boat called up and awarded a special prize for the boat that most epitomised the ideal spirit of a rally. (Apparently that is a good thing!!)

 

Party boat was Bali Hai and they got a special mention as probably being the best party boat in the 15 years that the rally has been running.

 

Pictures:

 

I will certainly be creating a picture library on the site shortly as we have now got some good shots of Serafina sailing. In the meantime here are two.

 

Seraphina_lagos_bow_lrge.jpg

 

serafina_1.jpg

38 knots of wind off Cape St Vincent.

 

Updates on various issues:

 

Sarah’s tooth seems to be holding up OK for now.

 

Mastervolt have been in touch and the parts for our generator arrive here in Lagos tomorrow and hopefully the local dealer will be able to get to work straight away.

 

We plan to move on towards the Med on Saturday, assuming all is OK with the generator. We did consider having a guard made for our radar dome following the incident on Blue Beyond, when their genoa swept their radar dome clean off their mast, but this would take time to make and we are keen to move on and get back into our own cruising mode  after all the excitement of the rally!

 

Sarah has been introduced to a sea sickness tablet that actually works for her. Traveleeze seems to do the trick as she was cheerfully preparing lunch for us as we crashed through the seas off the Capes the other day. This really is a big bonus all round, as the pills she used before had little effect and made her very sleepy, which was rather less than helpful!