39.12.072N 9.07.603E

We have had a varied week with a bit of sightseeing, some “fun activities” and work on the boat.

Bethany and Bryn (the children) from Cape came over and did some cooking with Stephen. They made chocolate cornflake things and some accidental fudge. “How can you accidently make fudge” we hear you say. Well it’s easy. While melting chocolate add some dark treacle– the nicely runny chocolate then becomes thick and sticky so we couldn’t mix in the cornflakes. Instead we put this in the fridge with some glace cherries mixed in and it made quite a nice fudgy sort of sweet.

After the cooking we took Bethany and Bryn back to Cape. The adults then decamped to Pyxis for a wine tasting session. We had bought a couple of wines from the local shop (where they sell wine by the litre in recycled water bottles) and Richard and Karen had bought some from the man that delivers wine to the Marina. Out of the four wines we tasted all we worked out was that there was one we didn’t like. The expensive one at 3 euro’s per litre was a slight favourite by some people but there was very little in it. The outcome of the tasting was we can get some very drinkable wine for 1.5 euro’s per litre!!

Our new anchor arrived on Friday. The marina staff are so helpful here – they helped Stephen carry it to the boat and get the anchor onboard. The new anchor is meant to be designed to be much better at holding. It is also much larger than the old one and heavier (33kg instead of 20kg) so overall it should massively improve our holding. For those boaty people reading it’s a new generation Rocna anchor. We are a little concerned about being able to raise the anchor when we need to leave places. We will let you now how we get on next year.

We had arranged to go out for a meal with Cape and Pyxis on Saturday evening. We all headed off up the hill to our favourite restaurant only to find t was closed L  After much deliberation we went to the floating restaurant near the marina for a pizza. They were a bit busy but they offered us a table for an hour (does this sound familiar – except this time we really did only have it for an hour).

On Monday we went for a bus ride with Richard and Karen. We took the bus to the end of the line – there wasn’t anything very interesting there – so we stayed on the bus back to the beach. Our bus journey took us past lots of building sites as well as past the salt lakes where there were quite a few flamingos. We had a walk along the beach to the marina. It is a very pretty marina, but at this time of year very quiet.

On the days in between we have finished watching series 3 of Boson Legal (there is the possibility that series four will arrive on Friday when Koa’s guests from the US arrive). We have also cleaned the decks, cleaned the shower pump (it was full of hairs and was just about to stop working), done some washing, checked out the indoor market which is only a 15 minute walk away and Stephen has changed the engine oil (oil change is now down to 2.5 hours with no spills).

Old Anchor                                                                                New Anchor

Flamingos in the salt lakes

Poetto Beach looking towards the very pretty marina (this is not the marina we are in as we are too large to fit L )