Left Horta
MILANO BLANCO
James Blackburn
Sat 18 Jul 2009 14:28
18 July 2009
James:
Crew changes:
Leave: Paul King, Carlos Perez,
Mateo Bryson
Join: Deborah & Robbie Blackburn, Jo
Edwards
We spent five days at Horta, eating and drinking well and reasonably,
fixing things on the boat, doing the de rigeur painting on the
harbour's black lava blocks (crap artists the lot of us) and did some of
my kind of cycling: up to the top of Faial's volcano with bikes in a pickup
truck, visit spectacular verdant caldera, then freewheel virtually all of the 8
Km back to Horta!
Major panic when someone basically nicked one of our gas cylinders at the
fuel dock. The two cylinders we have are light aluminium ones, and really
expensive to replace. The bloke saw the filled cylinder and asked the attendant
for it. The attendant assumed he had left the empty previously and charged him
whatever the gas cost is (probably about £10) and off he went, unconcerned
that it had our boat name on it. The fuel dock guys spent the best part of a day
trying to track down the guy concerned, but seem to have been more focussed when
I said it was a matter for the Police, and found it, down below, out of sight on
a yacht. The guilty party said it had all been a misunderstanding.
We left Horta at 17.20 happily motoring for an hour
or two to get our refrigeration going well enough to preserve the two enormous
bags of ice I got from the Marina Bar. As it turned out, we froze our beer and
Cokes, but luckily didn't break any wine bottles. When it works, the engine
driven refrigeration is brilliant.
The plan is to head North (or as close to North as
we can sail) up to 45 degrees North, then NW towards the Scilly Isles where we
will leave Jo, ancd then on up the Channel to Portland.
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