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.