Moose has been in Gran Canaria for 10 days now, there are over 60 ARC boats here already with more arriving daily, so I am trying to meet the crews whose boats are on our pontoon. We have a young Norwegian couple who are hoping to sail the family monohull slowly around the world. There are four catamarans on our dock, one arrived last night and another this morning so I haven’t met them yet but the third is owned by Ian and Dee, he is English, she is Icelandic although just like the Norwegians her English is perfect. They are also hoping for a two or three year adventure depending on how long the money lasts! There are also German and French boats near us.

Just myself left on board now, trying to shorten the job list which actually seems to be growing ! every time I start a job I find something else that needs doing. It turns out our AIS unit  packed up 50 miles off of Rabat (Morrocco), The VHF radio has a built in AIS, so that seamlessly took over and we were blissfully unaware. However the VHF only has AIS receive, not transmit, so although we could see all the other ships, they couldn’t see us, whoops, sound familiar? We only found out when the B&G technician arrived to change the VHF which although had been providing AIS was not working very well as a radio! It gets worse, the replacement VHF radio supplied by B&G under a partial warranty scheme and flown out with the crew who joined in Sotogrande, did not have built in AIS. I am now negotiating with Oswaldo at Alisios Sailing, the local B&G agents for upgrade and more partial warranty deals.

After an extensive search of all the local supermarkets we finally located Caroline some Provence Rose, very difficult to find but as she cant drink anything else we stuck at it, I might add this was high priority on the job list.

I am heading home on Tuesday and Caroline’s brother Chris is coming out to Babysit Moose until we return on the 24^th 

Oh and I had a bit of a haircut, always interesting without a common language.