Tuesday 8^th June

Recovery day after all the travelling and eating of the two previous days.

Lot of dodgy tummys around and sadly Trevor is one of them, so he spent the best part of the day in bed resting and fasting.

Kenny the washing machine was back in action today and once more we turned to the rather more mundane business of jobs around the boat, which for me included starting the process of exchanging the halogen lights inside the boat for ultra low energy LED lights, while Sarah continued the difficult job of splicing our redesigned anchor chain snubber system.

Very windy last night and around 2.00am the wind was fairly howling through the rigging, flags and bunting sounding for all the world like rain. Fortunately the direction was better than before and so although the big swell continued through the night, it at least did not get any worse and during the day, both the wind and the swell reduced slowly. However it remained difficult, if not quite dangerous to get off the boat and go ashore as Ko Ko, which was our route to dry land, was still pitching and rolling a good deal more violently than the rest of us. We lost one of our rubber mooring compensators which are rubber devices that adsorb some of the snatch, when it snapped in half yesterday evening. The problem where we are moored is that we are a number of big and heavy boats all rafted together in various ways and so as the boats pitch and roll out of synch, the combined weights that come to bear on a given point can be immense.

Lattakia started life in around 1000BC as a small fishing village but first came to the fore when Pompey at the head of the Roman army came here. Its strategic location meant that it subsequently has seen endless invading armies pass through including the Assyrians, Persians, Alexander the Great, Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Arabs and of course the Ottomans. Nowadays Lattakia is the major port for the Syrian Arab Republic, which for those that are not aware is bordered by Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east and south east, Jordan to the south, Israel to the south west and Lebanon to the west. A sort of who’s who of the middle eastern hot spots!

The political situation around the Gaza blockade is still causing difficulties for the rally, but for now we are continuing as planned but there may yet be changes ahead we understand.

In the evening there was another ‘formal’ dinner to which we were required to wear our posh frocks, however the outdoor event which took place outside the marina office descended into average chaos as all the plans were thrown into disarray by the rather unplanned arrival of 100 of the marina manager’s closest friends and family. Some  of the tables reserved for the rally were taken over and the arrangements for going up to get food were abandoned as the chefs simply delivered most of the food to the Syrian tables! Fortunately we have all eaten too much over the past few days and so the sum total of a single kebab wrap each barely justified us all to get so dressed up. There was a fun Syrian band of entertainers who were very loud and at times rather resembled a group of football supporters however they kept things moving along until they were replaced by a very loud disco which at least had the merit of recognising what sort of music we all enjoyed and a good time was had by all. Well, when I say all, I mean all those who were fit enough to attend as there are now quite a lot of people suffering in the same way as poor Trevor who like most of them stayed on board the boat all evening.