Tuesday 9 April 2019

Our cleaning continued today, so not very interesting, but the inside of the boat has now all been done, along with most of the outside. None of the work people came in the morning, much to our surprise again, because it was a beautiful quiet morning, with little wind. At about two o’clock, it was as if someone just flicked a switch to turn the wind on. I watched the ripples come into the harbour as the first gust came in.

Joaquin arrived at four thirty, when the wind had got up to the strongest of the day. Steve had given up on them, thinking is was then too windy to go up the mast, but he was mistaken. Joaquin was up aloft while there were gusts of around 28 knots, to run a new coaxial cable and see if this would get the AIS working properly. The conclusion was that the new splitter we had bought six months ago, which was fitted last week, isn’t working. This thing splits the AIS and VHF signals from one antenna into two cables. Our choice was to wait two days for a new splitter or have two antenna and two cables, keeping the AIS and VHF completely separate. We opted for the latter option, but will have to wait until tomorrow morning to get this fitted.

The working hours are nine am until two pm, then the workmen down tools to go for lunch and, presumably siesta. They restart at about four thirty pm and continue until about seven. While we’re in port, we are keeping roughly the same hours and having a siesta too, which I find suits me very well, as well as making sense in the climate. The sun is already very strong in the early afternoon.

People from an animal charity were much in evidence on the marina wall road this evening. We think they must be trying to catch the cats that live in the rocks of the sea wall. They had cages and cat transport boxes. I suspect it won’t be an easy task, rounding them up, as the cats both in September and now, seem to be very happy in their surroundings.

Distance covered today	0	nautical miles
Trip distance covered	0	nautical miles
Distance covered 2019	0	nautical miles
Tricia (and Steve)