Johanna
N 28° 28.042', W 16° 14.639'
We had a beautiful Christmas weather. Very sunny, calm and warm.
In Finland all the kids get their presents on Christmas Eve. I guess Santa Claus knows where we are from, since we had received a delivery in the evening while taking showers. We must have been good, we got just what we needed. Some underwear and flip-flops :)
Anyway, the dinghy is holding it's air and the outboard started like always. It just needed a couple of pulls and there it was running like new. Some people talk about gasoline going old, but we don't really believe it. This gas has maybe been in a canister for a few years and there were no problems.
In the evening we had a nice Christmas concert right here in the marina. Local symphony orchestra was playing and there were thousands and thousands of people in the audience. Organizer of the event is the Port of Santa Cruz with other sponsors. This year was the 20th anniversary for this event.
We had already planned on sailing to Las Palmas without our autopilot working, but we are always entitled to change our minds. We were not very keen on hand steering and couldn't trust the wind to be good enough for our windvane. So we decided to try to get the autopilot fixed here.
Yesterday at about noon we walked to the nearest chandlery "Nordest" which seemed more like a rigger. After a couple of phone calls he found us our hydraulic pump. After a few hours it was delivered to our boat. What an unbelievably good service!