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 :)
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| On Christmas day we did some easy work. Nothing that would get our hands too dirty. Our dinghy has not been used for at least a year. The dinghy is not very old, but the outboard has maybe passed it's prime years. |
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!
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| This morning it didn't take Timo very long to install the new pump. Even the previous pump was 20 years old, all the fittings and measurements were the same. In the dock everything seems to look good. We believe everything works just great when we finally get to use it. Now it looks like the wind is against us at least for the next couple of days. When it's not, we'll finally head for Las Palmas. |
