Everything works!

We haven't moved very far since our last post, we are now in Cartagena which is only about 120 miles from Almerimar. We ended up staying just over 2 weeks in Almerimar, which is the longest we have stayed anywhere but as Jan explained in our last post, the duration of our stay wasn't because of the attractions of the resort. 

At first we were waiting for some spares for our water maker to be sent over from the UK, then after the parts had arrived and we were planning to leave the weather forecast was for strong winds from the East - and since we were planning to head East and banging into 25 knot headwinds is a long way from being fun, we decided to delay departure until the forecast was a little more favourable.  We left on Tuesday morning and the forecast was for light Southerly winds so we were expecting to motor all the way in flat seas, but as it transpired the forecast was completely wrong and we ended up with 20 knot Easterlies. I have to say that the 60 mile passage was not enjoyable, but nothing broke and we arrived at Garrucha in the end that evening.

One benefit of our extended stay in Almerimar was that we made a trip to Almeria. We didn't know anything about it before we arrived but we paid a visit to the castle and discovered that it had been used as a set for Game of Thrones and a number of other movies. Jan is a bit of a GoT fan so as you can imagine she was ecstatic!

Some GoT scenery

The pond at Highgarden

From Garrucha we made our way here to Cartagena and this time the forecast was a little more accurate. The winds were light and the sea was calm so we decided to try flying our asymmetric spinnaker. We inherited 2 spinnakers with the boat, they are very useful when going downwind in light airs - and we had previously tried the conventional spinnaker but not the asymmetric, so it was good to be able to test it out in fairly benign conditions. The benefit of the asymmetric spinnaker is that it is much easier to use because you don't need to use the spinnaker pole and this was quite important because we had a complication in that Jan was unable to assist me. Whilst we were in Almerimar Jan suffered an injury. She fell down the stairs in the saloon - I think some alcohol may have been involved, and hurt her ribs very badly; we feared they might be broken. Well I'm pleased to report that after a precautionary visit to the hospital we discovered that Jan's ribs weren't broken but only badly bruised. I'm also pleased to report that there were no problems with the spinnaker (and we discovered that it is very big!). 

  

Although we waited a week for parts for the water maker in Almerimar the engineer there still had not managed to get it working. He was talking about ordering some more parts for it and we decided that we couldn't bear to wait there any longer and needed to move on.  Cartagena is a nice city and has the added benefit that we have discovered Juan-Pedro, who is a wonderful engineer. We asked him to fix the water-maker for us, which he did in about an hour and without requiring any extra parts. Whilst he was doing that he casually and without being requested tightened up our engine fan belt so we decided to ask him to look at some of the other problems that had been plaguing us. Well he has now replaced our automatic bilge pump, fixed the washing machine that we had thought required replacement, improved the efficiency of the fridge and mended the cabin lights. For the first time since we have owned the boat absolutely everything works, and if you know anything about boats you will know how rare that is! I am sure it won't last for long, but we have kept Juan-Pedro's phone number and e-mail and we will be making a special trip back here in a few months specifically to meet him and get the next batch of repairs done. Until then we are enjoying chilling in Cartagena - happy days!