The showers conspired against me today. Each time I made a plan to go ashore and do things another squall would come through the anchorage and force me to postpone my plans. Around noon I realized that I wasn’t going to make it ashore for breakfast after all and since my pantry was pretty empty I decided to make some bread, which I documented by the consecutive series pictures below. This effort was, for me, quite successful and I even managed to avoid messing up the galley area!
I use an anchor ball as a day shape, suspended between a cleat on the mast and the genoa. This method has served me well since I had the boat, but the anchor ball should be suspended vertically in order to look like a ball at all angles, so I changed the system and hoisted the anchor ball up via a spinnaker halyard. While this looked nice, a couple of wind gusts later the thin line on the anchor ball snapped and left me with a spi halyard waving and flapping in the wind. The friction in the system was strong enough to prevent any slack in the line pulling it down to a level where I could grab it. In the end I opted to use a boat hook, fully extended while up on the bimini, to grab the end of the halyard and pull it down so that I could grab it by hand. I’ll have to ensure that Version 2.0 of the new, improved day shape system is indeed both new and improved!
I went ashore and intended on finding some good food, but ended up walking less than 10 meters and getting dinner (Panini) and drinks at the little hole-in-the-wall bistro at the end of the dinghy dock. After my meal I was joined by the Italian musician on the trimaran and he explained that the boat search by the Gendarmerie that I’d observed in the morning was just a routine one; I was not-so-secretly happy that I have a standard production boat with a British flag and was thus spared a visit by the friendly Gendarmes.
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