11th February

18 26 N
64 45 W

Weather; sunny, wind n/a, waves n/a

Today began with a bit of a giggle, having jumped out of bed and needing a pee I used the forward head which has a manual pump out which pulls sea water into the bowl and then pumps it out when the valve is switched over. I always make sure that the water in the toilet is left clean by pumping extra sea water through the system when its clean. This time as I pumped the sea water into the bowl I noticed a tadpole swimming in the incoming water, I have to say that this was actually the second time I have seen this but I didn't quite believe it the first time and flushed it away without comment - not this time! I called out to Gerry to come and check this out - his comment? When did you eat that? We are more than a bit amused as we are in a sea water harbor and we didn't think that frogs lived in sea water and it definitely looked to be a tadpole to us. Of course it might be a baby whale or something similar but we just don't know, if anyone can cast any light on this we would love to hear! We haven't heard any croaking coming from the holding tank so we don't think there are frogs living there but we are a bit stumped and totally amused!
Gerry took off in the dinghy over to the other side of the harbor and through the cut to get our empty propane filled, we had searched for a refill station and this was the closest that we could find, there were plenty of exchange places but we needed one that would fill our tank. So whilst he was gone I dug out the boat sewing kit, sail makers palm, pliers, large needles, UV thread and some Velcro in order to "fix" a torn fastening on the canvas enclosure - it's a job that I've put off as it is a pain to do and in a difficult place but the time had finally come, I couldn't put it off any longer. So I was about half way through doing it when Gerry returned having had a successful trip. He pointed out that the way I had fixed the canvas wasn't going to withstand much handling and suggested we take down the canvas and do it differently. I was not amused as it is difficult to do at the best of times - this was not the best of times as it was hard for me to reach and it was blowing a gale at the time. We took the canvas off, Gerry made me a coffee whilst I patiently unpicked what I'd done and redid the whole thing, this time it was going to be OK no matter how bad it might look!. Whilst we had the canvas off we thought we would give it a bit of a clean to try and get rid of some of the mold stains so we sprayed it with the stain remover and then washed it off and put the canvas back into place. As it dried it began to look much better but we need to give it another go to make it look as good as new again, this required a trip to the shop as we had runout of cleaner. It was almost lunch time by now and we watched as cruise liner number 3 entered the harbor and was manoeuvred into a spot between the 2 cruise liners that were already tied up to the dock, it is a lesson in precision docking to watch them manoeuvring mind you this one had at least 3 bow and 3 stern thrusters which meant that docking it should be a breeze according to Gerry. I wouldn't have wanted to be the deck officer to get that wrong, I can't begin to imagine the insurance bill that could eventuate! Happily they docked without incident. So the town was now heaving with tourists - a great time to go ashore! We were only going as far as the supermarket to top up with essentials before we take off tomorrow. We decided to have a burger for lunch, along with the entire fire-fighting academy apparently, then we went and filled our shopping bags with "stuff" before heading back out to the boat. Our afternoon, or what was left of it was spent putting the dinghy back up onto the davits, catching up with emails, reading and in my case updating the blog. So that's it for today, we are intending to leave tomorrow after filling the fuel and water tanks but more about that tomorrow.
Sorry no photos today, will try harder tomorrow!