13th February

12 03.520 N
68 51.216 W

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

It's Saturday and it's raining! Although we are glad to see a bit of rain it has prevented us from doing anything today. Whilst the rain hasn't been really heavy it's that drizzly sort of rain that soaks you to the skin in a matter of seconds and although we aren't averse to going out in the rain we knew that we would be soaked through by the time we dinghied into the dock and it wouldn't be pleasant sitting in the car when we were wet so we just accepted the fact that today was going to be a stay on board day unless a miracle happened and the rain let up in the afternoon. We had thought that we would try and get into the Nautical museum today, being the only 4 hours of the week that it was open to the public but that was now on hold unless we are here for another Saturday it's just not going to happen. I had absolutely no urgent jobs to do except for finishing labeling the photos and trying to upload them to the gallery - take a look and make my efforts worth-while! Although I put them on in the order that I had taken them the program does its own thing and puts them where it thinks they should go! I have spent an age trying to put some of them back in order but I gave up when it got to the Beekenburg and Nassau Fort photos - I was sick of looking at them all by then, but you'll get the idea! When you look at the Queen Emma bridge photos you need to bear in mind that I was standing in the one place for all of the photos and the bridge was opening from my left hand side going across to my right hand side and then the opposite on the return trip, I didn't just take a series of the same photo from different spots!
Gerry struggled to find anything to do, his only useful job today was to chemically clean the water maker with a special kit designed for the job - that took him all of an hour to complete and then he vegged out watching the America's Cup racing between England and Italy. Every now and again he would turn the video around so that I had to watch whatever they were doing that Gerry thought was amazing. I can't get it in my head that this is deemed to be yacht racing, yes it is a technological feat worth all the praise it gets but it really isn't sailing to my way of thinking, it's almost flying. For those of you that care the result was that Italy won both of the races, they have to win 7 to be the contender to race against the Kiwis in the actual cup. I think that they only have 2 races each day so there are still a few opportunities for England to reverse the outcome but they are definitely behind the eight ball at the moment.
We did find one job to do early in the afternoon, Gerry put the steering wheel back in position and asked me to man the helm whilst he changed out the anchor bridle. He had bought new line for it at budget on our last visit there because he had noticed that the bridle we currently had in place was wearing through on the Starboard side. It wasn't a particularly difficult job but the wind and rain made it a little more troublesome than it should have been with Gerry having to cut the original bridle off as he couldn't undo it due to it being tightened by the constant movement of the boat. Anyway we got the job done and now have the new bridle in place, hopefully this will see us good until we get back to Australia.
I did nothing for the rest of the afternoon except read my book and Gerry did much the same as the rain continued on and off for the day. Late in the afternoon we had enough of a break to have some time in the cockpit watching the very few windsurfers who were braving the weather, these were obviously the more experienced surfers as the water was a bit rough for those who were just learning the sport.
Luckily we had left over Chinese from yesterday which became our dinner tonight. It might seem like a waste of a day and car hire but every now and again you need a day of doing nothing much!