1st March

10 24.394 N
75 32.692 W

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

March has arrived, where on earth did February go? For those of you in the northern hemisphere there are apparently signs of spring as a photo sent to us by David proved - there were crocuses in flower! As for those in the southern hemisphere autumn is heading rapidly your way with lots of rain forecast for the west and a tropical storm which looks like turning into a cyclone just off of the north coast of Queensland, fingers crossed it stays out to sea and doesn't cause any damage there. For us here in Colombia I'm not quite sure what to expect, its muggy, still and getting very hot by mid-morning and the afternoons are definitely siesta time! After yesterday's mammoth effort of deck and window cleaning neither of us wanted to do very much. I half-heartedly suggested that we begin bringing each cockpit window down below, one at a time so that we could clean and polish them on the outside, scrub the canvas parts with mold remover and lubricate each zipper and popper so that they work freely but Gerry vetoed this idea for today, we needed a day of doing next to nothing. Having said that he then went on to say that he needed to go up the mast again this morning, the reason for this was to take some measurements of the spreader. Yesterday he had been looking at a site which supplies spreader tips with a view to buying some new ones. These are the very outer end caps, ours have all but become useless (truth be known I can't ever recall them being there but they must have been fully operational at some stage as the outside bits are still holding the shrouds in place but the inner parts that are attached inside the end of the spreaders are still there but worn away, this is causing the shrouds to eat into the metal of the spreader). So once again it was out with the bosun's chair, winchrite, headsets adding on a tape measure for Gerry and a diagram and pen to record the measurements for me and we were once again doing the up the mast stuff! It didn't take very long, we are getting quite quick and efficient at doing this and it was made easy by doing it in dock on a calm, wind and swell free morning. With this job done we returned to the cool of the salon for a drink and then Gerry went back outside to put our awning up over the front of the boat which helps cool down and darken our stateroom. We haven't put the main deck awnings back up as we would have to either crawl underneath them or undo them each time we wanted to go ashore, we might yet put the port side one up as that one isn't anywhere near where we need to get off the boat.
For the rest of the day we did nothing, played with our electronic gadgets, had a nana nap, ate and drank as we felt the need and eventually watched the next couple of episodes of House of Cards.
It was a real lazy start to March but everyone needs those sort of days!