Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Monday morning we woke up full of enthusiasm to get our final jobs done so we can be underway on 1st Oct (weather permitting). We had heard from MI Cats that we needed to get a quote for the repair of the wear on the main sail, so we headed off to the sail shop at the marina to try and arrange it. The remainder of spare sheets (rope) that we had ordered from them was on the counter when we entered, so things were looking up. We spoke to the lady that we had been dealing with for sometime and showed her some pictures on the laptop of the wear to the sail. Her response was that they would book us an appointment for 22nd September but she wasn’t sure that they had a machine big enough to repair the head of the main sail. We would need to bring the main sail to the shop and remove the battens ourselves for them to determine this. We asked if they might be able to give us a lift round as the sail is rather big and heavy to carry about a mile between the two of us, when it was a 2 minute drive from their shop and they had a van. Reluctantly she said they had a car but didn’t seem too keen to offer it, presumably we were expected to hire a car to drive a mile?
We continued the day in a rather less upbeat mood now feeling that our departure date was in jeopardy. I was busy trying to get our laptops to talk to each other via a crossover cable to back up the data between them, however, with the might of Windows Vista against me I was struggling. The only thing it seemed happy to let me do was set up a wireless network between the two computers sat side by side on the chart table, however, despite their proximity the network kept dropping out and stopping the file transfer. Arrgghh, definitely not something we miss about our previous occupations, still the struggle goes on and we need to make sure that all of our precious photos and music is backed up.

We also went to the supermarket to stock up the boat as the local supermarket had their own label beer at 18 cents a can, which made it less than a round of 2 drinks at the Sailor Bar for a slab of 24. We understand that supplies could be limited and expensive in the Cape Verdes and in a general push to keep to our budget we went with our trolley and stocked up on the beer plus the cartoned wine we are already converts to at only 75 cents a litre. We are also looking into canning, which misleading actually means storing food in jars, using the pressure cooker to create a vacuum seal. The plan would be to pre-prepare food for longer passages which can be stored without the need for refridgeration or freezing which takes too much electrical power when away from shore power for long durations. It is the same process as is used to make homemade jams etc, but we understand it to be useable for other food types as well so we will be trying it for soups, pasta sauces and bean casseroles having brought a slab of tomato puree in suitable jars.

We decided to go back to the Sail shop to try and get a better progress when they opened again after siesta. Take 2: I went into the shop and was queuing behind a customer being served, another Spanish guy walked in and past me to stand at the counter alongside the guy being served. He said Buenas Tardes (Good Afternoon) as he did it, obviously he holds to the maxim that only the British queue. Luckily the guy behind the counter, when he had served the first customer came directly to me. I asked if he spoke English, he said a little, so I managed in my faltering Spanish to say our boat name that we needed the sail repair and that we would need a quote that week in order to get approval. He understood and responded in actually very good English, he said he didn’t know the details as the ladies who worked the morning were dealing with it but understood the urgency. He said he would be at the boat in 20minutes to do an estimate. What a different experience! Sure enough we went back to the boat and Octavia arrived and looked over the repairs and agreed they could do this no problem and would have the quote for us in the morning. I asked if we should go to the shop to collect, he said, no problem he would drop it off at our boat. Excellent, we could not believe the difference in service, but now we were much more confident that the work would be done in the timeframe we had planned.