Hello Everyone!

The second day of my sailing trip has come to an end. And I must say, even though the weather wasn’t that great, I really enjoyed the day. Although I wish someone could invent some kind of bug spray that would kill all mosquitoes. Those bugs are darn annoying when you’re sleeping in a close environment. There must be some happy mosquito out there somewhere. He managed to sting me not once, not twice, but five times!

The night rest I had wasn’t really that enjoyable either. I’ve seen pretty much every hour on the clock. And this was due to a couple of factors. The first being the boat. Rocking around and making creaking sounds that I am not used to that would keep me from falling asleep. And if it wasn’t the boat, it would be that pesky mosquito that kept zooming around my head. And of course, when you turn on the light to find and kill the bugger, he’s long gone hiding in a corner for you to turn off the lights. And last, but certainly not least. My dad. Geezj I didn’t know he could snore that loud. If I had known I would’ve brought myself a pair of these. I think I had my best ‘night’ sleep around 7:00, when my dad was wide awake and I had the chance to fall asleep without the loud snoring to abruptly pull me from my sleep.

I woke up again around 9:30 and decided I’d get dressed. We still needed to do some grocery shopping before we could set sail. And we didn’t want to leave after 12:00. So we headed to town around 10:00. We got ourselves some nice treats, half a white bread and some stuff to put on our bread. Some milk and water dissolve-able tea. We went back to the boat, ate our lunch, and found out it started to drizzle. Just our luck.

My dad was fully convinced that the little rain we had would stop soon. So we decided to wait. Well, around 12:30 it was still there. I decided we’d better get going, otherwise we’d never reach the next stop. We started the engine at 13:00 and used our motor to get to our next stop. The ride there wasn’t really that interesting. Due to the weather we were unable to raise the sails, so we had to motor our way from point A to point B. On the way we did come across a surfer and man did he go fast! I only managed to get a few close shots in until he made a nosedive into the water!

Arriving at 15:10 at our next stop, we needed to dock at the marina. It was funny because we had to dock next to a German ship with an old lady on board. The first thing she did when she saw us coming was run outside to make sure our boat didn’t hit hers! After docking we both had to go to the bathroom, so before doing anything else we scouted the marina for the needed utilities.

When we got back to the boat, we had nothing to do. So I decided to get the laptop, and see what I could do about my unstable IRC connection. And it appears that this laptop had a Vodafone SIM card in it with the needed software to use the nearby GPRS antenna. It’s great! I can now use this laptop in combination with my phone and use 2 mobile networks to cover all my needs! Aren’t I geeky? My mobile phone connected via a USB cable running an HTTP proxy. And the Vodafone card using GPRS for Windows Live Messenger and mIRC. I love it!

So I did all that between 16:00 and 18:00 when we decided we wanted something to eat. Even though we hadn’t done much that day, we were both quite hungry. We headed into town around 18:36 where we found a lot of the restaurants already filled to the brim! It was unbelievable, the amount of people in the same place looking for a nice joint to get some food. Well, we finally found one near a museum we were planning on visiting. The “Jopie Huisman” museum.

The food there was great! I had a salmon fillet with a dill sauce. And my dad got a pan with mussels and various dips. Well. It was definitely good because in the end we finished it all. I had some extra carrots for with my salmon, and we both had some fries. Aside from one bowl which contained raw crust, we cleaned our plates. And to finish off a nice meal, we both had some ice cream with fresh fruit (strawberries and melon).

After we got back to the boat, we both wanted to take a quick shower before going to bed. (well, I still had this blog post to write, of course!) My dad bought 4 coins which each provide up to 6 minutes of shower time. We packed our stuff and headed for the showers. And were these showers annoying! They had a really weak stream of water, and for my dad the temperature wasn’t even constant (and warm). I still have one coin left so I will probably take another quick shower tomorrow morning before we set sail for our next destination.

So far the days have been good, aside from the bad weather. And according to some sources this weather will probably stick the whole week. I certainly hope not, because if it stays this weather, and we can’t actually raise the sails. I will definitely be disappointed.

Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/o.lenstra/SailingTripDay2

Regards,
Olrik