At the moment our days are just not long enough for everything we have to do. After the long trip Pitufa needs quite some attention, the boiler was leaking and Christian removed the electric heater element that was rusted through (followed by happy bilge cleaning as 25 litres of freshwater had drained onto the engine twice). Yesterday was a 9 hour Pfaff-day (that’s the name of our sewing machine), we resewed almost all seams of the lazy-bag plus added some patches.
This morning we took our broken boom (4.5 m) with our dinghy (2.7 m) to a machine shop. We started out at 7, because we wanted to use the calm morning for the ride. We arrived there in calm weather, they promised to weld a plate over the crack until tomorrow morning. We did some shopping and by the time we were ready to go back to Pitufa the wind had set in and the ride back was seriously rough. Imagine a tiny dinghy heading straight against 25 knots of wind and steep seas up to 1.5 metres. It’s only 1.5 nm from town to the anchorage, but we were drenched completely and the dinghy filled up with water by the time we got home–fortunately we had thought ahead in the morning and brought a dry bag… This was our second-worst dinghy ride ever, the worst took place along the same channel two years ago, when our old dinghy got smashed in town and we returned half-sinking only with air in the inflatable keel left…
