Our week in Gibraltar was non
stop, we had lists of jobs to do on Magnum, plus all the boat cleaning which we
could do with the luxury of water, we had a list of spares which needed to be
bought and the expense of stating to provision for our Atlantic crossing,
not forgetting time needed to catch up with friends.
As Mark busied on the boat on our
first morning I rushed off to the laundrette, the woman must have thought I had
not washed for months when I filled the 17 kilo machine and she was right! and that was only day 1 of the washing! After our first day of busying Magnum looked sparkling, it is amazing how much
dirt accumulates on the decks, in the cockpit, on all the canvas and every spot
of the boat which is exposed to the elements!
It was not all hard work and it
was lovely to finally see Michelle and get to meet Shana, with a lack of green
space in Gib we had a nice afternoon spent in the Botanical gardens.
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| Michelle & Shana at Botanical Gardens in Gib |
We then had a few days rushing
around with a hire car, yet another engine problem meant that our diesel
injection pump had to be taken to an engineer in Spain which was not the easiest
with our limited Spanish but people were as helpful as ever. We then had the delight of visiting Ikea, I
had waited months to buy some memory foam toppers for our bed – after a few
weeks of use they have been amazing! We managed to pop up into the mountains to
visit Michelle & Alex but then back to rushing around. The car was filled with food/drink on a
number of occasions and we must now have over 100 tins on the boats in
preparation for 3-4 weeks at sea on the Atlantic crossing, it is nice to start
organising for this but also a bit daunting as not long now!
Our other significant task whilst
in Gib was the delivery and installation of our super new iridium Sat Phone
(thanks to my mum and dad for this belated wedding present), this will allow us
to obtain weather and keep in contact whilst out at sea. Up to now we have been relatively close to
land and/or not at sea for more than 3 days so been able to obtain a
phone/internet signal but this would no longer be the case with our next
passage to Madeira . Once the actual phone was fitted Mark still
had to set up a new service with “Mailasail” which would enable email
compression due to the much slower speed of a satellite internet connection, he
spent time testing the weather and emails, we also have an additional blog
which we will use on our longer passages to plot our position on Google Earth –http://blog.mailasail.com/svmagnum if you do take a long ignore our first plot as we were not in the middle of Spain!
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| Our super new phone |
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| New ariel for Sat Phone mounted on Magnums stern |
We enjoyed being back in Gib which
include listening to British Forces Radio, never would have found this in the UK
but as this is an English speaking station we spent a lot of our time listening
to what the forces are doing around the world and being more aware seems to
make you appreciate them more, shame they are not promoted more in the UK.
So with our jobs done we had time
for one last visit from Michelle, Shana & Ziggy before another sad goodbye.
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| Ziggy exploring the boat in Gibraltar |
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| There is even a Pizza Express in Gib |
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