On the move

November 18^th 2015: We departed Agua Dulce Marina at 9:00am after we settled the bill. It’s the longest time we have spent in any marina since New Zealand. I drove Southern Star out of the marina berth. I have done this the last few times, trying to get my confidence up. Robbie is always onto me to park the boat but I am resistant to this! I can do everything else but bringing this big chunky girl into a marina berth scares the heebies jeebies out of me! She is not easy to reverse so I figure I will get my confidence up by driving out of the marina berths first, and then maybe I will attempt to park her!

The wind gauge was reading 0.0 when we left! The water was flat calm and looked absolutely gorgeous. Starlet had left at 8:30am as they were more organised than us and had settled their bill yesterday.

We had no more than 5 knots of wind the whole day, super smooth and I was able to catch up on emails and the blog along the way. Plus give myself a manicure, which after 3 weeks of polishing stainless steel and manual boat chores was very much needed! Robbie took some photos of some of the thousands of plastic green houses. 

We followed Starlet all day, they are cruising at 1400 rpm’s and doing 7 knots, we had to do 1700 rpms to match their speed. We know Southern Star’s bottom is a bit dirty and this could be slowing us down a bit. Plus we (she?) is much heavier!

We followed Starlet in and anchored in Ensenada de Dacatin at 4:00pm, a small rocky bay surrounded by high cliffs. Robbie had all his scuba gear ready to go and he jumped in armed with a scrubber, a scraper and a soft sponge for the propeller (so as not to rub off the prop speed) He did try and entice me to jump in and help, but he has the thick wet suit and it was awful cold! I normally would be in there with him if the water was warmer!

He surfaced after about 20 minutes and reported that everything was pretty good underneath, the propeller was good, and a small amount of green growth over the hull mainly on the top part where the sun gets to the sides but otherwise all anodes and the keel coolers were all good. The small folding propeller for the wing engine was open which is unusual but could have happened when we reversed on the anchor. We will clean the bottom thoroughly when we get to the Canary Islands where the water will be warmer!

We had a brief visit from the Guardia Civil in their fast speed boat, they sped up close to Starlet, spun around and then sped away past us grinning like Cheshire cats with the wake they left behind rocking our boat!

Mark and Jennifer popped over with their laptop to plan our route for the next few days, and we enjoyed nibbles and sundowners.

We retired to bed where I was thrilled to be reading the next Jack Reacher novel that Mark has given us. (This and many, many more!!)

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