Progress Update

We are now around a quarter of the way from Turkey to Gibraltar and an eighth of the way to the Caribbean. Yes Zerrin, there is now a serious hole in that elephant – I think maybe his tail and one leg are gone. After initial problems, due as is often the case to not doing a shakedown cruise before setting off, Petronella is in reasonable shape. The water pump seems to be fixed and then stern gland is behaving itself better for some unknown reason! We’ve had to buy a shiny new 21m long mainsheet (rope) as the replacement blocks (pulleys) we bought when we were back in England were too small for the old rope despite being advertised as adequate. What else has gone wrong? Oh yes, the Pactor modem which worked fine in Turkey no longer works here in Greece so there is work to do there before we hit the Atlantic as this will provide our contact with Emma (The Wombat), our shore support lead. Also giving problems are the direction indicator on the anemometer at the top of the mast and the chain stripper which makes sure the anchor chain runs smoothly back into its locker when we pull it up. At present it doesn’t and is proving hard to fix.

Things that are working well are the new AIS, the solar panels,…. No, I’ll stop there because you can guarantee that if I say it is working well today then tomorrow it will break.

We are OK too now we’ve have had a few days rest here in the Ionian. We have a few more days in these lovely bays before Jen and Marcus fly out to Kefalonia on Saturday. We’ll give them a day to recover and watch the World Cup final before we set off with them for Sardinia via Sicily. This will be a trial run for the Atlantic crossing so we are hoping we all get on with each other!!