It has been a frustrating but eventually successful few days. We have spent a lot of time hanging around the boat waiting for people to come to do work, and have had to fill the hours with the limited range of jobs that we can get on with. We finally concluded on Monday that we would not be able to leave on Tuesday, and therefore started to re-plan.
The big jobs needed include a check of the rig, which
entails someone going up the mast, the deck clean, and investigation of
problems with the instruments and one of the winches. Inevitably, when someone
starts one job, then someone else arrives and both are impeded by the
other. The best example of this was on Tuesday,
when the guy was well into the long task of restoring the decking, when the ragazzi
from the maintenance company arrived to strip the winch. They did manage to
work around each other, and took away part of the winch for further examination,
but it was not ideal. The deck now looks
better than ever before.
The poor guys from the service company are being pulled in all directions. There are us and another boat who are pressing them to finish getting them ready, and Luigi said that while he was working on our boat he had 17 calls from the boatyard, asking him to do other things as a priority. He had made assumptions about our plans as to when we would leave and thought that he would have until next week to finish. We have our son with us for the extended weekend and really want to be able to sail with him. He has visited us at several previous Easters, and has never managed to actually sail on any of them, due to weather etc, (snow in Germany, torrential rain in Spain, and so on). We pressed Luigi yesterday, and as a result he made a huge effort and now has only one job left which is scheduled for tomorrow morning. There are 2 other things outstanding, but hopefully they will get resolved as well, so that we can leave at midday tomorrow (Friday).
While we have waited for people to come, we have done more
planning of the rest of the trip and have a much better idea of where we will
end up in June, and how we will get there. There are still plenty of details,
but it is great to have a concept of the plan.
The boat yard is constantly busy, and we have 2 launching
docks to watch. These have seen 3 or 4 boats each day lifted in or out of the water.
The closest one to us has the largest capacity 200 ton crane, and is lifting
some impressively large boats. The yard also has a hydraulic boat lift that
they can use to move boats once they are out of the water, rather than the main
boatlift cranes. It is really impressive to see them drive these things, fully
laden with boats, from one part of the yard to another. There is one part which
has a narrow roadway and a tight corner, but they never have any problem with
it. The hydraulic lift, like the big hoists has 4 wheel steering, so it must be
very controllable.
Whilst in the bakery buying bread for lunch, the staff suggested that we buy one of their traditional Easter cakes. These look huge, so on the first day we declined. On the second day, we saw a half sized one and bought it. Delicious. It is a type of panettone but has a pistachio filling and topping. All in the shape of a cross (well loosely). Definitely one of the best panettone we have ever tasted, and with Chris’ help, it is now all finished. We are debating whether to get one large one or two other small ones, so that we can try the chocolate version as well!
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| Only in Italy... |
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| Eventually out for a well earned celebratory drink with Chris |
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