March 25 – April 08, 2020; 2899 nm and 384 days after departure from La Rochelle

Another two weeks of Corona lock down have passed. The big question is: what does everybody do with their spare time and how to keep cheered up? I’m not talking about those guys who are working like hell at the moment and to whom we are all grateful to. No, I’m talking about Jo Blocks like you and me in times of being not able to do what we’re used to.
In the marina it looks like this:
A – the lucky group
the ones who still have lots of work to do at their boats AND have
all the material they need
B – the sportive group
they try to do any kind of sport in and around their boats; e.g. running
a marathon on the platform with a length of 50m (840 rounds); do they
need paper and pencil to remember the laps?
C – the lazy group
the ones who enjoy the beautiful weather, watching the other
groups, sunbathing with a cocktail in
one hand, a book in the other hand and their food bellies growing
rapidly in excitement
D – the indifferent group
where we belong to; we try a little bit of every style not knowing which
group we might and want to belong to.

Let’s come back to reality.
My lock down birthday was great! I enjoyed very much talking to so many friends I hadn’t talked to for some time as well as chatting with lots of others and receiving soooooo many wishes. Many thanks to all the “well-wishers” !!! Great to have all these technologies on hand shortening the virtual distance to zero. In social distancing times it is an even more important tool to keep contact to the rest of the world.
Though the best part for me was – of course apart from mi Capitano spoiling me the whole day – our two people party. It started right after having a virtual drink with all of you together via the known social media channel.🥂
DJ Norbert inaugurated the Altimate disco, the drinks were ready and the dance floor open. So funny! Unfortunately the pics we took were all to dark but this little video might give you an impression. Embarrassing for me, entertaining for you. Please don’t forget we were already in week two of lockdown.

Getting older leads to needing more and more time to recover from a party night. So a few days passed without us realising being locked in 😉. Eventually we were fit again and needed jobs to do. El Capitano was and is still installing our new computer and navigation system. Oops I forgot to mention some day since our last blog entry, the missing monitor arrived, after being stuck in a warehouse in Las Palmas for more than 3 week. Yeah!

Feeling pretty professional in baking bread I needed a new food project, “sprouting”. I started with mung beans. They turned out as easy growing seeds, which motivated me to try other seeds. Sunflower, corn, mustard, sesame, chickpeas and quinoa were my further attempts. They are all easy to grow – if they sprout. I figured, clever as I am, the better the seeds, the better they sprout. It is super easy, but not very time-killing.
However the time is flying anyhow after getting into the right corona mood, it’s not too hard spending the day doing nothing. The days go by with having coffee in the morning and reading the news about corona, walking slowly to the sanitaries (how exciting), sometimes going to the supermarket (even more exciting), talking to some sailor mates (only if the police is not around), cooking, cleaning, reading , sunbathing, sewing masks…

As we still use gas for cooking and our gas reserve was slowly getting smaller, we thought we try to find a way to fill up our gas bottles. It was not yet urgent but better to find out earlier than later. El Capitano got in contact via email with the marina staff. They were willing to help and send us to some gas stations. It didn’t help much. We’ve been using a bottle with a Spanish connector as we thought that would work for quite some time in Spanish territory. But, surprise surprise, on the Canaries (Spain !) gas bottles with a different connector are being used. The bottle needs to get refilled and can’t be just exchanged. We figured out that there is only one station in Las Palmas which is offering that service. Though at the moment it is too far away for us to reach. No Problem! Being in a marina we have always enough electrical power, so our idea was to buy an electric burner. The idea was great but buying one was impossible. The few electronic shops which were open only had big ovens but nothing of use for us. Online shopping was also not an option as it takes anyhow weeks to get the delivery and with the lockdown it is uncertain if we would get the delivery at all.
Luckily the sailor community is always very helpful! We asked for help and within 3 hours we could borrow an electronic burner from a very nice lady here in the marina. So great! Thanks to Björn for organising and Veronika for lending us her second burner.

Picking up the cooktop was not only nice because of getting the item itself but also because I met Veronika. She is a very funny and communicative person. We immediately got on well together. We both thought we must talk soon again. The trouble is that the police is checking quite often the marina and of course we don’t want to break rules but a little talk face to face once in a while would be nice. Our platforms are miles away in these days and definitely not useful for shouting from one platform to the other. What else to do than meeting in the marina sanitaries. Said and done. We met the next day in the afternoon in a bathroom. If someone would have told me only a few month ago that I would hide in a bathroom just to have a talk to somebody… nobody would have been able to have such crazy thoughts. Anyhow it was funny! We enjoyed it very much. I felt like a school girl skipping classes. Our “toilet talk” lasted 1,5 hours and we already did it again.😂

All in all the marina community is very well behaved. Nobody is ignoring the rules. We haven’t seen any boat parties or other gatherings. We can proudly confirm that the sailor community here in Las Palmas is following the corona rules. We need to continue following the rules as the Spanish government has extended the lock down for another 2 weeks until the 26 of April. Hopefully the rules will get loosen after the 26 so we are at least allowed to have a walk again and some shops will be open…would be great after 6 weeks of lock down.
The future will tell us, let’s hope the threat will be ended soon.
Don’t forget to wash your hands.