Boxing Day & New Years Eve
 
Your mission should you choose to accept, is to read on! We awoke Boxing Day to find it was a tad windy, not only were the boats moving around a lot, so was our pontoon!! We had been invited onto a boat called Moose (fantastic couple) for a Mexican style turkey lunch. It goes without saying that we were all slightly subdued and some of us weren’t really sure if a turkey lunch and a Mexican one at that was going to be a good idea. Once we had negotiated the moving pontoon and managed to get on board Moose, we settled down to lunch. I think we will all agree that despite the fact, that for some of us the ‘mexican turkey’ was our breakfast, it was bob a job! The weather was not good on Boxing day so rather than sit on Stella who really was rocking and a rolling. Captain M and myself decided to go for a walk. The sea really was whipped up, water was coming over the breakwater onto the road, something we haven’t seen here before. Later we returned to the marina to find some boats had been damaged. A huge gin palace had hit a lampost (I’d like to see that Insurance claim form) another rather large sailing boat broken it’s lazy line (now we know why they give you two!!) One of our springs got soooo stretched out, it broke!! This weather kept up for a couple of days then calmed down and it went back to being a bit scorchio again. Between Boxing Day and New Year we refuelled and regrouped. Ready for round two, New Years Eve. All I will say is that we left the boat at 8.30pm New Years Eve night - and went to bed New Years day night at about 2100hrs. In between these hours we had a very nice meal in a restaurant, then raced down to the lake for midnight to watch some fireworks. Only to find that there were no fireworks or people there. So they only thing left to do was okey kokey around the Christmas tree and sing ‘5 gold rings’ yet again. A friend of ours who is Spanish (Joanna, Eddies mum), had brought us each 12 grapes and instructed us that we had to eat a grape on each of the bongs at midnight. By doing this we would have ‘Good Luck’ in the coming year. Now you can never have too much ‘Good Luck’ when your sailing the dream. So on that first bong we started chomping, not an easy task when the grapes have pips in. Captain M found one of his grapes in his pocket 2 days later, well that’s his ‘Good Luck’ out of the porthole! As there wasn’t much happening at the lake (apart from 6 oddballs and a Jack Russell dancing around a Christmas tree). We decided to meet up with some of the others from the marina. There then followed a darts match until about 5am. We then visited a few more bars and danced and sang a bit more. We wandered back to the boats. A rather brave sole from the marina had said that she was going to go for a New Years Day dip at 10.00am. As it was nearly that time we decided to go down to the beach and watch. The weather was glorious. Tessa the brave (some might say nutter) was ready to go in when something rather extraordinary happened. Captain Ian had disrobed (not completely) and was all set to accompany Tessa into the sea. Now I said it was a glorious day but lets not make any bones about it, it was January 1st and the water was going to be a spot on the chilly side. But this didn’t deter our heroes, in they Splashed like a pair of young nymphs!! Well it wasn’t quite like that, but I always feel its nice to paint a pretty picture. New Years Day madness over and done with we returned to the boats. To go to bed I hear you ask? Oh no that would be far too sensible. We went onto Atoraxia (Eddies boat) and had a delicious Spaghetti Bolognese for lunch. Well even party animals have to eat!! Later that night we finally retired (collapsed). It wears me out just writing about it. Well that’s all the fun and games over with for another year. It’s back to work now, lots and lots of jobs to do before we leave in March. Unfortunately the list seems to get longer rather than shorter! But I’m sure we’ll get there. Love & best wishes for 2007 Captain M & me XX P.S Haven’t eaten the pie yet, but we do a lot of gazing at it.
Thursday, 4 January 2007