Sotogrande, Spain – 05 February 2009

For those of you who have been following our travels west across the Mediterranean will be pleased to know we have finally arrived in Sotogrande on Monday afternoon (2^nd of Feb). We are now 16 miles north of Gibraltar and can easily identify the ‘Rock’ from this distance. It is a wonderful sight to us!

We had an eventful 28 hours journey from Almerimar, during which, we pretty much had every weather condition possible – well I guess not a storm at least! We started our journey with light winds from the South East and were able to sail which continued to early evening. At that point the wind direction changed to the south west and picked up momentum as the hours ticked along. Then we encountered numerous squalls complete with thunder and lighting – quite a display and finally the last squall which was quite violent changed the wind direction to west 25 – 30 knots! Except for the SSE winds none of this weather was forecast!

At this point we were about 20 miles from the Malaga coastline. We plodded our way towards the coast endeavouring to get some shelter, which we did some hours later, when we continued motoring down the coast line to Sotogrande. It was rather a long long tiring night for both of us - so we were delighted to reach our destination.

We have been communicating with the yard since we were in Sardinia regarding the lifting out of AC to sort the problem of the knocking sound near the shaft. However we found out when we arrived that the lift is not working. We are waiting to hear when it is and then we can get on to solving our issue and push on to Gibraltar.

The upside of being here is that we met a couple in San Diego, John and Sandra Fitzpatrick (John was a famous sports car racing person in the 70’s and 80’s) in 2006 and we caught up with them on our way through to the Med in September 2007. Fortunately for us John has been most helpful in sourcing information in advance for us and they have very kindly offered to have us to stay with them while AC is on the hard! Gosh it makes all the difference when you have a local person to look out for you!!

On Tuesday John picked up and took us to a friend’s of his home – Roy and Margaret Oswell - where we had a lovely dinner – it was such a great evening! We are being well looked after which is fabulous!

Sotogrande is a resort complex with apartments, shops and restaurants around the water. It is very attractive, even in winter, and a very nice environment to be in! However the only downside is the cost to stay here – a little on the high side!!!

At this point we have been told that we will be lifted out tomorrow morning. It looks like we will be here until next week until probably Tuesday or Wednesday!!

At least we have just about finished Leg 2 across the Med – hooray!!!

Love

The Jolly Rogers