At home in Las Palmas

Slowly we’re feeling at home here in Las Palmas. The personnel of the local chandlery knows us by name, the kids have plenty of friends and the days pass by in an instant. Today at 13:00h, the ARC will start across the Atlantic and then it’s gonna be much quieter in the harbour. We’ll commemorate that by having a beach party in the afternoon. Hehehe.

Unfortunately, the Express Crusader also left Gran Canaria this morning. This beautiful, history-charged ship is inhabited by an argentinian family with three kids – despite sailing under the english flag. We’ll gonna miss them and look forward to meet again in Cabo Verde or maybe in the Carribean. Bruno was really very sad today.

Yesterday I built the mount for our tiller pilot and thus managed to remove one of the last items from my ToDo list. After that there was a big children farewell party on board the Express Crusader with 11 (in words: ELEVEN !!) kids. Afterwards Bruno and Viola still had energy left to do the long planned restaurant evening. The kids created a menu and Bruno took the orders with pen and booklet and passed the wishes of our guests towards the kitchen. Viola mixed Mojitos and Bruno and Gui made the Cheeseburgers. It was a wonderful evening with Klaus und Tim from the Kira (where the restaurant was actually planed – therefore the name…)

And now we’ll have to get into the Dinghy to see the start of the ARC 2011 . We wanna shoot a couple of pictures. We have a steady breeze and I guess at lest the racing division will use that to start under spinnaker. We’ll see…