Carra Tidings

20th July – We awoke to the steady drumming of rain on the hatch, and I was just contemplating turning over when Mags was up and about with swim suit in hand. The water temperature wasn’t exactly hot…a chilly 16.6C. Anything below 22C isn’t even an option for me. It clearly was cold judging by the expletives that were uttered on entering the water. I assumed it would be a quick dip then out again, next thing I saw was her doing laps of some distant buoys….. quite bonkers.

The rain passed and the sun came out – there was a gentle breeze and we wound our way through the rocks. There was a marked difference in the scenery, the islands became smaller and less inhabited. With only 14nm to Rodloga it didn’t matter that we were pootling along.

In the distance there was a very dark ominous cloud, we were still enjoying the sunshine but it was getting closer – then the wind died it was clearly being sucked into the weather system. It wasn’t long before we heard the rumble of thunder. We took down the sails as there are always severe down drafts under thunder clouds. We also put the handheld gps and mobile phones in the oven – this should hopefully protect them if we were stuck by lightening. With the engine on we would reach our destination faster and I would rather play lightening roulette with other boats around rather than being out on our own – is that uncharitable of me? The storm was 20 miles away, then it was 8 miles away it was getting closer, then the rain started, but thankfully the storm just past behind us and we emerged into the sunshine and we entered the fairly straight forward Rodloga natural harbour.

We had been here the year before with the Baltic Charter and we ended up in exactly the same spot. There was quite strong cross wind so we were quite pleased to have someone ashore take the lines. Mags set off like a mountain goat round the rock banging stone hooks into various crevices and with a rope from our stern to the shore we could brace her against the cross wind.

The evening skies cleared and the harbour was bathed in glorious sun, which really brought the red colour alive of the traditional houses on the main island.

It was soon time to fire up the Cobb BBQ which is designed not to get hot so you can put it on the deck. After dinner in the cockpit it was time to clean it. To my horror it was stuck the deck. The bottom plastic had melted to the deck. After quite a force I was able to remove it, which revealed a great big black circle and burnt fiberglass. There were only 2 reasons to be thankful. Firstly it was on the locker lid, so worst case we could replace the locker lid and we were able to remove the BBQ – I suppose it could have been a lot worse – we weren’t happy though. We have used our BBQ many times before on the deck and never once had this problem. We banished the offending item ashore to cool down.