Life in Machico

We have been really enjoying ourselves here in Machico. Quite a little community between the cruisers has developed. We now have thre french boats here, one German, one American and of course Eva Kullgren from Sweden.

We have been all quite preoccupied with the drama of Eva's engine though. It has been living a very hard life over the last couple of years and needs quite a lot of TLC. The local Volvo Penta agency seems to be quite keen to help her out and over the last week or so they have been working to remove it. Needless to say, we have all taken a keen interest and have shared her ups and downs over this. Suffice to say, that it was eventually removed yesterday to be taken away to their workshop. This was the cue for an impromptu dockside celebration.

Another activity we have been up to is to put our paintings on the harbour wall. This is an odd tradition amongst long distance cruisers. It started in Horta on Faial in the Azores when transient yachts would paint their name on the harbour wall. Now the tradition has expanded to all sorts of places. There are a lot of them at Porto Santo but we never got around to getting a design together but all the others here have done so and we managed to get some spray paint and a scalpel from the local chinese shop and put the following bit of graffiti on the wall here.

We will work on getting a better template so it looks more professional for next time!

We hope to be heading off to the Canaries around Monday or Tuesday.