 | What an absolutely beautiful day! It started a little earlier than expected, due to a weird problem with my Blackberry setting itself 90 minutes forward so my 9am alarm actually work me at 7.30am. I carried on thinking the time on my Blackberry was correct until I started up my laptop to check email... no wonder I was tired, I'd had 6.5 hours sleep, not 8 as I'd thought (yeah, I was up late watching episodes of Boston Legal last night while trying to stay warm in my hotel room...). Anyway, I met up with Ale (one of the guys from my L1 team) in the foyer of the hotel and waited for Dario (one of the guys from my L2 team) to come in his car (he'd called earlier to say it wasn't starting up). The two other guys who were going to come, didn't (one was sick, poor thing) so we headed to the boat club a little later than planned, but it was OK. |
We got sandwiches, drinks and some cake for later and hopped on a tender to the boat. Boy, is she beautiful! Bigger than any privately owned boat I've sailed on, but obviously much smaller than the Soren Larsen. And she can really turn on a sixpence; Ale backed her into a really amazingly tight space, to fill up on water, with absolutely no trouble at all. Anyway, we headed out into the estuary, munching on our sandwiches, and the wind and water were kind to us and we were making between 4 and 6 knots most of the time, I think. There were so many other boats out there it was a mass of white sails as far as the eye could see.
We sailed on out into Rio de la Plata and down along the line of the coastline of San Isidro, past the cathedral and south a little further. I'm not sure how far down we got, I was too busy enjoying the water. Heading back in after a couple of hours of relaxing going, and it was amazing the number of powered boats that were in a real hurry to get back to the boat clubs. We were cut up and battered by wash several times, but it just seems to be how it is on that estuary. Fighting off the mosquitoes as the light was fading, we headed back to the boat club to eat our cake and drink coffee... and I must say that, as a non-fan of coffee, I really did quite like the coffee there. It wasn't bitter at all.
Then it was off back to my hotel to drop me off, we stopped off at a roadside parilla and ate lomitos and chorizo - something so Argentinian, those little carts - with the smelly main road on one side of us and the river on the other. It was a really relaxing day. Even though I was with people from work, it didn't matter and I forgot about work for the first time in the whole 2 weeks I've been here, and for at least a few hours. I feel good!
