From previous Blog.......
Sunday, September 30th, 2007
Ok think I’ve got the hang of this blog malarky now!I admit it’s not the most professional link to a blog I’ve ever seen but hey it does the job. Having sought “professional advice” the problems with our website are numerous - “no meta tags in the head of the document, theres no alt tags on the images, you’ve no text based links for the image links on the left and the text that you have on the home page - while cute - isn’t descriptive enough for the search engines” - thanks Richard!So anyway it’s a week since I put anything on here and no one was able to read it any way because I couldn’t link it to the website so here we go - a potted week in the life of Vita Nova.
New generator arrived Monday - how we ever existed before Ebay is quite beyond me. Unfortunately the generator had been damaged in transit and had a hole in the petrol tank - it never rains but it pours so they say, and that’s exactly what the petrol did straight out of the bottom. Scott temporarily fixed it and we’re now waiting for a new petrol tank.On Tuesday our wind generator arrived and is now fastened on to the wheelhouse roof - no cables for it yet though.
The rest of the week passed in a bit of a blur waiting for this weekends high tides.The intention was to pull Vita Nova out of her hole and a bit further towards Roa Island, however things did not go entirely according to plan……..Friday night (early hours of Saturday morning), Scott managed to turn the bow (front landlubbers) quite a few feet round to the port side (left landlubbers) but the stern (back landlubbers - ok getting bored of this now look the words up - check out interesting links on vitanovaweb) just didn’t move. The result of all this was we ended up leaning towards starboard at quite an angle as the tide went out and of course couldn’t do anything about it till the lunch time high tide the next day. We blamed Scott the next morning when Saffi’s drink fell over! So Saturday lunchtime Scott straightened her up only to tip her the other way Saturday night. Maybe he thinks we won’t have to buy me so many bottles of wine if he puts my whole life on an angle!So here we are Sunday - last night was spent straightening her out again, so we’ve moved a bit but are now straight again. We were wondering the last two nights how on earth we came aboard and did the work we did when she was on an angle originally - it’s really hard to deal with having got straight

Monday, September 24th, 2007
The day dawned bright and sunny. Scott’s task for the day was to work on the electrics, he’s trying to work out where all the wiring goes from the engine room, not easy when it’s all marked up in Dutch. So 20 minutes on babelfish translator later and still no wiser he was making it up as he went along - no change there then!The day took a turn for the worse when the generator decided to go pop. What really upset Scott was he’d spent half of Saturday servicing the generator to try and get enough voltage out of it.Every down has an up according to Scott and the upside of all of this is we’ve actually got around to ordering the wind generator we’ve been talking about. Unfortunately we also had to order a new petrol generator in case it’s needed to top up our batteries on non windy days