14 May
The last couple of days have we spent on the roads of Bermuda. As planned we rented some scooters and took off for an excursion of this beautiful island. It isn´t big, approx. 40 x 10 km and consists of a number of smaller islands connected via bridges. We have probably travelled every meter of the road system here and all feel as expert on Bermuda. Around 65.000 people live here and around 500.000 tourists visit Bermuda yearly. It is much wealthier here than on the Caribbean islands, it is clean and tidy allover and the houses are just beautiful. They are all colored in various soft pastel colors, yellow, pink, green etc. and all have bright white roofs. Yesterday evening we took part in a pirate theme masquerade, and that was not an easy task with the clothes we had onboard. It was anyway fun to meet all the other fellow sailors and party together with them. Tonight we had a price giving ceremony, and unfortunately Aniara did not get any prize on this first leg of the race. Hopefully it will be a better result on the next, long leg. Today Eva & Stefan will leave us and fly back to Sweden. We are checking out the possibilities to get a new crew member onboard and will let you know as soon as we know ourselves. Today we will also start the preparations for the sailing to the Azores, we will fill up new diesel and water and will start with our provisioning.
12 May
We passed the finishing line at 13.37, local Bermuda time, yesterday, which means that we used 6 days and 37 minutes to go the 845 NM from Tortola. After passing the immigration procedures we anchored up in the harbor of St. George and went ashore for a dinner. Today we got a place at a local marina here and are close to showers and restaurants. Just before finish we got an extremely heavy rain which lasted for a couple of hours. We are told that this is the first rain falling in Bermuda for 7 months so the local people are extremely happy since it is a shortage of water supply on this little tiny island. We have some minor repair work to do on the boat, among others we have detected a small water leakage from our hot water boiler. We got assistance and have found a local workshop that will do some stainless steel welding for us. Later on today, after we have used the shower, which is very much needed for all of us, we plan to do some sightseeing on the island. Foreigners are not allowed to rent cars on Bermuda, but it is OK to get some scooters, we will find out a way anyhow. We will let you know about our findings before we start the next leg toward the Azores.