Oct. 31st and Back on Line

I think by now most of you will have heard that the prolonged silence after the Sept 4th blog was not a result of shipwreck but a maritime disaster of a smaller scale.
For those of you who hadn't heard, on Sept 5th, we sailed on from Viania Castello to Porto, a beautiful city still very original and undeveloped on the central parts by the river.
I was still looking for somewhere to dry Holly Mae out so that I could do some routine maintenance on the propellor. ( It's a self-feathering type which requires greasing and it's anode changing once or twice a year). The brand new marina there had a slipway which at first glance looked ideal and so I went for a closer look......... new concrete, very smooth, no mooring rings or bollards.......... not so much a slipway as a launching ramp. So I went down the slip to see if I could improvise and before I could stop myself was in a slow motion slide down to the polluted waters of the river Douro. I was standing as a statue.......... any sudden moves and I'd be over........... but when the water got to my waist there came an instinctive sudden move and....................... just as predicted I was on my arse !!! And what was worse my laptop, around my neck, was also now underwater. So computer gets wet and the blog dries up as a result.

Recently I've been home to say hello to Wilby our new grandson and now I have another computer so the blog restarts. But, if you think I'm going to sit down and recount the events of the past 2 months in one go, you're sadly mistaken.

I'm now in the Canaries and about to go out for a bite to eat but will try to catch up bit by bit over the next little while.