Thursday 31 May
To be fair, apart from the expensive fee, it wasn’t such a bad place to visit. Skipper washed, soaked and soaped all my running rigging (the ropes that control the sails), that was thick with salt, stiff and unwieldy, using copious free water that ran warm from the tap for most of the process – thank goodness we didn’t need to put it in our tanks. He also rigged our lovely new hammock for a first trial – a huge success comfort-wise, but a little draughty in the strong Northerly wind that blew all afternoon even in port. We enjoyed a stroll around the seaside town in the cool of evening, and discovered today is a National Holiday for Corpus Christi, one of many religious festivals celebrated in this predominantly Catholic country: Pope John Paul II was Polish.
Having arrived earlyish yesterday, we avoided the ensuing mayhem, and today again enjoyed watching the often clumsy berthing attempts by rookie crews out for the holiday weekend in unfamiliar charter yachts, as the harbour steadily filled to capacity. Reminiscent of harbours all over the Mediterranean in the season!