We've been in Norfolk for a week now awaiting the date we're insured to head south .... today! Now we've just got to choose a safe weather window to round Cape Hatteras and it's looking like Wednesday / Thursday this week will be it all being well so we're starting our preparations for heading south including cleaning and polishing Tumi ... it is Sunday after all, and everyone washes their cars on Sundays. It'll be an all day job by the time we've finished with the stainless steel and GRP.
We've had a good week in Norfolk. The OCC port officer and his wife have invited us and the other OCC sailors docked here to dinner and lunch this week and we've dined twice as a group too, so very social. We've also had two trips to the movies and used the local bus service to visit Virginia Beach (not to be recommended, an out of season Blackpool-type experience) and Hampton (a pleasant enough place but nothing much there). So we're ready to see somewhere new now and looking forward to arriving in Beaufort, North Carolina by the end of the week.
Now to the Gas. We finally managed to get our gas system sorted out so that we can use the US gas bottle safely. I connected the US regulator to the gas bottle last week when our European one finally exhausted itself and spliced two gas pipes together to make the connection to our European gas system. So far so good, we thought, we can cook again. The problem was, that we could operate the oven as a flamethrower, flaring gas everywhere on one ring, or a trickle if we wanted to sue more than one to cook potatoes AND vegetables at the same time. The regulator that we had just wasn't regulating so we turned off the gas and went back to the drawing board. We had a look at what the other boats were doing, and found out that there is an adaptor to convert US to European gas systems and so we ordered on online to be express delivered to us here in Norfolk. As we couldn't cook, it was a good excuse to go out as mentioned above but even not being able to boil a kettle for a hot drink was something of a pain. We realised that we need to have an electric kettle on board for such eventualities. We didn't want to buy a US one as they only work on 110v and we run on 230v, but as things turned out, the couple on the boat next to us happened to have a kettle they didn't want any more, and suddenly we are the proud owners of another means to boil water. Strange how these things just seem to work out isn't it?