Another Day in Hyeres

There was a small system blowing through so we decided to stay another day in Hyeres to wait for a calm day for the crossing. Later in our journey I hope that we start looking for days with more wind ...but with our first two days of 30+ knots and fairly large 2-3 meter seas, a little calm isn't really all that bad.  Besides, we could use a long power to charge the batteries and fridge.

View from the top of the mast.

We spent the morning trying to get our new LED running lights installed in the top of the mast to no avail. The wire is not conducting electricity. We vainly tried to pull the new cable using the existing one and then gave up -- having spent several hours accomplishing little else other than cutting a wire on top of the mast.

The day before when Marina and I rode the bus to Hyeres Centre-ville to get our telephony situation ironed out, we saw a go-cart track. The gang went to shore on Bonnie Blue our faithful little RIB and we walked to the track in total anticipation...and not just the teenagers!

We saw a couple of carts bucketing around the track and started smiling. Each "ticket" provided for a 5 minute race with lap times around 50 seconds, it meant you get about 6 laps each race. Ross and Hayden are newly minted drivers, Jess has never driven before, so we had no idea what to expect. These carts have Honda (lawn mower?) 160cc engines in them. I would guess they do 50-60 kms top speed and you can really pull G's in them as they corner like they're on rails. They also rent 320cc carts, though I think we would need some instructions on how to drive them optimally before I would be willing to try one. There was plenty of fun to be had with the small displacement carts.

We took 5 or 6 seconds off our lap times in the 4 races, Jessie was the most improved -- going from being lapped by everyone to where she started ahead of everyone and was able to hold most of us off staying ahead for the entire race. Ross had the fastest lap of anyone and claimed to be fastest, though I remember passing him twice and never having him pass me, so we'll agree to disagree. In our (soon to be) 20th year of marriage, Marina and I decided that our best lap times would be identical ... 47.724 seconds ... down to the earnest thousandth of a second. Hayden, who has less than 2 weeks with an 'L' steadily improved but did spin on the hairpin right more than once. His highlight was probably holding the hard charging Ross off on the second-to-last lap of the last race, Ross bumped him going into the corner, Hayden carried on, Ross spun out and was passed by a few of us on the last lap ... tee hee hee.

Happy GoKart'ers!

We walked back to town, did a little more grocery shopping and headed back to the boat to put the day's carnage away, lift the dinghy on deck for the passage to Corse.