BUSTED.......BUREAUCRATES AND BALDERDASH 31st August.

Established in 1685

The original home and old Oak

Time seems to have flown by since the last post. We have been really busy with jobs aboard and with Bureaucrats! A couple of weeks ago we went off to Cape Town to celebrate Trudie's 60th birthday with she and Robert and some of their friends at her house. It was a great night and we really felt like locals when we walked in and immediately met two other couples we knew! Friends of Robert and Trudie's of course but it was real fun.

The cobwebs are original

Fermentation tanks now restaurant.

On Saturday Robert had booked dinner at Murati vineyard in Stellenbosh wine lands. Its very hard to have a favorite vineyard but Murati would be at the top of my list. It is so totally bohemian. Fabulous rich history to be appreciated. You can feel it, smell it and taste it in the home cooked farmhouse food they serve.

Murati Vineyard

The drive home held an unpleasant surprise however, when I checked my emails to discover an email from the SARS, (South African Revenue Service) to notify us that Taipan had been impounded and there was a demand for copies of documents of Registration, Visas and passports. On a Sunday! We hurried off the appropriate documents and heard nothing. Monday Tuesday and Wednesday were spent either in the SARS office trying to sort out their problem or waiting for feedback from them. It became apparent that a sweep conducted by SARS of Foreign Yachts around the ports of South Africa had seen a number of boats either detained, impounded or seized.  On Wednesday evening we finally received notice that we could remain in the country with Taipan until the 3rd of October. We had a visa extension application in until the end of November. We certainly hope to be gone before 3rd of October.

Very worrying is the total lack of communication between various officers in the department. Some officers told us it was totally insane and that there was no justification for the actions taken. It appears that some regulation referring to Commercial Vehicles is being used to harass the foreign yachts. 

While we were in Cape Town we purchased a replacement computer for the Sony which died with the Digital Yacht AIS during installation of the latter. I have been stumbling along with the new iMac and am happy to report that we are mostly all up an running in Mac operating system. I will however have to install Win7 in Boot Camp to run Sailmail which uses a modem run from the HF radio. There is no software available for Mac to run the Pactor  because we are told that Pactor is unwilling to share its secrets out of house for fear of copies. Until they have a mac programmer on board there wont be any short cut for this problem.

David has been putting the finishing touches to the Fuel Filtration System. We purchased and installed a Facet Pump and a Keenoil depth filter. Now we are finished. Time will tell. This web site was after exhaustive research the most appropriate for us. We didn't use Gulf paper filters but the Kleenoil Filter is similar. Our primary resource for the new fuel filtration system. The tanks have been repaired, painted and had extra inspection openings added so we can get to all the sections. David has moved the return to the furthest end away from the engine supply line so hopefully fuel is all cycled through the cleaning loop when it is running. 
 
The weather has been horrid, cold and wet. The social life has been hectic. We are indebted to so many wonderful people both here and in Cape Town for their wonderful hospitality and generous inclusion of us in their social events or shopping trips. The Saldanha Bay Yacht Club continues to delight us as does Manolo who never fails to come on Saturday to take us to breakfast and shopping.

Yes. We are still planning to leave but right now there is snow on Table Mountain and its defiantly not the time to go anywhere.

Saldahna