As predicted, it was a stormy night but apart from waking up a couple of times, we had a good night, despite the occasional heavy rain (that's what woke me) and strong winds. By the morning, most clouds had gone and it was sunny but pretty windy, absolutely not the sort of weather that I would chose to venture out to sea in, the waves breaking over the breakwater were enough to put me off.

We elected therefore to make this a chore day and to do whatever sightseeing Rønne had to offer . We did the laundry, I uploaded the blog and after coffee, I decided to have a go at the guest toilet, which has been less than perfect in operation. The basic problem with it is that after giving it the usual pumps to empty and flush and then empty again, water tends to creep back into the bowl. Now I’ve had a theory that this is inevitable as the layout of the piping in the heads is not entirely logical, in that you have to pump against gravity ie the pipes go up and out, rather than down and out. Anyway, I then thought that there is supposed to be a non-return arrangement so perhaps my theory isn’t right so I decided that there was nothing for it but to dismantle the thing. Of course, as soon as you break the integrity of the seals, any water contained in the system comes out so it was quite a wet job. In removing the base components, I discovered that a copper weight was free and that it should be incorporated into a complicated piece of rubber that acts as a valve and when I got the bits back together and reinstalled them and put the whole unit back together, lo and behold, it worked! At least that part did but now we had a leak, but fortunately after removing some bits and putting them back, I seem to have stopped it and it still works, so fingers crossed .

After sterilising everywhere and hands of course, we had lunch then set off to see what there was to see. I wanted to go via the chandlers as the other job I wanted to start on was the annual maintenance of the winches and I couldn’t find my winch grease. We’d also decided to replace 'Oscar’, one of our lifesaving devices with this unusual brand name, basically a floating rope and a harness that is kept for emergencies in a container hanging from the pushpit rail. The idea is if someone falls in, you chuck the harness and rope in and as it floats you can drive the boat in a curve and the swimmer can reach the line, irrespective of the direction they swim in. Oscar has suffered from two things, old age exacerbated by UV radiation and bits of coal from my barbecue melting holes in the lid! I’ve got more careful with the barbecue now. Anyway, we succeeded in acquiring both items and Oscar has now been retired.

There wasn’t a whole lot to see in Rønne, or at least if there is, we didn’t see them. We did find a couple of nice streets dating from the 1800’s and some newer bits that had been built to replace the ones destroyed by the Russians as they ‘liberated’ Denmark in 1945, when they destroyed 212 houses. The church, always a good place to pop into, was locked and that was about it. So we did some victualing in Kvickly as we hope to be on anchor in Rugen as of tomorrow night and headed back to the boat for tea.

Once refreshed, I started on the winches, giving two of them a service, which basically means cleaning off old grease and bunging some more on, messy but strangely fulfilling.