Isla Norway

Been a while since the last update, it's been a rather hectic last couple of weeks. In the yacht club with met up with (no word of a lie) 4 Norweigan girls. Accompanied with them, plus various other accomplices at various stages, including our American freind Eli, who reappears now and then, and various other norweigans that seem to be slowly taking over the South American coastline, we did dancing in Lapa, Rio's nightlife center, a football match at Maracana, one of the worlds largest stadiums, and countless late nights and early mornings in and around Niteroi. They were all leaving for Isla Grande, so, not to be left behind, we sailed with a couple of them down to the beautiful island. Hence commence 4 days of sun, sea, and rather continuous partying. It turns out that the island is infact Norway-In-The-Sun; at one point we counted over 40 norweigans in our vacinity on the beach. Which is great because they all speak english and rival the brazillian females on the attractive level. There will be photographic evidence of this in the near future. And amongst all this we had one of our biggest sailing scares. On one trip out to a nearby beach on one of the tourist Scooner trips, we were caught in a terrific rain storm. There was little wind, so we weren't too concerned about the boat lying back at the anchorage. But on our return, huddled together on the deck of the schooner, we saw rebel floating a mile out of the bay. We got the crew to go out of their way to drop us off at Rebel. On lifting the anchor, we discovered the anchor had fouled on large metal piping. We safely motored back and reanchored. We were pretty shaken up. Suffice to say we now always drop two anchors. Many mysteries still surround the situation - although reports were that wind was stronger and the waves were choppier in our anchorage, our CQR anchor and scope has dealt with much stronger conditions without dragging. At some point, someone boarded rebel and payed out another 10-15 meters of chain, took a bottle of whisky as payment from the cockpit, and then left the boat to fend for itself. In a busy anchorage with other yachts, taxi-boats and schooners always going in and out, it's suprising that no one thought to tow it back, stay aboard, or otherwise help our drifting vessel. But we count ourselves very lucky, as, out of the 360 degrees the boat could have dragged, it chose perhaps the 60 degrees that didn't take it in to rocks. The norweigans now gone (40 of them departed en-masse yesterday morning), we are recovering from our two weeks of partyhard. We'll probably hang for a few more days on the island before continuing on to Paraty, 40 miles to the west, although we will certainly return here in the next two months.