Archive for December, 2011
Leaving Las Ve…Palmas
Yes, we are still here.
Yes, Slapdash is for sale.
We expected to be in Barbados before Christmas. After bashing the ARC people and their crazy deadline it figures that they would get the last laugh by enjoying the last good weather window for 6 weeks. We expected to leave right after the LPG wizard topped off our tanks, but by then storms in the northern Atlantic were pushing swell at us from the northwest. Four boats that left the day before our planned departure date returned to harbour with tales of the gnarly conditions. We decided to just let it pass and take the next window, but storm after storm just kept creating the same scenario; wind from the NE and big swell from the NW. Initially this really bugged us; we were getting up every morning and checking the weather hoping for a change. We didn’t want to be stuck in Las Palmas, and the day-to-day status kept us from having much fun. That all changed when we decided to just stop fretting about it and changed our mindset from ‘we’re leaving tomorrow’ to ‘we’ll leave when we have a good window’. It changed the daily disappointments to a weekly event, much better, and since then we’ve really enjoyed our unplanned time here. Jaime has been making use of the free bikes every day. They have a system of city bikes and once you have registered you can walk up to any bike stand, SMS the bike number, and the lock magically pops open. When you are finished with your bike you just lock it back up in one of the city bike racks. They have one right here at the marina which we have put to good use; Sight- seeing, grocery shopping, little errands… perfect!
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We managed to clean up our pre-departure list. It’s the first time that we actually completed every item. Invariably there are several things that just get erased or carry over forever, so for the first time since we left the whiteboard is clean.
Then some Swedish neighbors pulled into the slip next to us in a cool little purple boat that they had rescued, rebuilt, and sailed here from Sweden. See if you can find out about it online. It’s the famous Tua Tua Suecia and has a cool history. One that they grudgingly tell to Swedish old men that knock on their hull at 7am to ask about. Repeatedly. Anyway we didn’t know it at the time but the Swedes would become good neighbours and great friends. They eventually had a total of eight guests all converge on Las Palmas from Sweden and always extended an invite to their numerous social events. Since our friends and family have been weak in the visiting department lately we were happy to hijack theirs.
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Jaime and I have a bilateral agreement regarding Christmas. She does stuff, I don’t. Our spare cabin ended up with tinsel, a little tree, stockings, and gifts. In return I get to complain about Christmas and how stupid I think it is. We did however get invited over to the rowdy Swedish main event and, although most of it is a blur, I do remember some excellent sausage (our friend’s dad used to be a butcher) and a lot of people being very merry with silly hats. The next day we had an international contingent on the Slapdash which included (but was not limited to) an out of the ordinary Scot, a charming Pom, Sicilian Horse Head stew, Swedish Glogg (accompanied by a couple of Swedes), phone calls from home, and herbal remedies. The party wrapped up sometime on Boxing Day and, although nobody was hurt, the cockpit needed a good hosing out the next day. A marina in a bottleneck kind of location like this one is an interesting place to spend Christmas. Travelers with pasts as interesting as the countries they are from are far from home and hearth which results in a big merry melting pot. Even I had fun!
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Our new friend Will rounded off the unconventional holiday season by coming out of retirement and agreeing to tattoo Jaime and I onboard Slapdash! This is the ‘out of the ordinary Scot’ I referred to above. Besides having some incredible stories massed over decades of adventure travel, he also happened to be a highly sought after and acclaimed tattoo artist. He started doing private sessions only a few years ago before getting out of the game completely. He had all of his gear on the boat though, so we suspected that although he claimed to have been retired, his heart may not be into it. We ratcheted up subtle hints into obvious overtures and before we knew it we had an impromptu studio set up on our boat! Will is old school and his classic machine sounds like a Gatling gun. You could hear it on the next pontoon, and we had more than a few people stopping by to check things out. Over the course of two days he finished off the work on my back before adding significantly to my right arm. Jaime spent most of a day tying two pieces on her back together. We are completely stoked on our new pieces and couldn’t believe our luck. Here’s this guy we really liked that also happens to make beautiful tattoos, who then comes out of retirement to design a couple of pieces for us and then did the work right on our boat. Will is a true artist and not some guy who bangs out Chinese Menu symbols for tourists at a beach parlour. Needless to say we are pretty stoked.
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You may have noticed that the Slapdash is officially for sale. We have taken a soft sell approach, only advertising on this website so far. Selling the boat at the end of our circumnavigation has always been a part of the plan but we wanted to get the word out to potential buyers early. Even so it did have a finality to it that made us hesitate, so we appreciate all of your the nice emails, condolences and encouragements. Sometimes we forget how many people are on this trip with us, so when your emails came pouring in we were really touched. Thanks for that. We have a bunch of ideas on what to do next and selling the boat doesn’t mean that we are going to disappear into ‘real life’ anytime soon so stay tuned.
Our IsatPhone Pro people introduced a data package recently. I connected the phone to our laptop, and with a little firmware upgrade am now data ready. Roger got us set up on a client that sends and receives emails for us. This is neat for a few reasons, one of which is that we should be able to send blog updates and photos during the crossing. We’ll be in touch with friends and family who used to have to wait and worry about us until we made landfall to know we were safe. We will also for the first time ever be able to receive weather information while offshore. If all else fails there’s still the newsfeed on our homepage which we will update frequently with position reports. Thanks to Roger for helping to set this up, and to IT guru Shannon who has kindly offered to make sure the posts are getting onto the site okay and troubleshoot the glitches. Also a big thanks to Jeff (you may remember him from the Jamaica and New Zealand logs) for putting down the pencil, joining us in the 21st century, and being our weather guy. We will now hold him accountable for any unsavory conditions met along the way.
We had two exciting pieces of news today:
- The neighbour Swedes we mentioned earlier (Pontus and Malee) will be crossing the Atlantic a couple of weeks behind us. Their original (unacceptable) plan was to stay here the season. We would have been sad to leave them behind, so are pumped that we will get to log some Carib time with them after all.
- Our long awaited and much overdue weather window has arrived! Slapdash has been passage ready for weeks so we’ll be able to react on short notice. We should be able to leave tomorrow, so the next time you hear from us it should be through our whiz-bang gadgetry from the high seas!
So that’s it. We have over 5000 kilometres to sail before we can sip on our first of many Caribbean Rum drinks in Barbados, so we’ll be at sea for a few weeks. Check here, on the homepage, for newsfeed, and the Slapdash facebook page for updates.
So long and thanks for all the fish!
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Fear and Loathing in Las Palmas
We had arranged to contact Roger on the same channel we had always used when we arrive somewhere; VHF 69. He wasn’t responding. Okay, so we were two weeks late but really! From the top of our cockpit we looked across the pier that separated our anchorage from the marina. It was massive. There were hundreds of boats in there so the chances of finding La Palapa were slim. Or so we thought. I focused on the trees, not the forest, and the first tree I noticed had a burgundy sail cover. We were thirty meters from a big sea wall and one of the several dozen piers in the marina (each with 20-30 boats on them) butted up to that seawall. Directly across from us, on the deck of that maroon sail cover-boat, on that very pier closest to us? Yep. Since La Palapa was sitting there only a couple hundred feet away from us we could actually see Roger walking around on deck. We immediately abandoned the VHF and used the loud hailer which involves going outside and yelling, “ROGER!”
We brought breakfast over and as suspected Aimee didn’t really exist. I deduced this using typical male sensibility, locking onto the obvious (she wasn’t there) then skipping a few steps to get on with loudly harassing Roger. What are friends for? If you answered harassing, you are correct. Get yourself a beer.
Jaime on the other hand quietly tapped into some crazy female superpower thing that all men suspect may exist but are scared to talk about. She immediately pointed out several changes and improvements on the boat completely invisible to me (and I suspect Roger as well) that were well beyond a single guys investigative skills. With a Sherlock Holmes flourish she confidently concluded (my dear Watson) that not only did Aimee exist, but that she really liked this girl. Of course, she was right. Aimee made an appearance later that day; she was every bit as cute, Canadian, and cool as Roger had claimed and Jaime had deduced.
La Palapa was in a fully hectic, high stress flurry that day. We had caught them preparing for an Atlantic departure date only three days away. It’s widely understood that the best passages from the Canary Islands to the Lesser Antilles sprawl lazily between mid November to May. With such a large window one might reasonably wonder why anyone would do this to themselves. So we posed the question to this man. The one in the dress.
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The ARC
It’s only fair to state that we harbour some anti-establishment type ideas so you can take the following biased opinions with a grain of salt.
ARC = Atlantic Rally for Cruisers. Or as we’ve commonly heard it called by non-participants; the Atlantic Rally for Cripples. I guess it just depends on which side of the fence you’re on but imagine putting something as big, as adventurous, and as thrilling as sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in a little boat. Then take all of that and put it in a giant corporately sponsored blender. Add fees, flags, bureaucracy, clipboards and schedules. Before you’re finished add an arbitrary deadline, a couple hundred other boats, and hit puree.
Two hundred and seventeen boats were in this marina preparing their boats to begin an Atlantic crossing from the same place, at the same time, and on the same day. We haven’t seen anything like it before. Maybe that’s why it left such an impression. For the privilege of sharing completely overwhelmed local services, limited space and labour, and eventually a very crowded horizon, participants were paying hundreds (thousands?) of dollars.
I made a dinghy trip from the anchorage to the marina to drop off a friend of ours at 11:00PM in the pouring rain the night before the official ARC departure and there were boats on the fuel dock, people up their masts, and sails unfurled. Even at this literal 11th hour the marina was still a beehive of activity which really left us wondering how participants can justify the added stress imposed by an arbitrary deadline.
At the skippers briefing ARC participants were provided with critical nuggets of sailing wisdom such as, and I quote:
- Chew your food slowly
- Wear sun block and lip slave (not a type-o, the handout actually said “slave”)
- Don’t forget to take prescribed medication
… and so on.
With such weighty subject matter to cover it’s no wonder a few trivial matters were glossed over, such as how 217 boats are meant to leave the same marina at the same time on the same day. We were at the start line (on an anonymous boat) to observe the folly first hand. We lost track of the close calls, bitter yet creative expletives, and near collisions. I’ll admit to a certain level of excitement, and it was neat to see all the sails headed for the same horizon, only because it wasn’t our boat in harm’s way but Rog…I mean, an anonymous boat.
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After seeing it all firsthand we still have no idea why anyone would pay to subject themselves to this chaos but I will admit that there is a positive slant that I have to mention here. The event gets a massive amount of people to cross the Atlantic in small boats every year that may not have otherwise. We think that’s pretty cool… Flag waving ceremonies, arbitrary deadlines, fees and uniforms? Not so much.
Other news
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In between marathon bouts of getting Palapa ready for the ARC, we managed to sneak in a few epic parties, most notably a belated wedding reception. Secretive preparations had been underway all day and we eventually hosted the event on Slapdash. We were at anchor and when Roger and Aimee showed up in their dinghy they were greeted to The Wedding March blaring full blast over the cockpit speakers, and Jaime in full hot-hostess regalia handing out glasses of bubbly from a tray. There were wedding decorations, tacky presents, a bridal bouquet, and even a cake with little plastic bride and groom figurines. Congratulations Mr and Mrs Palapa.
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Also of note while in Las Palmas; I’ve been filling the Slapdash LPG bottles myself since August. Decanting highly explosive pressurized gas is not one of the things I ever expected to find myself doing, so this is not something I would recommend, endorse or do myself if there were any other option. The only good thing about filling your own LPG bottles is that it’s probably illegal.
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This butt puckering exercise involves a few homemade connections, a free flowing regulator, suspending the full bottle upside down in your cockpit, an ice bath for the empty bottle, and hoping for the best. Leave the full bottle in the sun to heat it up thereby increasing its internal pressure. Chill the empty bottle in an ice bath to decrease its internal pressure. I’ve also found the ice bath to work exceptionally well to chill a six pack, which in turn will steady your nerves. Secure your connections and open both valves. There are a few things to take into account: butane is stored at a lower pressure than propane so if you have any propane left in your bottle and are trying to top it off with butane, it won’t work very well. Butane in an LPG bottle is okay (since the LPG bottles are built to withstand higher pressure) so by that logic filling a butane bottle with LPG might be a bad idea. As your bottle is being filled, the pressure will increase. Our bottles have a vent screw and releasing some of the pressure using this screw sped up the process. Other than that, just light up a cigarette and barbecue some steaks while you wait. Okay skip the last part but if you need to be told that you are probably an ARC participant hard at work chewing your food slowly, and have already boycotted this website.
Our friend’s boat had been in Las Palmas back in June on their way up from Africa this year and he had told us about a “wizened” old man who lives in a blue van that makes his money from bootlegging LPG. He drew us a map of where we could find the guy on a napkin. We stuffed it in our log book and were pretty excited to try it out when we got here; it was like a treasure hunt. It didn’t take long before we found him, and everything (the van, the location, his description) was exactly as Kerry had outlined on the napkin for us. Everything except that “wizened” looked like wizard so we were a little disappointed to find out that he didn’t have a wand or pointy hat. At least he had a white beard, he was old too, and did in fact live in a van. Anyone fitting that description making their living outside of the law gets our business every time.
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Since Palapa took their leave we have moved into the marina and various groups of friends have been cycling through. There hasn’t been a shortage of company and we’ve never had to go far to find a party. We reunited with Heartsong, and were thrilled to find out that they had been in contact with our friend Kerry (from Ibiza post) and would be taking him along as crew to the Caribbean. This was great news because the last we heard from Kerry he was considering hanging up his sea hat (hat?) and getting a j-o-b. Close call.
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We snagged a great spot in the marina and are the closest to the pier. Unfortunately this also means being doormen for every single person that forgets their keys or doesn’t have them to begin with. Usually not a big deal, but exceptionally annoying when you are working on the boat and have 15 interruptions. More often than not the people without keys don’t have boats either and are looking to crew their way across the Atlantic. This is an unusual phenomenon. We’ve been approached by random people asking to crew on our boat a total of two times in our entire trip before Las Palmas. Since we’ve arrived here we get asked 5 or 6 times a day. I don’t know why everyone comes here to do that, but if you are looking for crew on your Atlantic crossing, Las Palmas is definitely a buyer’s market. All the cute chicks were the first to go of course. After that the clean cut guys with a little sailing experience started to disappear. Now we’re down to the hippies. There is a huge hippy contingent passing through here; The full-on dread-locked, Aladdin-pant wearing, beach bongo, patchouli-oiled, cave dwelling variety. I’ve never really understood the whole scene and still think its 95% bullshit. Sorry hippy. But it turns out that any hippy folk we’ve gotten to know on a personal level have been pretty cool and we even semi-adopted one that did an especially great job of passing me beer and making us laugh while getting Slapdash ready for her next passage. So to all the hippies stranded Las Palmas: So long you crazy bunch of freaks. Thanks for the laughs. It’s been fun getting to know you and we wish you all the best. Get a haircut.
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Hairy Canary
The Passage:
We chatted with some local sailors to get the skinny on how to best negotiate our egress through the straight, for westbound traffic like us the weather and tides count for a lot. Get it wrong and you will have a very bad day on the water, there’s a lot going on in this little gap. We did as instructed; waited for some easterlies and then left a couple hours before the tide in an attempt to get most of nature’s forces on our side. This meant a 5:00AM departure, so the night before we dutifully set the alarm, went to bed early, and tried to sleep while the wind tried to keep us up with haunted sounding moans and howls.
It was cold, dark and windy so the next morning we both bundled up in everything we owned. Leaving harbour in the dark of night and threading our way through sleeping giants anchored in the harbour created an exhilarating expeditionary feel. Even at this ungodly hour there was enough traffic to keep us both up and in the cockpit on collision avoidance duty. With ships everywhere lit up like Christmas trees it was sometimes tough to tell if they were anchored or slowly underway.
We left the harbour, tacked into the Straight and immediately felt the currents strange effects on the surface sea state. With a few hours of following wind and seas pushing us along at 6 or 7 knots we made great progress before something began to change. The wind was the same, our wake sounded the same, and the water rushing past our hulls looked the same; but it somehow felt like we were trying to sail up a big river. Before long we had the engine running and both sails up with 25 knots of following wind just to make 3 knots of headway. After two or three hours of this we were out of the bottle neck and into the eastern mouth of the Straight. The strange conditions lost their pull on us. The sun was up over the horizon but was struggling to push any light through the overcast sky resulting in a cold grey ominous looking morning, and it was time to cut across the shipping lanes. We watched the lights, timed the gap and cut a hard left. We were broad reaching on a port tack now and the Med shot us into the Atlantic like a cork out of a bottle. Slapdash flew south on our rhumb line at a comfortable 8 knots. By the time the sun burnt through the scud we were through the Straight, across the shipping lanes and settling into our sail so Jaime went off to bed to rest up for her shift. I sat outside burning my bottom lip on a steaming hot mug of coffee. After six months of finicky sailing in the Med this steady wind and long rolling Atlantic swell felt incredible.
The next few days passed without incident. We had steady light to moderate wind which behaved itself by staying aft of the beam where both wind and wave belong. It was our first big ocean passage since we sailed from Sri Lanka to the Maldives in April and we wondered how it would feel. Fortunately we fell into the routine of our passage cycle without difficulty, slept well and had a good time.
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The only real excitement happened on the morning of day four shortly after Jaime woke me up for my 6:00AM shift and went to bed. She had been hugging the limit of a port tack for the past three hours. Instead of needlessly waking me up or attempting a night time jibe on her own wisely held the course and waited for daylight. I went outside and received her no-look-pass right away. A jibe would get us onto a nice heading but instead of waiting a few minutes to fully wake up just went ahead and sheeted in the main, changed course, brought the boom over and began trimming the sail; just like I’ve done a million times before.
The mistake I made was lazily reaching aft from the cockpit with my hand between a dodger support bar and the traveller. When I pulled the pin to adjust the traveller the boom swung over and pinned my hand between the block and the dodger bar.
The safe way to do this would have been to simply reach around the dodger bar keeping hand and arm out of the way in case something like this happens. That’s the benefit of retrospect but at the time I was mainly concerned with un-skewering my hand. I pulled on the main sheet with my free left arm to take some pressure off the boom and managed to yank my hand out. The bad news was that I could see the bone just below my wrist, the good news was it was intact. Jaime heard the commotion, came out to see what was wrong then nearly fainted when I showed her the bone in my hand to prove that it wasn’t broken. We did our best with what we had to patch it up, and that was it. Happy ending, cheap lesson
Lanzarote:
We arrived in Arrecife on October 13th. We pulled into a nice little harbour that Roger from La Palapa had told us about. It looked good but there were no free moorings and our anchor wouldn’t set on the rocky bottom. We reluctantly motored a mile north into Puerto de Naos.
Naos is a lot of things; totally protected, crowded with ancient looking liveabords, and totally disgusting. We snuggled in between, behind, and in front of a bunch of boats, dropped the anchor and wondered if we would ever see it again. It was that kind of place. We didn’t even bother launching the dinghy and stayed on the boat instead. We cleaned things up from the passage and enjoyed a nice long sleep so the surroundings didn’t bother us but in the morning we left right after coffee. Fortunately the anchor came up without any trouble and we decided to head south and check the mooring field one more time on the way by. We got lucky; another boat was leaving just as we arrived so one of the prized moorings was free for about five minutes before we scooped it up and settled in. We were moored behind a huge promenade that protected our cove from the swell. The water was clean and clear. It was a nice setup so we decided to take our time there and explore.
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Arrecife is an unpretentious city (why does using the word unpretentious feel so pretentious?). They have an active small boat sailing community. Flocks of dinghy sailors and lasers were zipping through the mooring field all the time, and there was a little club on the quay for guys who don’t want to get their feet wet and prefer to control colorful little model sailboats by remote control.
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‘El Charco de San Gines’ is a salt-water lagoon in the city centre surrounded by cafe’s and fishermen’s houses. We weren’t far from the Castles of San Jose (now a Museum of Modern Art) and San Gabriel (the Archaeological Museum). A 20 minute walk took us to Columbian and Dominican neighborhoods, and the little local bars there served the best fried chicken and patacones we’ve ever had, and the massive Dominican ladies always gave me an extra piece.
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The Grand Hotel dominates the skyline in Arrecife. It’s one of many weird developments here that seem way too bloated for the little island to support. There were a lot of fancy buildings, whole neighbourhoods in fact that were seemingly thrown up with a ‘build it and they will come’ approach. The Grand is a massive 5 star hotel complex without enough occupancy to cover operational costs. It worked out well for us though; the Pool Bar was stunning and we usually had it to ourselves. The glass walled elevator whisked us up to the rooftop bar where stunning 360 degree views provided a nice backdrop while we plucked away using the free wifi and sipped inexplicably cheap beers (same prices as the dodgy fried chicken bars).
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We spent a couple of weeks slumming it in the dodgy districts, and hobnobbing it in five star luxuries like our personal pool and rooftop terrace.
At some point a low pressure system moved through. Those in the know went around the corner and hid out in the dirty but sheltered Naos. We were among the 4 boats that were not in the know. By 9:00AM things were getting a little sporty with full swells roaring through the mooring field. I had dove the mooring when we first arrived and was impressed with the hardware; a massive chunk of concrete with commercial sized rigging. The day before the storm I dove it again and attached a second line from our anchor cleat straight down to the concrete block as a backup. Conditions were forecast to improve so we decided to just ride it out.
We couldn’t leave the boat unattended but there was no point in both of us suffering so Jaime took the dinghy and spent the day on shore. I hunkered down on the Slapdash prepared to spend an uncomfortable day being paranoid about breaking our mooring and smashing to bits on the sea wall.
Then a boat beside us broke free. Fortunately the owners were on board and quick enough to get the engine running and bash their way out to sea before breaking up on the rocks. I exchanged waves with my neighbours who, also out on their decks, were watching this before heading back into the cabin. Somehow despite the noise, pitching and rolling I managed to sneak in a nap. I woke up to an Arabic sounding battle cry, ‘loo-lo-loo-lo-loo-lo! , so went outside to see what was going on.
A 30 foot monohull on the mooring in front of us had broken loose and was heading straight for us. I imagined it hitting Slapdash, and both of us tangled up, being pulverized on the rocks behind us.
With no dinghy I could only stand lamely on deck with a puny fender waiting for the inevitable crash. That’s exactly what I was doing when off in the distance I saw the bearded French guy racing towards us. He bashed through the waves and without even a glance back at me slammed his little dinghy straight into the bow of the rouge boat. He bounced back and nearly flipped over, but the impact pushed the boat off its collision course and I watched it spin past only ten feet off our port side. By this time some friends off another boat had arrived on the scene in their dinghy. I tossed them a line to tie the boat off to our stern. The boat was moving fast though and by the time they retrieved the line we were 6 feet short. The boat was closing fast on the gnarly looking lee shore. I managed to point out the free mooring behind us with some tactical shouting and arm flapping. The two dinghies raced off ahead of the boat and waited at the mooring like they were fielding a pop-fly. Somehow they managed to tie it off on the way thereby saving the little boat from being granulated against the rocks. We later learned that the Arabic sounding battle cry (loo-lo-loo-lo-loo-lo!) originated from the powerful lungs of a former opera singer on a neighboring boat. Her warning had carried over the storm and pounding surf after all other hoots and whistles had failed. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of the dramatic rescue, but here’s an unfortunate shot of that same mooring a couple days before the storm.
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Conditions eventually settled down and the next day I had an opportunity to re-balance our boat karma by rescuing somebody’s dinghy. Jaime caught a glimpse of it as it flew past our window and I was the first on the scene. I chased it down, tied it off and bashed back up into the wind reuniting it with its rightful German owner. The guy confessed that he had seen the dinghy too, and considered rescuing it but when he got up on deck discovered that he didn’t have a dinghy anymore. A second glance confirmed it, the dinghy he was considering rescuing was his own.
When the weather finally settled down a couple of days later I decided to celebrate with a nice boat bath. I geared down, soaped up and dove in. The instant I was below the surface Satan tasered me. I surfaced fighting the urge to scream, splashed back to the boat and called Jaime. My arm felt like someone had flayed the skin off it from armpit to elbow and then rubbed habanero peppers, salt and nail polish remover into the wound. Suspecting that the soapy-naked-man-bawling look may not be that attractive I tried to rinse off and hold back any blubbering until I was inside.
Maybe it was because she just felt bad for making me dress my own bloody wrist wound on the trip down but Jaime was an excellent nurse. She poured me a drink, retrieved our industrial strength black market pain killers from Sri Lanka and calmly looked up ‘jelly fish stings’ in our trusty Captain’s Medical Guide (which covers everything from childbirth to decapitation).
In the meantime I watched ropy looking welts rise up and blister on my arm. It looked like I had been branded. I’ve been stung by jellyfish plenty of times but this was something extraordinary. The pain lasted for hours. In a week the sting scabbed over and then eventually became impossibly itchy. Considering that I was naked at the time I do of course realize how lucky I was and that it could have been much, MUCH worse. Most of it eventually cleared up but now (two months later) there are still these clearly visible marks where the tentacles burned the deepest.
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We left Arrecife on Oct 31st to finally meet up with Roger in Las Palmas. We hadn’t seen him since Greece and were excited to find out if his wife Aimee really existed or not. We suspected that she was out of his league and that he had made the whole thing up. Fifteen miles later as we were passing through a 6 mile gap with Lanzarote on our right and Fuerteventura on our left, the engine conked out.
We had a good sail going but there was 25 knots of wind and we were a little worried about our proximity to the now lee shore of Punta Gorda. The symptoms were the same as a clogged fuel filter, but since I had just completed a full servicing in Arrecife that didn’t really add up. For the next couple of hours we tacked back and forth while I tried a few of the more obvious remedies. Nothing worked and although we could restart the engine, it would only run for 5 minutes or so before dying again. We wanted to carry on but a quick look at the charts showed that Rubicon Marina was right beside us.
Yes this is a sailboat, but is it really prudent to pass up a safe harbour only 3 miles away in exchange for an overnight 100 mile open ocean passage? We decided to make the safe call and tacked our way up into the harbour. We called the marina on the VHF to let them know we were coming in with limited maneuverability. Despite their guarantees of course nobody was around to provide assistance when we arrived. Fortunately we managed to come along side without any trouble and after getting squared away at the office our engine ran just long enough to get into a slip. We sent Roger an email that night with the news that we would not be there in the morning. He was not surprised.
We took the afternoon off and explored the new harbour, bumped into some friends and eventually found 4 or 5 boats that we knew were here. The marina was very protected, had a pool and a couple of grocery stores. With the several bars and buddy boats in the neighborhood we couldn’t have really picked a better spot to break down.
The next day I got on with things. After spending a few hours checking all the easy stuff again I decided to quit kidding myself and turned our nice tidy cockpit into a jobsite. We emptied the lockers, pulled off the engine panels and spread out the big job mat. When the engine ran it ran perfectly. Then it would choke out and die, clearly a fuel problem but what?
WARNING: The following paragraphs contain geeky boat talk and may not be suitable for some viewers:
The next ten days went something like this; it wasn’t the fuel so it must be the filters. It wasn’t the filters so it must be the fuel lines. It wasn’t a clogged fuel line so it must be an air leak. It wasn’t an air leak so it must be the injectors (which involved ironically; a trip back to Arrecife to have the injectors serviced). It wasn’t the injectors so it must be the return line. The return line was fine, maybe a clogged vent on the fuel tank was creating a vacuum. Nope. I explored each theory but every test yielded the same result. Governor? Fuel pump? Guess again.
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The mystery managed to stump seven or eight different sailors whose combined experience totaled over 100 years. I was scouring manuals and books, even Skype conferencing Roger from time to time for remote support. The one thing everyone seemed to agree on was fuel delivery, but what? I started over to see if I had missed something. I spent each day with my head in the engine and each night commiserating with my support group.
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During one call to Roger he began questioning me on lift pump operation. I described the starting sequence and something didn’t make sense to him. The sentence that finally began to unravel the whole mystery went like this;
“You have confirmed that the lift pump is operating because you can hear it priming the system when you press the pre-heat button, but where does the lift pump get its power from once you let go of the pre-heat switch?”
Great question, I had no idea.
Back at the boat a multi meter revealed that the lift pump was receiving a full 12 volts when the pre-heat button was engaged, but once the engine was running (and the pre-heat button was no longer being pushed) the pump was receiving low and somewhat erratic voltage. When I jumped the lift pump with a lead straight from the battery the engine ran perfectly on the first try. Finally! The smoking gun that had been eluded us all this time. We had a wiring, terminal or ground problem and nothing more. Fortunately there was a spare lead at the dashboard which I was able to use to supply the correct voltage to the correct places. This was sorted out within a day and Slapdash was back in business.
Despite being incredibly frustrating at times there were several positive aspects to our unplanned sojourn. As previously mentioned there were a lot of friends kicking around, we had been bouncing around with a couple of the boats (Pegasus and Imagine) since Indonesia and finally had the chance to get to know them. We met new friends and created more memories with long time favorites Stu and Sandy off Heartsong but didn’t discriminate between new friends or old when it came to making a nuisance of ourselves by borrowing tools. I had the opportunity to show off my search and recovery skills by diving for (and finding) a lost purse. It was a fun diversion and the rewards (plenty of beer, a nice red cooler pack that I had my eye on and best of all ‘hero status’ on S/V Evergreen,) exceeded my input. Just don’t tell them that.
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Although I’ve monopolized the log with boring engine talk, Jaime was hard at work the whole time. The sympathy pains she was feeling for my greasy hands and skinned knuckles resulted in gleaming stainless, oiled teak, washed and waxed hulls and several dinner parties which we both attended and hosted. At one Jaime presented me with this aptly named bottle of “Chit On” wine. If you can’t see it in this shot the rest of the label says, “Seth has been… Chit On by a Westerbek but Beeker loves him even if he can’t show it”.
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The boat was magically provisioned and meals magically appeared when I forgot to eat. Jaime stoically faced greasy hand prints, gratuitous ass crack, my foul temperament, and the daily destruction of our cockpit while I developed a fetish for bikinis and curlers. Looking back at it now, I realize that I had the easy job. It was effort squared and then some, an incredible bit of teamwork.
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It goes without saying that we were relieved to hear Beaker (our engines name) purr like a kitten on November 17th when we left for Las Palmas. Instead of hating the sound of the engine running while we sail like we usually do, this first extended sea trial sounded like Beethoven’s 3rd symphony to us. After a half day we were satisfied that all was well and shut him down and fully enjoyed the following wind and sea scenario we had.
Wind fluctuated between 12 and 18 knots and the swell stayed behind us the whole way. The only problem we had was trying to rein Slappy in so that we wouldn’t arrive in the dark. By the time Jaime woke me up for my 6:00AM shift land was clearly visible and we were closing fast. I let her sleep as long as possible until we were well within the harbour and needed to take our sails down. We found a great spot, dropped the hook in twenty feet and rewarded ourselves with a shot of Baileys in our coffee.
Med’s dead baby, Med’s dead
Thanks Pulp Fiction, for the catchy tag line.
It took just over 3 days to cover the 380 miles that separated Ibiza and Gibraltar. It was a great sail and the weather held nicely. In addition to crossing into the Western hemisphere we also had our best one day mileage in the Med, 131 nautical miles in 24 hours. It may not sound like much, and it really isn’t, but by Med sailing standards it’s fantastic.
A big handsome moon lit the way for us at night, and we were treated to gorgeous sunsets every night including the one in this lucky shot. I zoomed in on a black speck later and discovered that it was actually a little dolphin. Unknown to me at the time it had breached at the exact moment that I snapped the shot, one in a million.
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We arrived at the eastern end of the 36-mile strait, our hallway to the Atlantic proper. This is where the Rock of Gibraltar and the Jebel Musa form the mythical Pillars of Hercules. This narrow stretch of water (just 8 miles wide at the skinny bit) is all that separates Europe and Africa, and connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
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Sailing past the 430 meter rock of Gibraltar was a thrill. It’s one of a handful of earth’s features that are so instantly recognizable.
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A pod of pilot whales led us in. After all this was a big milestone, regular old dolphins just wouldn’t do. We actually thought they were dolphins at first, and once we realized that they were whales couldn’t believe how many there were and how close they were. Take a look and at this picture and you will see what we mean.
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The dolphins were a little late for the party, but eventually arrived on the scene and rounded off our welcoming party. Maybe they didn’t like being out-staged by the whales because they showed up in incredible numbers and stayed with us for at least an hour.
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We stayed at Marina Bay for 15 pounds sterling per night (which at today’s exchange rate is roughly 375 dollars Canadian). It was a super friendly marina, and everyone was really helpful. We were a bit bummed when the guy told us we would have to clear in, but it turned out to be a non event as the marina staff handled that right there at the office without us even knowing about it. We left without saying anything thinking that they had forgotten and maybe we had gotten away with something, but the cheeky monkey must have snuck a stamp in our passports without us even noticing… if only every country worked like that.
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Since we’re on that topic, I can’t say that either of us really figured Gibraltar out. We thought it was a part of the EU but apparently not. They use Pound Sterling, are surrounded by Spain, and the whole place seems to be some kind of cruise ship duty free zone. The history is hectic like all good history should be. Gibraltar has been a British colony for over 300 years, but Spain had it for 242 years before that and thinks they should get it back. Their most recent attempt was by Franco who closed the border between 1969 and 1983. This is nothing new; the rock has been a contested piece of real estate throughout recorded history with no less than 14 recorded sieges. The Dutch, Moors, Phoenicians and Genoese have all squabbled over,and at times, controlled it. They even found some Neanderthal bones in a cave here, which probably means that they stole it from some Cro-Magnons.
It’s hard not to get the feeling that the Gibraltarians there today are a bit tired of it all and just want to be left alone. “Thanks for the fuss everyone, but we think you’re all a bit mad so how about you just jog on and leave us be.” Something like Quebec I guess, but with apes.
The apes are Barbary macaques, apparently the only ones in Europe not in a zoo. They were great, really great. We caught it at the right time of day and had the run of the place. The view up at the top was spectacular, and we got to hang out with our primate pals without anyone else around. A bunch of the little ones were messing around constantly while their bored-looking parents kept an eye on things. Before long I was a part of the game, not really a participant in any way but more like furniture or a human jungle gym. They were running up my leg, hanging from my arms, sitting on my head and before long the sneaky little one was sneakily trying to steal my sunglasses.
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The geeky Ape warden guys (and one girl) rode down with us in the gondola. It was the last one and their shifts were over. They turned out to be nearly as entertaining and, not surprisingly, far more annoying than the apes. They spent the whole time trying to make the Apes out to be these crazy vicious beasts and themselves out to be some kind of Top Gun lion tamers or something. We sort of felt bad for them with their funny outfits and all, so tried to look impressed by all of their ape war stories. I’m pretty sure that this was the group who decided that this sign was the perfect way to portray the animals.
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Legend has it that if the apes leave Gibraltar, it will cease to be British. The legend was taken very seriously by the Poms. So much so that the British Army used to be responsible for their care and feeding. I’m convinced that this bit of history must at least in part explain some of the Ape geeks’ Top Gun attitudes.
We must have shown the appropriate level of awe at their tales because they finally let up. It was the perfect moment to show them our pictures of the apes crawling all over us. One geeky ape warden had a coronary, another had a conniption, and the only one there who didn’t take himself too seriously found it hilarious.
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Gibraltar comes on strong and fades fast. After you check out the view from the rock, visit the apes and their geeky keepers, see St Michaels cave and the Moorish baths, then wander around the old fortified city for a beer at Lord Nelsons, you are pretty much finished. John Lennon and Yoko Ono only stayed an hour, and they got married here. It was an interesting stop though, and I would recommend giving it more than an hour. Two or three days should do it though. We enjoyed ourselves but after a couple of days began watching the weather.
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We were up at 4 AM on October the 8th. Timing is everything when you are trying to sail west through the strait. We were underway with strong easterlies pushing us hard before 5 AM, both very excited to finally get ourselves into the Atlantic for some proper ocean sailing.
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Mallorca & Ibiza if you pleeza
It was 65 miles down to the next island in the group, so on September 1st we got up really early and set off. Late that afternoon we were sailing along the coast of Mallorca looking for a suitable spot to land. Unfortunately there was a strange swell that made all of the anchorages within a reasonable distance a bit sporty. We know because we checked them all. After sailing up and down the coast for a couple of hours, we ended up back at the spot we had originally landed at just before sunset. This time we were a little hungrier, a little hotter, and a little bitchier. A drink and a swim restored the mood though, and soon we were settled in, rolling away next to a beautiful beach.
It was a pity that we had the wrong weather for this coast, it was stunning, but by the next morning we had had enough of the swell and carried on to the most sheltered bay we could find on the chart, which turned out to be Porto Colom, a 25 mile sail down the east coast.
Porto Colom was as sheltered as it looked on our chart, which in our state of mind more than made up for the crowded anchorage and dirty water. The town itself was very charming though with sidewalk cafes running along the water front to explore, and traditional old fisherman’s houses with built in boat garages crowding the shore at the end of the bay.
At some point we had expected a potential surprise visit from someone we hadn’t seen since our Kauhale Kai days back in the Pacific. We didn’t realize that it would be here, and we didn’t realize that it would be today. Seonagh the master partier and legendary chef (or is that the other way around?) and Justin surprised Jaime at the dock when she was getting into the dinghy. Then they all came back to the boat and surprised me. Somewhere along the way day turned into night, there must have been a visit to shore because I remember discovering that ordering drinks in Porto Colom meant bottle service. The server delivers glasses, a bucket of ice and your requested mixer along with a bottle of spirit so that you can finish the pour yourself. I’m not sure how they stay in business but it definitely cut down on the workload of the service staff, which was good because Seonagh had her busy going back and forth all night treating the table to a never ending plate of local delicacies, the only one I can remember was the Xoriguer Mahon Gin dangerously served over ice with fresh lemon juice. Did I mention that they leave the bottle on the table?
Much to the delight of the other boats in the anchorage we made it back to the Slapdash at some point, I know this because I woke up there. Judging by the state of the boat the next day, and the dirty looks from our neighbours our party had been centered around the cockpit. Fortunately when you live in a boat you get to change neighbours, and neighbourhoods whenever you want. This limited our sheepish skulking about to just one day, since Seonagh had to get back to the big boat she was working on in Palma. We dropped them off after coffees on the opposite end of the strip we had terrorized the night before and headed back to Slapdash in need of a nap, but celebrating the random nature of our lifestyle. You truly never know how a day will end.
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We carried on down the coast line and stopped in some of the most stunning little pocket coves (cala’s) that we have seen in the whole world. In one of them we had the anchor down for a few minutes before someone with a familiar accent was treading water beside us. He introduced himself as Wayne from Saltspring island. He was staying with family and friends in one of the villas overlooking the anchorage when he noticed the Canadian flag and swam over. Canada is a very big country, and Saltspring island is a very tiny little island but it’s surprisingly close to the island I grew up on. If this wasn’t coincidence enough, later on when I was up at their villa I met his wife who grew up in Errington. Errington? Even people from Vancouver Island have never heard of it, but I grew up there on Grafton road just a few hundred meters away from her. Same school, same swimming holes, same everything. It’s hard to describe how ridiculous of a coincidence this is. There might be a few hundred people living in Errington, and its biggest claim to fame may be that it’s next to another tiny town called Coombs and their ‘world famous’ country market with goats on the roof.
In Cala d’or we also had some neighbours in a beautiful new Fountaine Pajot named Katmazu who invited us over for crepes. This was meant to be a lunch stop but the social calendar was filling up, the weather was stunning and the water was clean, clear and warm. We ended up spending four great days swimming, beaching and visiting new friends.
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The island had a magnetic pull over us and we wanted to stay longer but we had to keep moving. Our two weeks in Mallorca were nothing but stunning calas filled with decadence and coincidence but turned out to be nothing more than a warm up for our next Balearic islands; Ibiza and Formentara.
On September 11th we pointed Slapdash at Punta Castavi on Formentara island (well, Espalmador actually), it was 96 miles away so we made the trip overnight. This is meant to be a really nice stop, but we had a terrible experience. The anchorage was huge but so crowded that we had difficulty finding a spot. The water was murky and full of jellyfish. The beach was long but narrow, the few feet of sand between the water and the high tide line was full of naked Germans. We had three choices; sit around on the rocking and rolling boat, lay around on the disappointing beach with the kind of naked people that really shouldn’t be, or go find the legendary mud baths. It was a no brainer. We hiked through the low beach scrub for a few hundred meters following the path created by our mud seeking predecessors. This isn’t surprising considering that the mud had been highlighted anecdotally by every visitor we met, on every guide, brochure, and website. I realize now that this isn’t because they were anything special, but because there is very little else worth talking about on the island.
What did surprise us was that once we found them they were surrounded by signs telling you in three languages that it is not permitted to enter the mud baths. I should note that using the word ‘baths’ is a misnomer, it’s more of a marshy looking duck pond surrounded by mud flats that smell like decaying vegetation (or farts if you aren’t trying to be polite).
We wondered if we had the right place. It must have been, the trail was splattered with mud and at the beach end of the trail were a bunch of naked mud covered Germans. This was the end of the trail and there was nowhere else to go, but instead of finding whatever it was we had expected to find there were just these roped off fart smelling (I’m not trying to be polite) marshy flats with a bunch of signs telling you not to go in, which hardly seemed necessary given the smell.
We did what anyone faced with this disgusting scenario would have done; we turned around and left… right after we geared down, jumping into a pool of squishy foul muck and snapping a bunch of stupid pictures of course.
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Finishing the ritual means sitting in the sun and baking your slimy new sludge suit into a hard crust and then scrubbing it off in the ocean. I’m happy to report that despite our original reservations our silky new epidermal layers were quite radiant and smooth. Too bad we smelled like duck farts.
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I’m sure that you will be surprised to find out that even after this glowing review we high tailed it out of there early the next morning and took on a grueling 15 mile sail northwest to Ibiza. We arrived in time for lunch and stayed on somebody’s mooring in the nicely protected Cala Vedella. Getting a free mooring turned out to be far easier and happened more frequently than we ever expected in the Med, and this was just another example. We took advantage of the sheltered cala to fix a nagging problem. We ‘broke’ our halyard on the way from Sardinia to Mahon almost a month previously. I disconnected the topping lift and used it to run the ‘broken’ halyard up through the top of the mast and back down to the mainsail. We had been using this improvised setup ever since which worked fine when the main was up, but when the sail was down we had to put a fender under the boom since there was no topping lift to keep it off the dodger. Not a big deal, but a scenario lacking a certain amount of class expected of elite sailors likes us. I’m also not going to explain the terminology here because if you don’t understand any of it you probably don’t care about this bit of the story anyway, not that I blame you so I’ll get on to the point:
Jaime needed to go up the mast to fix this. Jaime is not fond of heights and somewhat unreasonably doesn’t like to spend much time dangling from a rope at the highest point of our boat. You might wonder why I don’t do it then, which would be a fair thing to wonder since I had been lying about the ‘broken’ halyard thing all along (more on that later). If only we lived in a fair world, or at least on a boat with a power winch. In our world I weigh a substantial amount, and we have no power winch. Cranking a normal person or even a tiny person up our mast is a substantial amount of physical work. Jaime cranking my 230 pound carcass up the mast is nearly impossible (nearly because on September 17th 2009 we did actually manage to accomplish this once on Santa Hana for an emergency repair and both swore never to do it again). Long story short, smallest crew goes up the mast on Slapdash.
You may be wondering about the broken halyard lie. Well, the halyard did in fact detach itself from the sail, but when I pulled it out of the mast and inspected it lacked the fray that one would expect to find on a broken line. You would also expect to find a knot with a broken piece of line dangling off on the main sail but there wasn’t one. This could only mean that the knot somehow untied itself; a scenario with approximately the same unfathomable odds as being struck by lightning, meeting someone from Errington in Cala d’or, and having your pecker nipped by an unknown beast while dragging along behind a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Since all of these things have in fact happened, then a reasonable person should accept that it is possible for a knot to untie itself as well. Right?
I guess one could be forgiven for immediately suspecting the level of attention the person tying the knot gave to his (or her, but in this case his) task. I didn’t want to distract Jaime with these trivial details just before her death defying terrifying trip up the mast so found it prudent to go with the simplified non-functioning/broken version.
So Jaime found herself at the top of the mast yet again. My 10 minute estimate turned into 45 as the project revealed itself to be far more complicated than expected but in the end she got some great photos and saved the day. Thanks to her we left Cala Vedella with a functioning halyard and topping lift. Now I owe her big time. I’m thinking our next boat will have at least one power winch.
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This excitement all preceded yet another epic sail; the next day we fought our way through 8 demanding miles of warm weather and fair winds to San Antoni, home of the original and now legendary Cafe Del Mar. We would also find out that although unmentioned in the guidebooks that this was the temporary residence of the original and now legendary Kerry Boe. Kerry was a guy we met back in Bali who was crewing on a boat called Son of the Sun with his (and now our) friend Franz. We hadn’t seen him since they sailed off towards the sunset (and the Cape of Good Hope) a couple of years ago. It took us half of a moment to recognize the shaggy looking Scot waving to us from the bow of a 32 foot Bavaria as Kerry, but once we did we realized the other half of that moment later that this planned 2 day provisioning stop would likely lead to much more. We were right.
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We caught up with Kerry that night on his boat over a Sicily level of good lasagne that he had whipped up and plenty of Kerry’s house favourite vinto tinto. We heard about the rest of their trip, which included African adventures and a particularly gnarly bash sailing north from Cape Verde, through the Canaries and back to Germany. So in the time since we had seen Kerry last he had earned a prestigious new label; successful circumnavigator. We were also happy to see that he had retained his previous label that he had picked up during our biker gang days in Indonesia (Rambut) by successfully avoiding any sneaky haircuts. At first we thought the girls were calling him ‘Rambo’, a myth Kerry tried to perpetuate before the ah-ha moment when we all learned that rambut was the Indonesian word for hair.
By the end of the night Kerry had us convinced that our tasks were trivial and our itinerary was arbitrary, maybe we were a willing audience but I prefer to blame Kerry. We were here on this beautiful island with a local cala savvy Spanish speaking guide at the perfect time; the tail end of high season. It meant gorgeous weather and a thinning crowd of moronic charter boats. If you think that sounds harsh, spend a few weeks here observing the habits of these strange mammals and then we’ll talk; amusing anecdote coming soon.
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It came as no surprise to anyone that our two days stretched into two weeks. It was a blur of anchorage hopping between secluded calas, impossibly beautiful sunsets, beach barbeques on totally deserted beaches and picking giant fat delicious black ripened figs right off the trees. I had never seen a fig tree before and now we were literally gorging on their fruit. We were anchored in a secret Cala on the top of Ibiza when we found the first trees. Kerry and I had explored an ancient trail that led up the side of a big cliff while Jaime, the little white dot hundreds of feet below, paddled around exploring the bay in her recently replaced kayak. The trail led us to a centuries old ruined village. It was being reclaimed by the forest but stone walls, archways, trails cut through the stone and even a bread oven were all clearly visible. It was such a surprise since not long before the discovery we had lost the trail and almost turned around before deciding to go just a little further. If this wasn’t interesting enough a little ways past the village we found the fig trees. Kerry turned into a fig fiend and before long I was converted. We stuffed our mouths, bellies and pockets (for Jaime) and then made our way back down the cliff to the anchorage. We returned to an abandoned fisherman’s shack on the shore in time to build a little fire in a carved out pothole in the stone that had undoubtedly served this same purpose a thousand times before. We grilled our dinner over the hot coals, sipped our rum and sat dumb struck as the cliffs surrounding us were turned a million different shades of color by the setting sun, sublime. We were undoubtedly the luckiest three people in the world that day.
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The owner of the boat Kerry was taking care of, his friend David, flew in from Barcelona and we all cruised around at least a half dozen more calas like this. None were anything like the others and each had their special offering; a beautiful beach, perfect water, stunning sunsets, total seclusion, a nice beach bar etc. There was always something and only a few miles to the next one. This worked particularly well because if the weather changed we would just pop around the corner to find a change of scenery and a nice calm anchorage. Great company, isolation and free moorings; was this really the Med?
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Just north of Playa De Comte off the west side of the main island of Ibiza lies Isla Conejera and Isla del Bosque. To find deep water on your way into San Antonio you need to pass around the outside of both of them. If you are careful or follow a local you can pass between them in the right spot and keep 12 feet under you hull. If its calm, the water is clear, the sun is high, you are in a Gemini and feel like showing off you can even pass to the South of Isla del Bosque in 4-5 feet of water. If you are a brain dead moron you could also try this at dusk, motoring at 6 knots, inexplicably aiming at a section of exposed rocks. I would like to say that again, exposed rock! We sat sipping sundowners and watched that exact scenario unfold. We had just been telling Kerry and David about our tricky little shortcut south of Isla del Bosque when a big chartered Lagoon came screaming around the corner motoring flat out. They altered course and headed straight for these rocks. It was obvious that at this time of day they wouldn’t be able to visually navigate their way over the reef, that combined with the speed and purpose with which they made that course change could only mean that the captain had done this so many times that he could do it with his eyes shut. We all stopped talking and were shocked by what we were seeing waiting for the last second skilful maneuvering which would save this catamaran from meeting what appeared to be an inevitable conclusion. Sometimes appearances are not deceiving. There was no last second maneuvering and with an audible crunch this massive catamaran went from six knots to zero as it impaled itself on the exposed rocks that it had been charging towards. It’s a sickening site to see the bow of a boat that size dip and the stern lift from the force of impact and immediately stop. The ricochet action of diverted force combined with the props chewing into rock in reverse spun them off the rocks and they bobbled around for a bit as people scurried around on deck. We watched them disappear around the next corner, so we know they made it at least that far without sinking. In all likelihood they had dropped the keys off with the charter company and were probably on a flight home while the boat slowly sank at the dock. Even Kerry and David, locals accustomed to the idiotic charter boat antics you see every day in the Med ranked this one pretty high on the ‘oh my god did that just happen?’ list.
We finally left on the very last day of September. We had a brilliant weather window and made the decision to keep sailing instead of stopping on the mainland as we had originally planned. This cost us a visit to one of the most happening cities in the world (Barcelona) but as compensation we rode following wind and seas for 348 miles.
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On October 1st we crossed off a very significant trip milestone; for the first time since May 21st 2009 we were sailing in the Western hemisphere.
On Tuesday morning, October 4th we were staring up at a massive rock, The Rock. Hello Gibraltar!
Med Myths
If you are unfamiliar with the general habits of the cruising crowd then you may not know that it’s common and expected practice to rumour-monger and bash to bits the places you have chosen not to visit. Since this Med adventure is now over, and we have accumulated a humble 6 months of first hand sailing experience here, I feel like it would be a good time to dispel or reinforce some of the Med myths that we’ve all heard so much about.
Here we go:
- It’s overcrowded
Yes there are more people here on boats than in other parts of the world. Funny this doesn’t stop many people from visiting French Polynesia, Bahamas, Thailand etc. You also have to wonder why there are so many people visiting right? Answer: It’s really great!
We’re spoiled brats who’s pendulum constantly and reliably swings from one side that wants perfect secluded anchorages all to ourselves with clear warm water to swim in, to another that craves easy access to a populated shore and all the convenience and local culture it has to offer.
Before long we get tired of having to wear clothes, spend money, and people in general, so begin craving another great anchorage. The Med offers both, and you don’t have to go very far to find a completely different change of pace or scenery. We loved the blend. There is something for everyone’s habits and addictions.
There was a tremendous amount of commercial traffic in some areas, but this didn’t bother us. Commercial traffic have the right lights, a lot to lose, likely have more experience than you do, act predictably and almost certainly have AIS. There are always exceptions of course, but what I’m saying is we would take a night passage on the busiest stretch of Med water dealing with 1000 foot tankers going 18 knots, over erratic and creatively lit third world fishing boats any day… or night, you know what I mean.
- Dirty
Yes, there are dirty anchorages and places you wouldn’t even consider getting in the water. Fortunately those are usually the places where there’s more interesting things to see on land anyway.
It also has to be said that we anchored in some of the clearest cleanest water we have ever seen. Ask the Pacific camp if they have ever anchored in the Aitutaki harbour, Hiva Oa, or Nuku’alofa. Not many swimmers in those harbours. The point is there’s crap harbours everywhere, and we didn’t find the Med’s balance much different than other Seas in the world.
- Expensive
This one surprised us. We found cheap or free moorings all over the Med. We stayed a week in a little marina in Greece for free, we stayed in a gorgeous Turkish bay on brand new moorings for free. In fact we were able to find free moorings or good anchorages in pretty well every country we stopped in. In Greece we spent an average of 15 Euro for a night in a marina, and I think the most we spent was 30 in Sardinia. Yes, the most expensive marinas in the world are here but don’t worry, if you are in a sailboat and didn’t book 18 months in advance or provide a 5000 Euro bribe they won’t let you in anyway.
We could usually find beer for 2-3 Euro when we were out, and for a dollar or less at the store. If you eat like the locals you can go out and have incredible and inexpensive meals. Jaime and I usually shared a dish or two, had a drink or two for less than 20 Euro.
Kebabs, Greek salads, and Sicilian pizzas were the best low cost high value items we found and you won’t believe how cheap and great the selection of wine, meats, cheeses, and olives are at the grocery store. Like the marinas you could spend as much as you wanted to on food, but there are loads of cheap options.
Diesel was pricey and averaged apx 1.25EU/litre. Propane (butane actually) was the most expensive here and surprisingly challenging to find. More than anywhere else in the world
Overall you cannot say that the Med is categorically expensive, totally untrue. The crappy marina in Benoa harbour was more expensive than the beautiful perfectly maintained marina in Paros.
- The weather is terrible
We totally underestimated how bad the conditions could get in the Med. In the Pacific 20-25 knots makes for great sailing, the same wind speed in the Med can be dangerous. This burned us and a lot of other boats unfamiliar with Med conditions. The troughs are short and the waves are steep. They stand up, break, and we experienced more incidents of confused (aka: sloppy crap) here than anywhere else.
Once we learned to check, respect, and plan around the forecast things were fine. This can translate into a lot of motoring if you are lightweights like us and prefer to sneak between systems in order to enjoy a nice calm anchorage instead of slogging it out in crappy weather just for the sake of throwing up a sail.
Schedules will get you into some uncomfortable water here. When we had the option of waiting for light conditions and checked wind and swell forecasts beforehand, leaving earlier than planned or staying later, passages were far more comfortable.
- Unfriendly and unsocial
This is probably the craziest Med myth we heard. Sure we have encountered some idiots, some unfriendliness and worn out bedraggled service staff during the high season (June-September) but these were by far the exceptions.
I think the number of charter boats may lend to this comment since they usually have their own thing going on and don’t get involved in the so-called “cruiser community”. If you are out sailing around only looking for people living on other boats from your own country maybe this is the case, but we’re not really sure how even that would be possible.
Instead of speculating I’ll just say that we were never lonely unless we wanted to be, and in every place we stopped (without exception) a friend was never more than a “hello” or a cold beer away. We were also recipients of touching generosity in the form of food, drinks, invitations by locals keen to show off what they have to offer so many times we lost track.
Out of all the things we heard before going into the Med this probably rates highest on our BS scale.
- Charter boats
Yes, there are million. Yes, they are crazy. Be afraid. We had a handful of encounters with the truly brain dead, the kind you can only hope hasn’t decided that this is the day they are going to self select themselves out of the gene pool. Fortunately we suffered no permanent damage, and more often than not charter people just end up providing the afternoons entertainment.
There are slight variations from time to time, but usually it goes like this:
A charter boat pulls into the anchorage, circles harbour, 12 people rush forward to drop the anchor in the worst possible spot, nobody stays at the helm, boat drifts dangerously close to [reef, other boats, rocks, continent, ferry etc] anchor does not set, 12 people rush back to the helm and start the process all over again. This can go on for hours. Once satisfied that the 10 meters of chain is the perfect amount to hold the boat in 9 meters of water they get dressed in very fancy clothes and all 12 of them climb into the 3 person dinghy. They take turns trying to start the outboard for approximately 30-45 minutes.
At this time the first signs of dissension in the group appear. One faction (the girls) give up on the engine and begin trying to row the group to shore by waving oars around like sugared up 8 year olds trying to sweep a bat out of an open window.
The other half (the boys) stubbornly refuse to give up on the engine. Manly looking pulls, frown lines and concentrated discussion are the hallmark of their club. At risk of being shown up, they don’t point out to the bat sweeper crowd that their theatrical attempts at rowing are pointless since the painter is still attached to the boat.
Angered by a glancing blow from one of the bat sweepers, the chief engine frowner then turns all of his frustration on the little outboard and gives that pull cord one last mother of a pull. This of course fails to start the engine but succeeds in knocking the person next to him out of the dinghy who can’t swim, but was fortunately wearing a lifejacket and, oddly, white (fortunately waterproof) zinc on his nose for sun protection.
One bat sweeper helpfully points out that they would have been there by now if they had just rowed to shore. An engine frowner begins to yell something back at her but is cut short when someone trying to help lifejacket guy back into the dinghy falls out too. Three bat sweepers start crying while four other people decide that they have had enough and begin swimming for shore.
Eventually somebody notices that the little red key had never been inserted behind the kill switch. Three more people start rummaging through the boat looking for it when the chief engine frowner finds it in his pocket. He inserts the key and the engine starts on the first pull. Everyone climbs back into the dinghy except for the four swimmers who by now have finished their first round of drinks on shore.
Three more end up swimming to shore after the first ripple encountered threatens to sink the overloaded dinghy, and 48 seconds after that the only remaining occupants flip the dinghy while inexplicably trying to negotiate a surf landing.
They drag the dingy 11 centimetres up the beach to keep it from floating away and join the original swimmers at the bar where everyone is wondering why they didn’t just use the floating pontoon in front.
Having provided our neighbours with the occasional laugh and scare over the years, we are obligated to cut charter people some slack. Besides that we’ve found that charter people make great company.
Most are only out for a week or two and have to fly back to a crappy job which tends to make you feel really good about life. They can also provide a nice alternative to the heavily recycled weather and boat repair topics normally found in anchorages. Charter people also have the ability to make even Jaime and I feel like really knowledgeable sailors, and most importantly, we always have better tans.
So there you have it. As usual most of the negatives turned out to be total B.S. and even if they weren’t the place still has so much going for it; the food, history, cultures, 3 or 4 months straight of perfect weather, and of course the topless beaches. We heard so much crap about the Med that it turned out to be a really pleasant surprise for us. We’ve met people that have been happily been cruising around here for years who like to remind us that we’ve barely scratched the surface. As nice as it’s been, we are just way to far up in the Northern latitudes to be here past October. Yeah, it’s cold and way past time to head south. Did I mention that we’re spoiled brats?
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