Atlantic Crossing
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.
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