In the Cradle

We pulled Mareda out of the water yesterday for 3 months of drying out on a tall cradle designed for lifting keels.  We were surprised at how clean the bottom was after 7 months in the water, and there were only a few spots where the paint showed signs of “close encounters”, mostly on the underside of the keel.

I was also reminded of an important fact of underwater optics:  dive masks magnify things underwater.  Several months ago, the keel hit the tidal gate leaving Guernsey in the English Channel Islands.  The tidal gate has 2 meters of water over it when the traffic light turns green.  I saw green lights, and conditioned to believe that green means go, we headed out.  “Bonk !” went the not-so-gentle reminded that our draft is 2.25 not 2 meters.  Apparently, sometimes green means maybe.  The keel did what it was designed to do; it just lifted up and slid over the barrier and then dropped back down into place.  Later I dove down to look at the damage and reported an impressive golf-ball sized chunk missing from the leading edge of the swing keel.  Now that we can see the damage with our own eyes and without the magnifying effect of the dive mask, the real damage is only about thumb-sized.  Nice surprise!  

The mechanic came over and winterized the motor and our only nasty surprise was a huge crack in one of the blades of the water pump impeller.  If it had disintegrated, the bits could have blocked the cooling system and caused lots of trouble. The impeller was new 6 months ago and we only had about 160 hours of motoring this season.  A bit disturbing.

After a good scrub of the hull with the high-pressure hose, we’re ready to leave Mareda high and dry until mid April.  In the meantime, I’m studying the charts, pilot books and blogs to plan our cruise around the Iberian peninsula, through Gibraltar and into the Med.  It’s going to be challenging (fog, fishing nets and pots, tiny fishing ports with few facilities, nice but very expensive ports, interesting mooring situations, capricious weather, language barriers, etc.) but we’re eager for the adventure to begin! 

Addendum:  forgot to mention that I got the chance to try out the emergency rope ladder in the transom yesterday.  Since our cradle is really high to allow the lifting keel to almost fully descend, our ladder was just a tad short so I used the emergency rope ladder to climb the rest of the way up.  I learned 3 things during this exercise: 1) I hope I never have to use it in an emergency, 2) I really need to work on my upper body strength, and 3) we absolutely need to have a robust block-and-tackle system that we can attach to the arch to help haul up someone who has fallen overboard.  We do have 2 small tackles on the arch to haul up the dinghy but I doubt those would be strong enough to do the job of hauling up a wet crew member (or skipper !).  

And now, off to find some snow…

Read More

Update 2: A Year of Reading the Med

Update 1 of this adventure highlighted some real gems of Mediterranean literature.  Round 2, however, was more of a mixed bag, which is a polite way of saying I slogged through some stinkers so that you don't have to. 

ISRAEL: A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev  ** ½

Winner of the Brenner Prize (Israel) and several other European awards from an internationally-acclaimed author.  With all due respect to the author and to the literary establishment that heaped glowing reviews onto this book, I need to tell you from the get-go that it’s going to be hard for me to describe this book without sniggering.  I do agree with one professional reviewer who call the book “unforgettable”.  Spoiler alert in effect as from this point.  Yair is a short dark muscular boy born into a tall blonde family, and we suspect something is amiss from the beginning.  Written from the view point of Yair as an adult in the throes of his own marital turmoil, our attention is focused on the story of a pigeon handler during Israel’s war of independence, who is (queue menacing music… dah! dah! dah!) a short dark muscular boy.  All that remains is to figure out how his mother met the pigeon boy, and what could be more straightforward than a pigeon boy meeting (drum roll, cymbal clash and pregnant pause…) a pigeon girl!  The pigeon boy decides they will not have sex before he goes off to war because of his belief that he would not return alive if they did.  But hang on a minute … we know from the beginning of the story that the pigeon boy dies in battle, torn to shreds by snipers’ bullets.  How could the boy possibly be Yair’s father, you wonder?  Well you have clearly forgotten about the pigeons, my friends.  As the boy lies dying alone in a small monastery, he manages to… well, er, uh… expel and collect his sperm in a small glass vial that he attaches to the leg of his champion carrier pigeon.  The pigeon manages to lift off with its precious burden and flies bravely between whizzing bullets to the pigeon girl at the zoo, who understands immediately that the bird’s return means that a) the pigeon boy is dead and b) that the vial contains his sperm.  (As an aside, does this remind anyone else of the Monty Python sketch, “what is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”) Scrambling madly through the zoo lab in search for a spoon and a syringe, she flops on her back and inseminates herself.  The rest of the story unfolds with relative ease.  It’s too bad, really, since the book is otherwise well written, the story lines are interesting, and the characters are vibrant and engaging.  I had intended to give it a 3-star rating up until this (dare-I-say-it?) seminal moment in the story.  Alas, after such revelations, I found it hard to take seriously anymore. 

LEBANON: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine  **

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award.  The story flows from the memories of 70-year-old Aaliya, an endearing feisty blue-haired heroine who dared to live a modern and independent life in the constrictive society of 1970s civil-war Lebanon.  Her salvation from both the war and the society that condemns her lifestyle is literature.  The novel combines all the ingredients needed to create an appealing story for modern women and lovers of literature and history; me, me, and me.  But I didn’t love it.  After a beautiful start (and I recommended it enthusiastically to a few friends after a promising first quarter), the book gets bogged down in Aaliya’s literary reviews and ponderings to the point that the plot disappears completely and we feel like we’ve accidentally wandered into an academic treatise where the author tries to dazzle us with the breadth and depth of her knowledge.  Towards the end it was simply a painful slog to finish. 

MEDITERRANEAN overview: On the Shores of the Mediterranean by Eric Newby ***

Fans of travel literature should feel their hearts skip a beat with excitement when they see the name Eric Newby, author of the classic works A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and The Last Grain Race.  Newby sailed a 4-masted schooner from the UK to Australia in 1938, climbed the Nuristan mountains of Afghanistan, was a prisoner of war, escaped from his concentration camp and was recaptured, returned later to marry the Slovenian woman who hid him during his escape, and spent some years working with his father in a women’s high-fashion business.  For most of his career, when he wasn’t traveling himself, he served as travel editor of The Observer.  With such credentials, it’s impossible not to be enthralled by his sometimes hysterical recollections of traveling around the Mediterranean basin, clockwise from Naples, in the 1980s.  In the acknowledgements in the front of the book, Newby thanks Colonel Muammar Kaddafi for hosting them during their jaunt through Libya.  While some passages are dry and dip too deeply into the historical landscape for my tastes, the book as a whole is a fantastic read and is an essential companion to the fiction from each country that I’ve been reading.

MEDITERRANEAN overviews, continued:  The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean by John Julius Norwich ****, and The Pillars of Hercules *1/2  by Paul Theroux.

The Middle Sea is essential reading, the bible of all things Mediterranean, and despite the comprehensive historical coverage, very engaging and readable.  After reading Norwich and Newby, The Pillars of Hercules by Theroux struck me as the personal ramblings of an often poorly-informed traveler content to offer up summaries of a place based on meeting a few local characters in a bar.  His goal is to write a book and cover as much ground as possible as quickly as possible.  Perhaps this approach is meant to offer a snapshot in time and many critics loved the book.  I found it annoying and didn’t learn anything useful or interesting about the Med from it.  It’s all about him and his insights. Pass.

Read More

Paris by the Sea, Take II

And before we close this chapter of symbols and images of the sea in Paris, here are some scenes from the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the new contemporary art museum designed by Frank Gehry rising out of the Bois de Boulogne in the west of Paris.  It's meant to resemble a sailing vessel with 12 large sails.

Read More

Paris by the Sea

Ocean scenes and symbols are not what one typically associates with the city of Paris, but if you can focus your eyes beyond the glitz and glamour, you’ll find the sea all around you.   A river runs through it, and the official seal of this important river trading post features a sailing barque with the motto “Fluctuat Nec Mergitur” or Tossed by the Waves but Never Sunk.  You will find this seal on official government buildings, monuments, museums, metro stations, street drain covers, libraries, swimming pools...in fact, once you start looking for it, you’ll see it everywhere you turn.  After the terrorist attacks in 2015, the seal and motto showed up in graffiti as a mark of the city’s resilience.

Graffiti in Paris after the November 2015 terrorist attacks.  Photo from wikipedia.

Lurking among the ever-present sailboat emblems are other sea creatures, used to decorate bridges, buildings, and lamp posts. Paris even boasts a (very expensive) port for motor boats or de-masted sail boats at the Port de l’Arsenal near the Bastille.  

Along with Paris' "permanent exhibits" of ocean culture, the Seine often plays host to temporary expositions worthy of any sea port. Currently docked along the river is the 3-masted sailing goelette La Boudeuse, which is the only vessel of its kind still capable of long expeditions on all oceans.  La Boudeuse is flanked by a life-sized blue whale as part of an educational exhibit along the banks of the Seine.

Paris even boasts a (very expensive) port for motor boats or de-masted sail boats at the Port de l’Arsenal near the Bastille.  

I wonder how many tourists notice the sea around them in Paris?  Oh, okay… I couldn’t write a post about Paris without at least one photo of the Eiffel Tower.  Nice lighthouse, eh?

Read More

Material Girl Mareda

The year is ending with a big buying bang for Mareda.  As if the financial pit of buying a new boat weren’t deep enough, we’ve splurged on a few items that may at first glance SEEM to be unnecessary but will, I’m sure, prove to be worth the investment. 

To protect the double helm steering wheels and the cockpit table / GPS screen, we bought protective covers in sunbrella material.  We probably could have pieced together some tarps ourselves to accomplish the same thing, but as we’ll be leaving Mareda for several months of the year in various countries around the Med, we decided to indulge in quality protection.  Classy, eh??

And for boating enthusiasts, there’s no better gift than personalized boat swag !  My sister, who recently bought her own Catalina 25, gave us two great presents:  a picnic / beach blanket tote and a couple of hot-cold travel mugs, both with MAREDA conspicuously and beautifully displayed.  Watch out, Med, here we come !  (After a few months of hibernation, that is…).

Great nautical swag !

On a completely unrelated note, we recently contributed to an informal information poll about “grey nomads” and the aging of the cruising fleet.  Check out this interesting article from Hubert Hell at Active Outside. 

Read More

The Sea, Otherwise

We’ve just discovered that enjoying the sea doesn’t have to stop when the boat is put up for the winter.  For the first time since moving to the Morbihan Gulf in Brittany, we went clam digging with some other hibernating sailors.  It was a cool drizzly day and I hesitated taking my camera, thinking that the photos would only show grey tones (which is a way of avoiding the use of the now ruined phrase “shades of gray”).  I was pleasantly surprised with both the subtle colors and textures of the shoreline as well as the three handfuls of clams we found.  The Brent geese were on their post-nuptial migration from Scandinavia to their wintering grounds, which range from Brittany down to the Arcachon basin near Bordeaux depending on winter conditions.  My guide book says they rarely fly in V-shapes, but we were given quite a show…which was particularly tricky to catch with my camera in the rain. This little outing opened our eyes to new ways of enjoying the sea in winter, and we are eagerly awaiting the next large tidal coefficients to try our hand at fishing for razor clams.

The road to Tascon island, only passable at low tide.

Who says Brent Geese don't migrate in V-formations? 

The mighty hunter.

Read More

Eulogy for a brave little camera

This week, I was forced to accept a bitter truth: my Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ8 has not healed itself by sitting alone in a drawer over the summer as I had hoped. Even worse, my attempts to unblock the zoom, thrown off track by fine Sahara sand from Morocco last spring, have now guaranteed that there’s no saving this brave little camera.  It had a fantastic zoom and I could control aperture, shutter speed and exposure.  Okay, sure, I didn’t actually use those features very often, but the fact that I could manually control everything is what made it so special. 

I do love my Olympus TG-3 tough camera, bought to overcome the frailties of “nice” cameras, but it’s much more limited in manual controls. As Christmas approaches, I was toying with the idea of getting my first grown-up DSLR camera, but I’ve now decided that I am not going to do that until I fully master my point-and-shoot. When is that?  A tutorial I was reading recently said “You’ll just know when you’re ready.”  I'm not there yet.

Here are some of the death throes of my little Panasonic from its last conscious days in Morocco. Rest in peace, friend.  (You can click on the photos to get larger images).

Read More

Cruising Primer

Her face positively glowed with relief.  “Oh you DO have one of those!” she said, pointing to the toilet.  Other anxious faces would appear throughout the summer as non-sailing friends joined us for their first sailing experience, a bit concerned about how they would eat, sleep, or charge their cell phones. 

I’m always surprised by the questions we get asked about the sailing life.  Things that seem so familiar to us after almost 12 years of cruising are unknown to most people, as they were to us when we began this venture. 

Here, in no particular order, is a primer on what it’s like to live on a sailboat.

   

Our "house" may be small, but you should see our backyard...

How do you go to the toilet?  Let’s just get this one out of the way first, shall we?  Yes, we DO have a toilet, and it even looks like a normal one  The flushing mechanism is a sort of hand pump that draws in seawater and then pumps it all out again at the flick of a mechanical switch.  The contents go into a holding tank (Ellen at the Cynical Sailor has cleverly dubbed this the “PPB”, or the Pee and Poo Box).  The PPB can be emptied into the sea by opening a valve when you’re away from port and the coast.  Each boat has its own rules about toilet paper but we adopt the most conservative approach: nothing goes into the toilet unless it has passed through your body first. Nothing stops up a toilet mechanism faster than paper, and nothing is worse than having to unblock it.  A small trash can sits next to the toilet and all paper goes here. And no, it doesn’t smell.  It gets emptied frequently and has a lid.  You can also put small strips of fabric softener in the can if you want to make sure there are no offending odours.      

Relief in sight.  Everything's going to be okay.

Where / how / what do you eat?  How do you buy groceries?  Our eating is actually very similar to the way we eat at home.  We have a refrigerator (and if we crank up the power, a small freezer) and a stove with 2 gas burners and an oven. The originality of a boat stove is that it is on gimbals, which means that it stays horizontal even if the boat is heeling over at an angle.  This feature, along with clamps, keeps your pots securely on the stove while you plough through the waves.  

Coffee on the go...

When we’re in port, we head for the local markets and grocery stores, so we have fresh food every few days.  We also tend to eat out in local restaurants.  You can learn a lot about a culture by eating “local” and it’s one of our favourite things about traveling.  On longer passages or in more remote areas, we may have to tap into the canned food, but that’s pretty rare for us.  When we’re actually sailing, we tend to eat a simple sandwich that will suffice until we pull into port and can fix a regular meal, or one-dish meals (spaghetti, stew, etc) that are easy to manage on a rolling boat. And there’s always mackerel out there, waiting to be filleted into fresh sushi !

Buying local goods on Brehat island.  Just take what you want and leave the money in the honesty box !

Do you have electricity on board?  One of the first things friends ask when they join us on Mareda for the first time is “Is there someplace where I can charge my phone?” Yes.  We have circuits for 220 volts (European standard power) and 12 volts like you have in your car.  The batteries are recharged by the boat motor alternator (just like your car) as well as by plugging into shore power when in port or by the solar panels.  We have a sensor that tells us how many amps we’re using at any given time and the state of charge of the batteries.  We watch this carefully when we’re at sea or on a mooring away from shore power to make sure we’re not draining the batteries.    

Do you sail at night?  Can you just throw out the anchor to stop the boat when you get tired of sailing?  No, you can’t stop the boat just anywhere for the night, which means you sometimes do have to sail all through the night (or several nights, or days, or months).  Most boat anchors and chains are only useful for anchoring in 10 meters (~ 33 feet) of water or less.  Away from the coast in deeper water, the anchor is useless.  You can stop the boat and drift with the winds and currents, but this is rarely comfortable and always risky.  You may be pushed backwards and lose some hard-won miles or be pushed onto the coast and risk grounding, not to mention running into cargo ships or fishing boats.  When you sail throughout the night, you set up a watch system with the available crew on board where each person takes a turn (usually 3 hours, less in bad conditions) being responsible for keeping the boat moving safely forward while the others sleep.  The autopilot is your best friend at night, allowing you to remain under the spray dodger and out of the wind.  You are legally required to maintain a visual watch at all times, so we don’t spend much time below when we’re on watch.  Since we are usually only 2 people on Mareda, the person not on watch sleeps on the convertible settee in the saloon with a clear view up to the cockpit  and within easy earshot.  The off-watch person also stays clothed and ready to leap into the cockpit if the other needs help.  We almost always put a reef in the sail (to reduce the sail area to slow down and to heel less) whether it needs one or not, just in case.  The person alone in the cockpit wears his life vest with a search-and-rescue light attached to it, and stays tethered to the life lines at all times.

  

Sunset sail (and rushing to port to avoid a night sail !)

Where do you sleep?  Do you reserve a place in port ahead of time like a hotel?  What if there’s no room?  We stop the boat for the night in ports or along the coast somewhere sheltered from the wind and wave swell.  Ports almost never accept reservations.  You simply call up on the phone or the vhf radio as you get near to port and ask for a berth for the night.  The coastal sailing guide books provide graphics showing the layout of each port, which allows you to find the spot attributed to you.  We’ve almost never been turned away.  If there are no free berths, you raft up next to someone else, which means you tie up next to a boat that is tied up next to the dock.  These raft-ups can sometimes be 3 or 4 boats deep !  We have been notified that ports aren’t accepting visitors because of a regatta or dredging work in the port but if it were a real emergency, they will always find you a spot. 

How do you shower?  We have a shower on board !  This is a luxury we actually don’t use that often because you end up hosing down everything in the shower area and you have to wipe everything dry afterwards.  Most ports have shower facilities although they are often none too appealing and the water is never really hot.

How do you do laundry?  Small items are washed by hand.  Synthetics are highly prized.  Occasionally, the port facilities include washing machines.  About once a month, we find a laundromat and wash things “properly”.  It’s not so bad.  You can meet some interesting people in the laundromat !

Laundry day !

What do you do with your house while you’re away? What about your mail?  Up until now, the house has been shut up with no electricity or water.  The police are notified of our absence and our neighbours have keys to the house and keep an eye on things.  All of our bills, taxes, etc., are handled via internet or through automatic deduction from our accounts, so any mail that piles up is 99% junk.  Our biggest problem is the yard, which doesn’t take well to 6 months of neglect during the growing season.  In the future, we’re thinking of renting the house while we’re away but that has its own set of headaches.  We’re still in the research phase of that idea. 

What about getting seasick?  It happens, but it’s rare now that we know ourselves and how to cope.  We even “cured” a friend who was sailing with us this summer.  He started getting very nauseous and we immediately covered him up with another jacket and warm cap, put him at the helm to steer, and gave him ½ of a travel sickness pill.  He was laughing and joking within 30 minutes. 

Don’t you get scared? It has happened in the past, but it’s rare now.  I don’t remember being frightened at all this past year since we didn’t have any surprise storms and we didn’t have boat trouble as we have in the past. There were quite a few anxious moments, but we’ve learned that a scratch in the hull isn’t the end of the world and that bearing hours of discomfort while pounding through rough seas is just part of the game (to be avoided whenever possible.) 

What do you do when it rains?  Since we travel with no strict calendar in mind, we can choose when to cruise.  Our movements are mostly controlled by the wind and sea state rather than rain.  If the winds are right and it happens to be raining, we just cope with it, wearing our foul weather gear and boots. 

Sailing in the rain is just part of the job sometimes.

Don’t you get lonely / feel isolated / miss friends and family?  We don’t get lonely, but we do miss family and friends. Skype and email are lifesavers when you are lucky enough to have an internet connection. Here in Europe, the public transportation network of buses, trains, and airports, allows us to get where we need to be within 48 hours or less in an emergency.  But one of the best things about cruising is the other cruisers you meet.  Last year along the coast of Spain, we had social events with fellow cruisers almost every night in every port.  The solidarity and community spirit make up for the lack of contact with friends back home. 

Read More