Med Weather and Sailing Instructions Choices

Preparing for a cruise requires lots of information about ports (do they have space for visiting yachts?), anchorages (does this bay offer good protection?), and sailing instructions (e.g., keep 1 Mile offshore of this headland to avoid steep waves).  You also need radio channels and broadcast times for weather information and local security services.  It’s easy to go overboard (so to speak…) buying every nautical guide out there, but when you’re on a budget, choices must be made.  

Trying not to go overboard buying ALL the guides out there...

I’ve limited myself to the 2015 Bloc Marine Almanac (England to French / Spanish border), the IMRAY Guide for 2013 for Spain and Portugal, the 2014 IMRAY Guide for the Costa del Sol and Costa Blanca, and the 2016 Bloc Marine for the Mediterranean.  We've also added the Mediterranean Cruising Handbook and "Spanish for Cruisers" but those are more general (but VERY useful.)

It’s also easy to go overboard with weather information, sources, and equipment.  The VHF radio is mandatory and provides regional weather reports several times per day. But reports over large zones don’t always give you a very realistic picture of the weather where you are, especially in tricky areas around mountains or headlands.  NAVTEX and SSB radio seem to be on the way out, and most people tell me the equipment is finicky and that actually receiving the weather reports is hit-and-miss.  Satellite phones are all the rage, but they’re still too expensive for us (although coming down…love that sat-sleeve idea for cell phones).  We’re left with getting internet via wireless internet in ports and cell phone networks along the coast.  For Spain and Portugal, we haven’t quite decided whether we’ll sign up for a European-wide phone / internet contract before leaving France or if we’ll just buy a SIM card in Spain and Portugal and get a local phone / internet contract.  The cheapest international contract we’ve found is about 40 Euros / month for 5 GB of data outside of France, which seems a bit pricey.

Having internet aboard is critical for weather information when you’re at anchor and not in a port (or more likely, a nearby café or bar) where you can get wireless internet.  We have a number of favorite internet weather sites for coastal spots along the way, and for larger scale weather information, we use ZyGrib files.  For the Med, our Med-savvy friends have introduced us to a fabulous, free, and trustworthy high-rez grib service called Open Skiron, which provides grib files starting in Gibraltar and covers the entire Med.  (Note: these come zipped and are on the heavy side.)  I’ve been playing with these and I can import them into OpenCPN and MaxSea (although still haven’t tried this on the IPAD version…). 

And now, a treat for any of you who can read French: Last week, one of our local sailing gurus, Antoine Maury, introduced us to his friends Pierre and Martine Lavergne, who have spent the last 14 years sailing around the Med on their Sun Legend 41, Logos.  They have a blog that is an absolute GOLD MINE of information.  Enjoy !  http://pierre.lavergne1.free.fr/index2.php 

And on a final and completely unrelated note, I think I have convinced Patrick that we should invest the $16 needed to buy an anchor ball and motoring cone.  These are plastic visual signals that you hoist up to let other boats know when you are at anchor or when you are motoring.  I have always thought that the anchor ball idea was dumb unless you’ve had to anchor in an emergency someplace you shouldn’t be.  The motor cone, though, is useful.  Often, we keep the mainsail up even when we’re motoring (motor sailing).  But once your motor is turned on, you become a motor boat, not a sailboat, and lose the right-of-way.  Other boats, seeing your sail, may think you are under sail and treat you as a sailboat.  Both boats giving way at the same time can lead to problems. You can always pull out a pair of binoculars to see if the sailboat’s motor is pumping out water, but that’s not always possible in a tight spot or crowded area.  Of course, none of these arguments hold any sway with Patrick.  He was simply impressed by the tales of frequent controls by the Portuguese Coast Guard and the $400 fine for not having these $16 pieces of plastic aboard. Whatever works, right?

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Spring Cruising Preps

An anticyclone has been squatting over France for the last week, bringing sunshine and warm(ish) temperatures, and now the calendar tells me it’s spring.  In the span of a few days, we’ve gone from that dreamy fresh-out-of-hibernation state to near panic as we realize how much we have to do to prepare Mareda and ourselves for our Mediterranean adventure. 

A boat we chartered and sailed from Tunisia to Lampedusa, Malta, and Sicily.  This was our favorite anchorage in Gozo, Malta.

Preparing the Boat for the Med

In the summer, it’s going to be hot in the Med (yippee!):  bimini, window shades, wind scoops, small fan, mosquito nets, swim platform, water supply (All taken care of except for the wind scoops and repairing a latch on the swim platform.)

Sailing in shorts and tee-shirts !!  Unbelievable !

In the Med, winds can roll down the mountains and build up to gale force without much warning.  Anchor and chain need to be heavy enough and long enough to keep you securely fastened.  A secondary anchor needs to be ready to go, too.  (Need to splice the rode directly to the anchor chain to increase strength; Need to find a good way to have the 2^nd anchor and chain easily accessible from the cockpit.)

We also plan to anchor out often.  I’ve already mentioned the necessity for a strong anchor / chain system and a secondary system.  A flopper-stopper system to reduce rock-n-roll at anchor is also a necessity for a good night’s sleep in anchorages that get a lot of swell (which seems to be just about all of them along the Algarve and Costa del Sol sections of our voyage.) 

A sunny lunchtime anchorage in Tunisia.

In the Med, you often dock stern-to-quay.  We’ll need some more fenders, some longer sheets, and a gang-plank.  The drop-down swim platform is fabulous for stern-to moorings but the height difference or distance from the quay may not always be optimal.  A simple plank with holes in the corners for ropes is an easy(-ish) thing to pull together and is also useful for protecting your fenders if you have to lay alongside a rough cement quay.

I’ve rechecked the off-shore security material regulations and carried out an inventory of our existing material.  Need to buy 3 new hand flares.

Last but not least is getting the navigation taxes and insurance in order and getting Spanish translations of everything. 

Preparing the Navigation Plan

Basically, we'll head south until the butter melts and then turn left.  How hard could it be?

Gozo (I think) over my right shoulder.

But seriously, now...

I still like having paper charts aboard and a friend has graciously agreed to loan us his Med charts.  I suspect we’ll never look at them but their presence comforts me.  We now have 4 (!) nav systems aboard:  The B&G Zeus GPS / Chart Plotter running Navionics in the cockpit; a PC with GPS running MaxSea and OpenCPN, a backup PC with MaxSea and OpenCPN, and an IPAD Air II running MaxSea. 

I have the Mediterranean Cruising guide (Heikell 2012), the IMRAY Guide for Spain and Portugal (2013), and the IMRAY Guide for the Costas del Sol and Blanca (2014).  I still need to get the Bloc Marine Med Almanac for 2015/2016 to have the Colregs up to date.

Using these guides, advice from friends who sail in the area, and recent reports from other sailors on Noonsite, we’ve made a rough plan of our dates and ports and/or anchorages from Arzal to Alicante.  We believe FIRMLY that the most dangerous thing on a boat is a calendar, so we won’t be trying to keep to any set schedule.  We’re just going to follow our noses and look at the weather to decide when and where we go.  If we don’t get to Alicante by the time the bad weather sets in, we’ll just put down somewhere else.  In general, we plan to spend June sailing around Galicia, July sailing down the Portuguese coast, spend August along the Algarve to Gibraltar, and in September and October we’ll sail along the Costas del Sol and Blanca with initial plans to winter over in Torrevieja near Alicante.

Tunisia to Lampedusa, Beaufort 5 with choppy seas, and one HUGE helm.  Me in the background with grimace because of 2 freshly cracked ribs (remember "one hand for you, one hand for the boat?")

Preparing Ourselves

I just completed an inventory of our on-board pharmacy and compared it to the checklist in our French offshore sailing regulations.  I have a few items that need to be replaced and will got to the doctor next week for those items requiring a prescription.  We’ve both got dentist and dermatologist appointments in the next few weeks, too.

We have to prepare the house to be abandoned for 6-7 months.  This mostly involves weed control and buttering up our neighbours.  (We are VERY lucky to have neighbours who have become dear friends.) 

Mentally, I think we’re both in great shape and ready to go.  We will have a 1.5-month shakedown period with Mareda before we head across the Bay of Biscay to Spain.  All the reading and talking with more experienced Med sailors has given us a good idea of what to expect (I hope !).  It’s always reassuring to reduce the unknown to manageable proportions.  Here’s what we expect:

• A wee bit of stress (but the good kind, right?!) 
• Some charming villages, towns and cities (Galicia region, Porto, Lisbon, the Algarve, Cadix, Gibraltar, etc.).
• Some not-so-charming areas (large industrial ports, over-built coastlines).
• Chilly temps and fog around northern Spain; warm weather south of Lisbon
• Many fishing boats and their unmarked / poorly marked nets and pots
• Many fish / shellfish farms to dodge
• Poor internet reception; lots of time spent in cafés and bars trying to get a weather report
• Getting proficient at Med-style moorings (stern-to-quay) (see “stress” above)
• Learning to cope with rolly, lumpy anchorages exposed to swell
• Early starts and lots of motor-sailing to reach the next port before the stiff afternoon breezes set in (or more hopefully, maximizing the use of our Gennaker that allows us to sail in as little as 7 knots of wind)
• Covering shorter distances than planned to avoid long hours of motoring, followed by longer distances than planned when the weather becomes favorable
• Some beautiful anchorages with water warm enough to swim in without a wet suit
• Improving our fishing skills (e.g., anything other than mackerel…).
• Meeting other cruisers along the way (always one of the highlights of any cruise)
• Hot weather in July and August; learning to maximize interior comfort and minimize interior mosquitoes and no-seeums
• A mix of very expensive ports, some reasonably-priced ports, and lots of anchorages to keep overall prices down.

Like most things, urchins are okay with lots of butter and garlic.

And now, it’s off to the ship chandlers and then to the boat yard to see about that new battery…and flares, and anchor rode splice, and…

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Saved by Stickers

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a whiny existential post, so before spring is upon us and sailing preparations get seriously underway and obliterate the dead time in which existential crises breed, here it is.  This winter’s crisis began with what should have been a joyful occasion: buying a new laptop computer.  The photo theme accompanying this crisis is “pathways.”

Volubilis, Morocco.

The problem is a simple one.  French keyboards are not the same as English (or American) keyboards.  Of course the French slip in some funny characters (é à ô á è ç) but even the normal letters don’t have the same placement.  A French keyboard is called an AZERTY keyboard because those are the 6 letters on the top left hand of the keyboard, whereas English / American keyboards are QWERTYs.  You can special order a QWERTY keyboard laptop from France, but it costs about $200 more.     

Biking trail along the canals, France.

Patrick offered what he thought was a simple suggestion: just get used to an AZERTY keyboard.  It made sense.  In a few short years I will have spent more than half my life in France  anyway.  Maybe it’s time to let go.  But when I actually thought of re-learning to type, I broke down in tears.  For short emails or facebook posts, I sometimes use Patrick’s French computer to peck out a message, but for someone who used to touch-type 60 words per minute, it’s a real setback.  It’s not the process of learning to type again that frustrates and depresses me, it’s the loss of one of the last links I have to my mother tongue. 

Dades Gorge, Morocco.

Except for skyping with my parents and a few friends a couple times per week, my only English interaction is reading and writing (and I read about 1/3^rd of the time in French already).  If writing now has to be done through a French veil, I’ll lose a small part of what’s left.  I’m fluent in French (although that doesn’t mean I don’t make mistakes) but even if I live here for the rest of my life and even if I speak French 99% of the time, it will always be a second language. Maybe others manage, but I can’t always express myself the way I want in French, or at least not as well as I would in English.  The searching for words, the hesitancy, the “foreignness” of it all is like watching a film in black and white instead of in colour, or like cooking with only salt and pepper instead of a spice-rack full of options.

Hiking trail, Guadeloupe.

My first French teacher was a French woman living in Woods Hold Massachusetts where her husband worked at the Oceanographic Institution where I was a graduate student. We would meet for lessons in her beautiful home, working at the sunny kitchen table overlooking her “French” country garden.  One day, she held my hand in hers and told me that if I made my life in France, I would never feel truly at home anywhere in the World ever again. She knew what she was talking about. With the passing years, the foreign becomes familiar and home becomes a stranger.      

After wrestling with all these demons for a couple of days, I told Patrick that I absolutely could not accept an AZERTY keyboard.  I would make do with my  7-year old Sony VAIO running Vista Business until it just wasn’t possible anymore.  He was frustrated and I felt like a pouty child throwing a tantrum, but I’m just not able to let go of this small part of my culture just yet.

Colza field, France.

And then I turned to the internet to tap into the hive-mind of Anglo-Saxon expats in France to find out if others had gone over to the dark side (okay, we’ll call it “the other side”) and how they managed. 

Tizi n Test pass, Morocco.

Stickers.  Stickers was the answer.  Any recent computer can change its keyboard input to any other language. The only problem is that you have to know the keyboard by heart because, while the computer can speak numerous languages, it can’t do anything about the letters physically printed on the keyboard.  Several companies make stickers that you can use to convert your keyboard to a QWERTY.  The fancy ones are even transparent so that you can see the original keyboard markings as well as the QWERTY ones in a different colour.

Desert road, Morocco.

This solution, besides being simple and elegant, has many parallels with my life in France. My language is now a sometimes-confusing sometimes-frustrating mix of French and English. Yes, I do need to more fully embrace my adopted homeland and its crazy language, but I have so little to cling to that is still my own that giving up even a small part of my mother tongue just isn’t possible for me right now. 

So like dogs and their masters, my keyboard and I are destined to look like each other, both a mad Frenglish melange, neither fully French nor fully English and never really at home anywhere.

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Update 3: A Year of Reading the Med

I've created a new category "Reading the Med" if you would like to find the earlier updates and beginning of this project.  Update 3 includes two fantastic finds and a confession.

LIBYA:  In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar ****

A first novel, nominated for the 2006 Man Booker prize and winner of the 2007 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje prize.  This haunting story is one that will stay with me for a long time.  We see 1979 revolutionary Libya through the eyes of a 9-year old boy, whose father is taken away and tortured for subversive activities. Initially I dreaded reading this book, as I supposed it would be fairly predictable, bitter and sentimental.  But instead of focusing on the plight of the dissidents of the revolution, Matar tells the story of the family and friends caught in the cross-fire, where loyalties are tested and broken, cowardice is defined and redefined, and, because several of the main characters don’t act the way we want them to, the reader is forced to question how he/she would respond under the same pressures. As endearing as our boy narrator is, he is far from the noble stoic hero we want, manipulated by the regime and a victim of his own innocence, frustrations, and prejudices.  Several scenes are so chilling that I was not able to read more than a few pages at a time, but the often light-hearted recollections of childhood – even this childhood –  save the novel from becoming too dark. The writing is beautiful with strong sense-of-place and richly-defined characters.  The plot is well paced and the novel never bogs down in heavy-handed reflection.  Highly recommended.

TURKEY: The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak ***1/2

Foreword: I am a huge fan of Turkish literature.  You may have expected me to review the works of Nobel prize-winning Orham Pamuk (whom I ADORE) or one of my all-time favourites, The Time Regulation Institute by Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar, or even Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernieres, not a Turkish author but author of an exceptional novel about the heartbreaking birth of the Turkish nation.  A few months ago, I was watching a (fantastic) tv show called “The Europe of Writers” where the featured country was Turkey.  Pamuk was featured, but I was also introduced to Sema Kaygusuz (whom I have yet to read) and Elif Shafak, Turkey’s most widely-read author and a fascinating character in her own right.  For Christmas, some good friends offered me Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul.

In 2006, this book earned its best-selling author a condemnation by the Turkish authorities for insulting the national identity, carrying with it a 3-year prison sentence. She was eventually acquitted. The Bastard of Istanbul addresses the delicate issue of the contested Armenian genocide and does a brilliant job of presenting the complexity of history and its interpretation by its victims’ descendents almost 100 years later. The story revolves around the friendship of two young women, one Armenian-American and the other Turk, who together walk the razor’s edge between amnesia and debilitating memory to try to understand how to (if possible) erase the past and move forward from the atrocities of their shared history.  In the midst of this deliberation, the author presents us with a metaphor for the Armenian-Turkish rift in the form of dark and unspeakable family secrets.  Initially a bit annoyed by this tactic, I agreed to go along with it to see how the metaphor played out, hoping it would provide some insight into the author’s thoughts on the Turkish dilemma.  I’m very glad I did.  At first, the response left me perplexed, and that has made me appreciate the book all the more. With reflection, the parallels offered by the author become clearer: heinous crimes committed by youth and the moral obligation to punish those crimes at the expense of spoiling a glorious past and destroying a whole family. To try to move forward building ever higher on an artificial foundation can only lead to disaster and collapse.  Clearer, but not yet clear.  What good is punishment without public recognition of wrong-doing?  Is assisted suicide still suicide? This is a tale that gives the reader a lot to think about after the last page has been consumed (after which you will certainly go back and re-read some critical passages to make sure you really understood what just happened…). This is a historical fiction novel that is essential reading to understand the beginnings of an impasse that still plagues us today.  As an added bonus, it is a joy to read, and, strangely, hysterically funny in parts.    

And a CONFESSION:  I have been cheating on the Mediterranean with other non-Mediterranean countries.  It just happened.  But I’d be lying if I said that it was meaningless or that it won’t happen again.

MEXICO: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo (***)

SOUTH AFRICA:  J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (****)  

FINLAND: I have just started Arto Paasilinna’s “Le Cantique de l’Apocalypse Joyeuse” with the english title, “The Best Village in the World.”

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Quiberon's Wild Coast, Unchained

The first big storm of winter hit southern Brittany today with recorded gusts of 146 km / hr (91 mph, 79 knots!).  Patrick and I ventured out to the Wild Coast (Cote Sauvage) near our home to watch the spectacle.  We waited till the wind was a more manageable 75 km / hr (40 knots), but taking photos was still difficult - impossible to steady the camera and sea foam blowing everywhere. We're very happy Mareda is safely tucked away on her cradle (facing the wind !).

Grib files showing 40 knots sustained winds for the next 24 hours or so...

Sea foam plasters the rocks and flies through the air

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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. 

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