A journey from New Zealand to Norway by two rookies in a 50 year old sailing boat

A journey from New Zealand to Norway by two rookies in a 50 year old sailing boat
Viser innlegg med etiketten Spain. Vis alle innlegg
Viser innlegg med etiketten Spain. Vis alle innlegg

mandag 21. juni 2010

Bay of Biscuit

We've crossed the Bay of Biscay. It was nice. The weather was good. Just like that.
That could be all of it, but sorry peeps, I'm unable to be as concise as that, and will in the below go into petty detail, boring you out of your minds.
After the little incident of the Party-Portuguese (oh, by the way, we never used this info, but apparantly if you go to Lisbon you can go to the main street of the old town, past the church, the second door will be half open and you'll see a girl in there. Tell the girl you want to go up the elevator, if she tells you there is no elevator, go home and put on some other clothes, try again. In the elevator tell the operator that you wanna go all the way. Don't forget to say the secret codeword "Silk", and voilá: your at the most secret, coolest club in Lisbon. So the party-portuguese said anyway, if you try it, please tell us what it was like. Info courtesy of the Party-Portuguese) Okay, so after the crazy portuguese we were joined by Martin. Martin had decided to join us to work at his tan, which wasn't such a bad idea, as we would also like to tan hard for our imminent arrival home. Also we had read the book and watched the movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and realised that we needed a lawyer for support and guidance, Martin would be that man. So we started out from Cascais, Portugal and went up to Camariñas, Spain, a four day journey. We had some good tanning going up there, but not much wind so we did a fair bit of motoring. That was all right, first things first; vanity, then progress and diesel-economics. Camariñas is situated just before the Bay of Biscay, which is extremely convenient. The weather in The Bay can be pretty bad, so it makes sence to stop and get some rest and decent weather reports before going in. We found everything we wanted here: Beer and internet. We failed miserably reading the weather reports before going. We thought that the big high-pressure moving in would mean we'd get some excellent tanning in, but hey; it was bloody overcast the whole way. Poor Martin hardly got a speck of color in, even though he stuck strictly to his motto of "tan while you can" and sought out every opportunity to rip of most of his clothes to catch some rays whenever the cloudcover was slightly thin. On the not-so-important upside we had excellent winds and were doing more than six knots lots of the time. As we closed in on France and our destination of choice; Aber Wrach we got boarded by customs. Yup, for the first time ever on the journey we actually got boarded in open water. The guys were courteous and polite enough (all six of them, interesting how they all fit on board.) They stayed for about 90 minutes ripping the boat apart, dismantling equipment to look for hidden drugs, taking out drawers to look beneath them and generally creating havoc. At the end of their searching-spree they were content that they had been pretty much anywhere without finding anything of interest to the french police or tax-authorities. As an afterthought one of the guys asked whether we had any perfume. Opening the toilet-door to show the guy our common, half-empty bottle of aftershave I noticed the look of amazement on his face. It wasn't until later we realised that after 90 minutes of meticulous searching (they checked inside the battery-compartments of our torches and inside our wallets) they had failed to find the toilet which takes up roughly one sixth of the inside floorspace of the boat. After that we went to Aber Wrach for weather-reports and some rest time. If you ever go to Aber Wrach you'll see that it's the kind of cosy place best suited for walking with your boy-/girlfriend fully dressed in warm clothes along windy, ice-cold beaches waiting for summer to come. All year round.

fredag 7. mai 2010

Emergency shelter at Costa Del Sol

Oksy-gebroksky: We left Tunisia with moderate wind in our faces, engine running so we could make some progress and just maybe reach Gibraltar before the next storm would hit. HAHAHA

So, we've spent one (half) night sailing without the engine running, the rest has been spent motoring in dead calmsOr beating up against the windSomeone told us that Algeria was a sweet spot to hang out, the trick was apparantly to get yourself arrested in the right place. Sidi Ferruch was such a place, and since we were going close by anyhow, we decided to give it a go. Unfortunately they just gave us plenty of polite hassle, told us the harbour was to shallow to enter and sent us packing after 20 minutes. A brief, brief visit to Algeria....
Unfortunately the polite Algerians sent us packing straight into an approaching weatherfront that had us fighting for the best part of one day. Our windmeter maxed out on 60 knots, but it's broken. However we know it shows approximately twice as much as it actually blows, so it was blowing somewhere over 30 knots for the whole day. Interesting sensation when the front passed, tried to drown us in rain and then started blowing 30 knots from the opposite direction. One hour later the (big-big-big) waves started coming from not one but all directions, and 20 minutes after that it just stopped blowing, leaving us bobbing uselessly and helplessly around in swells from aaaaaaaaaaalllll directions. Ahhh, the joy...
I just checked my nag-list, and it appears I forgot to nag about currents. Appearantly the currents are all against us. We spent 60 hours covering 100 miles out from Sidi Ferruch. 100 miles is normally an ok 24 hrs run...
All in all we've been moving agonizingly slow. Howevever we hoped to reach Gibraltar by the beginning of the next big blow. We're 100 miles away now, and according to the forecast we should be able to make it. Just. Unfortunately the in-the-face-winds started blowing hard again this morning. We quickly decided for the first time actually double back and then zoomed downwind for about ten miles and ended up here: Adra, on Costa del Sol. Now, maybe we will have time to do some crucial repairs, god knows its needed. Actually we could make a whole blogpost about everything that's broken on board. We just want to patch everything up good enough to make it home. ...preferably in one - or at least not too many - piece(s).