Ruairi’s Ramblings
Part 2
As a paid delivery Captain, I learnt long ago that there is a substantial difference between an owner onboard trip and a crew trip.
As a professional you have a higher tolerance for discomfort. It is not that I would be particularly gung-ho, at the end of the day the aim of the enterprise is to deliver the boat to its destination in as good as condition as you received it. It is also an acknowledgment that the miles must be covered, the clock keeps ticking, and whenever you pause or seek shelter, valuable time slips away.
To that end when I price an owner occupier trip I will always use a day rate with a projection of the amount of days it will take, should Percy the ships cat feel a little off his food, at least I am getting paid whilst sitting in harbour, during his counseling and recovery period. I mention this only (we had no cat) as it was a factor that was relevant as we made our next play.
Motoring at 7.5 knots along the south coast of Sicily in flat calm conditions we knew the weather would not remain benign for long. Shortly after passing to the West of Sicily, we would be hit with a North-westerly gale, just where most of the Mediterranean shipping concentrates on its way to Suez or Gibraltar. Assuming you don’t get mown down, the next consideration after passing Tunisia would be having Algeria as a lee shore, if conditions deteriorated or we had a major equipment failure, I know nothing about what sort of reception we would receive or indeed was there anywhere suitable to stop.
Tunisia however is very welcoming to visiting yachts but then you have the palaver of clearing in and out again, not to mention the 140-mile detour off our course. We could of course pull in somewhere in Sicily, were it not for Schengen issues. You are permitted to shelter at anchor in Italian waters under force Majure rules, however that meant contacting the relevant authority by VHF, explaining our situation and being directed to a safe anchorage. I tend to view the VHF as a school headmaster, essential but best avoided if possible (I’m a headmaster’s son).
In the end we settled on anchoring behind the island of Marettimo, the most westerly of the little archipelago to the Northwest of Scilly. Big enough to block the weather and hopefully small enough not to have immigration officials with binoculars.
With an hour or so to our arrival, as we picked our way through an armada of little fishing boats, we fired up the water maker, not because we needed water but it was a new toy so you kinda have to.
I was thinking about a bloody awful trip I had through this area mid-winter when I was in my early twenties and the wind was in its late thirties. Evidenced by having been a dinosaur foot path back in the day, this stretch of water is shallow. Memories of a big winter gale, tons of shipping and a truly dangerous sea state, I was definitely keen to get out of this neighborhood.
“Fire,” the shout snapped me out of my reverie, Aillee was pointing to the starboard engine hatch where smoke was squeezing out. Conventional wisdom suggests keeping hatches closed during an engine fire and letting it burn until it starves of oxygen and extinguishes itself. Bollocks to that, I threw open the hatch and although we had a lot of smoke, no flames were apparent. It was quite odd because we only had the port engine running, so the engine was an unlikely source. Further investigation showed that the primary electric pump for the water maker had got bored of producing water and was now a smoke machine.
After we had ventilated and shut everything up again, we somberly continued to our anchorage with an unspoken ‘what did you guys do wrong in the installation hanging in the air.’ Nami set about cooking as the boys went for a swim, Aillee passed tools to me and I tried to find out what had indeed gone wrong. Fortunately, George and Pablo who had installed it were in the clear, one of the brackets that hold the electric brushes inside on the motor had snapped a weld, got mangled and caused a short, the source of the smoke. The fix was a new motor and more parsimonious use of water for the rest of the trip.
As the gang got on with all of the at anchor stuff, I sat with a cup of coffee and a fag, trying to riddle my way through the next week of weather, for sure it was going to be a long leg.
It is about 700NM from Scilly to the bottom right-hand corner of Spain, roughly 4-5 days in normal weather. Predict Wind which had been faultless to date, told us we would have NW 25-30 knots imminent, which would veer North than North-east for a couple of days before going back to the West and blowing old boots for the foreseeable future. If we waited out the first North westerly, we would enjoy 2 days of fast passage making before getting slammed. Two days would put us halfway along the cost of Algeria with a long way to go.
In fairness, Gil took it quite well, he had just started to ingest a bit of animal, when I said that although the beach was lovely, the Venetian fort looked stunning in the setting sun and that it was definitely going to blow hard on the nose tonight, we had to leave. Delaying now would make it very unpleasant in three days’ time with no sensible way to avoid it. At least by having a quick stop where we did, we had gained some valuable ground to the North.
Anchor up and hammer down, course straight at where the sun had just disappeared, get as much rest as you can, for the next 24 hours were going to be bumpy. Not a difficult prediction, which certainly came true, treble reefed main sail and alternating engines every 3 hours gave us a very noisy, seriously uncomfortable time. The boat would leap from the crest of a wave before burying the lee bow into the face of the next one, stagger, shake and gain momentum again, simply put not nice. We made ground though, frequent checking of the interweb weather showed us that our efforts were not in vain, seeing our position in the darkest of the red bit was strangely comforting on the basis that this could be as bad as it gets.
Politics aside, Starlink proved invaluable, being able to access up-to-date weather allows you to make subtle alterations to your course, that no amount of staring at clouds would ever allow you to.
By evening of the following day, the wind had freed a bit and by morning we were back to motoring. The boat was equipped with Gori folding props which have an overdrive function, allowing you to decrease the engine revs whilst increasing propeller torque. In this way we could run with one engine, conserving fuel whilst giving a bit of a break if you are lucky, to the off watch in the aft cabins. If you are unlucky there is the possibility that your down time will coincide with the engine running on your side.
We were impatient for the strong easterly to arrive, not only for the easy miles it promised but for the opportunity to try out another new toy. Being a monohull sailor at heart I could never understand all of the hype about Parasail Spinnakers, it seemed like an awful lot of string to me. I understood the wing would afford a degree of stability, however I guess I’m just used to putting the kite up and rolling, bit like lighting the barbeque and it’s raining, it’s just the way it supposed to be. Having no pole, this thing just gets hoisted in a sock, the sheets run to the tip of each bow, yank up the sock and bang it sets, it is stable and gybing is a breeze, in fact you don’t really need to adjust or fret over it. We sailed with the Parasail for forty hours making 7-8 knots and I made coffee more often in that period, than touched a rope. I was kind of envious of the future Tradewind passages the guys would make, with this sail pulling them along for weeks on end, a brilliant piece of kit.
As Algeria prepared to handover to Morocco, we had to hand progress back over to an engine, squeezing the last miles out of the easy conditions in the dying breeze and by dawn it was back to 30 knots on the nose again.
Volumes have been very written about passage making to windward in heavy weather, but I find it difficult to write about. Sure, you can talk about the majesty of the sea, the vastness of the ocean, the discomfort, anxiety, and all of that, for me its just tedious shit, no way to big it up, just uncomfortable never-ending crap. A passing ship focusses all your attention from first appearing on AIS twenty-four miles in front until it slips astern and out of sight, wishing you could swap his fifty miles of progress for your ten. We clawed, battered, and banged our way over to the bottom right-hand corner of Spain, buoyed only by the approaching coast and the respite it would bring from the freight train waves which by this stage were all that our world consisted of.
What a difference a Spain makes, now with it 5miles to windward and 30 knots just forward of the beam, Blue Moon showed what she could do. Double reefed main, little blade of a jib she fairly took off, getting maximum lift from the lee daggerboard we enjoyed 10-14 knots of boat speed throughout the night, reveling in the flat water and not a little disappointed when the wind shut down as the sun came up.
This was day eight of our trip with about 140nm to Gibraltar and of course we had a decision to make. Our destination of Gibraltar was proving problematic (in this case to us, not to the Spanish!) Despite trying to reserve a marina space since departure, we were repeatedly, helpfully told ‘call again tomorrow,’ finally to be told there was no room at the inn. I got on the phone to a buddy in the industry who gave me the number of an agent who was much more positive. Come onto the fuel quay, take some diesel and once we had established a beach head as it were, he would get us in. He would also sort our paperwork, terrific chap who only wanted €500 bucks for his time, some of my mates move in different circles than me. Added to that €300 a night for a berth and the cost of flying from there, it all added up to making no sense. We could go to Algeciras on the other side of the runway, which serves as a border, they had room, sensible prices and you guessed it, Schengen.
I phoned another friend or more completely, Claire in the office and asked her to find a way to get me back to Greece without flying halfway around the world. Not 10min later, she had found a flight from Morocco connecting in Barcelona to Athens, happy days.
Now we knew where we were going, we just had to figure out how to get there. As the crow flies it was 140nm but our westerly wind was only on his lunch break and would soon become strong then very strong as we approached the bit where Europe is in touching distance of Africa in the straits of Gibraltar. None of us had the literal or metaphoric stomach for another 24hrs of self-flagellation so we chose a more circuitous route.
For the second time in 12 hours Blue Moon revealed another of her strengths. With almost literally one paw on the beach and both engines running hard, she could cover some miles. Five hundred metres to port we could see a very unpleasant sea developing and 100metres to starboard people on sunbeds, bizarre. In this fashion we flew up the Costa del Sol approaching Malaga just as the sun began to set, delighted with progress I went to bed to be ready for my overnight watch.
The girls Nami and Ailee had turned more south during their watch, and we were approaching the Northern anchorage area, which was busy. Not your immediate picture of what an anchorage should be, just an area out of the east-west traffic lanes, where it was shallow enough for a ship to drop her anchor. It spanned an area 10miles offshore and all the way to Gibraltar 20 miles away. As I mentioned it was busy, really busy and of course it started to get windy. Every direction was a blur of red, green and white navigation lights and slowly I tried to filter out what was relevant and what was not. Eventually I zoomed the radar / AIS down to two miles and ignored everything beyond that point. Coupled with a lot of wind and 3 knots of tidal flow, it made for the least boring watches of the trip.
Gil took over from me at 6am with twenty miles to go, which was nice, everything had settled down by then, so we drank coffee and enjoyed the satisfaction of a successful long passage. At the sound of the anchor chain rattling out, everyone arrived on deck bemused by rain then awe struck by the most perfect rainbow any of us had seen.
For sure as a family crew their confidence in themselves and their boat had grown massively as it should, they are a great unit and I was genuinely impressed with their very capable offshore boat.
6 weeks later, I heard from the gang, they had just left the Canaries enroute for the Cape Verde islands but hey as exoctic as that may be, it’s not a patch on Vliho boat yard in the rain!
Seasons greetings and thank you to one and all who support what we do at the Yacht Club. Guests, clients, staff, family & friends and without all of you this would be a very dull place, see you next year.
