Mila sailing äround somewhere

We had a nice overnight downwind sail from Barbados to Grenada. It was the last one so far as we headed North in the last weeks and with the prevailing Northeasterlies right now this means sailing close-hauled most of the time.

The day we arrived in Grenada, our friend Andreas joined us for three weeks.

We took a minivan with a totally crazy driver to visit the Seven Sisters waterfalls on Grenada. While I’m probably not a slow driver myself, I was really impressed by the speed of this minivan that was completely filled with about 15-20 people. After several experiences like this I start to get the impression that being on land and in a car is possibly the most dangerous thing about a circumnavigation.

Luckily, we made it to the falls without dying and had a nice hike through the woods. On the way back, we got visited by some monkeys that obviously liked climbing on humans very much.

After three days in the marina we were finished with hanging out in the pool, doing the laundry, filling up on water and food and so we went out to the anchorage. While we do have a good, oversized anchor and a heavy oversized chain as we need to have a reliable anchoring system, we had some problems getting our anchor to grip in the St. George anchorage. We tried to find a usable spot for six times but the but never hit a spot with enough sand. The next idea was to dive down and carry the anchor to a better spot, but we were not able to make it all the way down to the six to seven meters depth. Obviously, we do need more diving practice. So far, we are only able to go down about four to five meters.  So we just decided to leave it as it is and not leave the boat alone for a longer period of time.

From Grenada, we did an overnight sail to Canouan which is a small island of the Grenadines. It is mostly known for its two luxury resorts for tourists with a lot of money (hotel rooms start at 350€ per night) that come to the island with a small plane and then just stay inside their resort for the whole holiday. Which is a shame, because the rest of Canouan is absolutely beautiful. People are very friendly, and there are loads of turtles, wild dogs, chicken and other animals walking freely around the island. One evening, we went to a party club on the island (probably the only one) and had a nice evening with the locals with cold beer, good food, a live band, karaoke and local comedians.

 

After three days, we headed over to the Tobago Cays, which is a group of uninhabitated islands with an outside reef protecting them from the atlantic swell. We were unsure about going there because this spot is known for being very crowded and there have been some thefts last year, but we decided to go there and it was totally worth it. There were a lot of boats especially in the small anchorage between the main islands, but there was enough space outside to find a cozy anchor place for Mila.

We went snorkeling every day and saw a lot of fish, turtles (some were quite big), stingrays, and a water snake.

One evening, we made friends with six german guys that sailed a charter catamaran. They invited us over for a nice dinner and some beer, and when we met them again on Martinique before they went back home they kindly gave us their leftovers of food and drink.

Next, we headed north again and had another overnight sail to Martinique. Because Andreas had to get to Guadeloupe in time to make it to his flight back home, we did not stay long. Teresa went for a run to see a little bit of the island, but other than that we mainly went to Martinique for provisioning, and bought two shopping carts of food and drinks in the first big supermarket with acceptable prices since we left Gran Canaria in December last year. We only took a short trip with the dinghy into the mangroves and saw some birds and a lot of crabs everywhere.

And now we’re on Guadeloupe, where Andreas left us this morning to get back home. We’ll be on our own for some days and then Teresas mother will join us.

Yesterday, we went out for Carnival, which started a little bit boring in the beginning but then got very interesting later in the night. In the end, we just joined one of the groups and walked through Pointe-a-Pitre with them. As it is quite a long walk from the city center to the marina, we tried to get a cab but this turned out to be impossible as cab drivers were either all asleep or probably all drunk. Which was not bad in the end, because in the end we found a way to get back to Mila much faster than with a cab, we just asked one of the powerboat guys that was in the process of leaving if he can take us with him and so we were back in less than two minutes thanks to his dual 250hp outboards.

So for now, nearly everything is great onboard Mila. The only problematic thing right now is our dinghy, which is a cheap roll-up-inflatable that is just not up to the task of being used daily and transporting stuff through a choppy anchorage. Everything on board gets completely wet if there is a minimal amount of waves and the transom started to break apart and can’t take the forces of our 5hp outboard anymore. So we are currently planning to get a new one as soon as possible and it will probably be an aluminium RIB that is quite expensive but much more appropriate for us than the current one.

written by Lukas

On december 27 we left Gran Canaria for Cape Verde. There was still a lot of sand in the air, so almost no sun and moon visible. We spend a very relaxed New Years Eve at sea, just had a bottle of sparkling wine and continued with our shifts apart from that. The young crews of cargo ships were going crazy on the VHF playing party music and exchanging new years wishes during the night. We had a bird visiting for 3 days, occupying all the floor space in the galley. We arrived in Mindelo on São Vicente after 6.5 days. After going to the immigration office we had some welcome beers in the floating harbour bar with the crews of Paloma, Mira Polaris and Isis. We liked the atmosphere of Mindelo a lot. There was a good live band playing in almost every bar and sometimes outdoors and most of the Cape Verdeans are happy and friendly people.

Provisioning for the big crossing ahead of us was a little bit tricky as the supermarkets had only limited amount of food available and almost no vegetables and fruits. For that we had to go to the market, were it was difficult to get a good deal without speaking Portuguese. Lukas had problems buying fresh meat. Pretty much only fish was available. As the water quality in the harbour pipes was not the best, we stocked up on 35 five liters canisters of water. The good thing was that the supermarket had a very uncomplicated system of delivery. An employee just accompanied us to the marina with the shopping carts and took them back after unloading.

One day we went for a hike with some sailor friends on the neighbour island Santo Antão. We got up awfully early, caught the ferry at 7am and then jumped on a minivan to go up to a volcano and hiked down to the coast from there. The landscape changed a lot from being quite dry up in the volcano to super green and full of exotic plants when we went further down the valley. For the first time we saw banana palms, papaya trees, coffee trees, huge fields of sugarcane and many more. The vegetation on São Vicente is a lot more barren then the one on this island. We came trough little villages of the farmers and I managed to buy a papaya directly from the source. It was a wonderful day, when we arrived on the coast we were all exhausted and found a cozy art cafe, where we had some great typical Cape Verdean food. We waited so long for it that we almost missed the last ferry back to our island. The very laid back owner kept telling us not to worry and organized a faster minivan driver for us so we could enjoy our food. We were lucky that the ferry was delayed.

After one very frustrating day of boat projects, a visit to the beach in Calhau, a nice barbeque on the pier with vegetables and fish from the market, some uno and drinks with the other crews, some more exploring of Mindelos nightlife, and some final provisioning, we decided it was time to go sailing for real and cross the Atlantic.

We left on January 11 some hours after Paloma. We already had about 20 knots of wind in the marina and dented our bathing ladder while getting out of our berth. In the acceleration zone between the islands we had about 30 knots of wind for a time. In the first night we had a hard time sailing because the wind behind the islands was not consistent at all, changing directions and sometimes dying completely. After sunrise the wind settled and we had about 20 knots from the East. We were starting to feel comfortable until I discovered that our beloved Booster had torn apart. I tried to tape it and sew it and gave up when I realized that we didn’t have enough repair tape onboard. We decided to postpone the repair until we had the right material. So we set our genua and still made a good speed of around 5 knots. On the next day we overtook the Paloma. When we were next to them, both boats caught a mahi mahi. As the fish was 95 cm long and I don’t eat fish, Lukas had some problems eating all of it.

On the next day we made 138 nautical miles with the boomed out genua and the boomed out jib. Every night flying fish were landing on the foredeck and in the cockpit. Whenever we heard a noise followed by some flapping we knew what happened, I got a torch and a glove and hurried outside to throw the little fella back into the water. About every second night I baked a bread or some buns in our omnia oven. The rest of the time we spend reading, watching stars and films, cooking, eating, washing up, taking deck showers, cleaning the boat, sunbathing, sleeping, playing guitar, fishing, snoozing, writing messages on our satphone and occasionally chatting to other boats on the radio. The days seemed quite short and resembled each other. Actually we did not have to do a lot during the crossing as we did not get hit by a single squall. Just sometimes a little bit of rain, but no wind gusts at all. We were a little bit disapointed that the sky was quite overcast for most of the time, but that got better in the second half. On January 20 we made half of the way, so I allowed us the last two beers that I had hidden to save them for that occasion. Thereafter we had two days of light wind, which made us miss our booster. At one time we needed to take in the sails and run the engine for a couple of hours. We did 6 hours shifts during the day and 4 hour during the night. When we approached Barbados on the 28th the wind increased and we had 20 knots again.

We had to come into the deepwater harbour of Bridgetown to clear in. That one is build for the huge cruise ships and was very bad to Mila and got her some black strains on the side because our fenders were too small for the gaps in the wall. Fortunately it didn’t take very long to get the formalities over with. We then went out to the anchorage in Carlisle Bay and dropped our anchor close to the Norwegian boat Isis. We were overwhelmed by the bright turquoise colour of the water close to the beach. The beach is quite noisy with some beach bars on it, jet skies, horse riding, these rocket thingies that I just know from the videos at McFit, ah flyboards they are called. We noticed that the sun was more intense here and both got our first sunburn on the trip. On the left side of the bay is a channel, which is convenient for driving into town with the dinghy. Landing on the beach is a bit hard due to the surf. We noticed that food is extremely expensive on Barbados. Now we are dividing our time between boat work and having fun, like we always do. On the fun side we went out with the dinghy to look for turtles. Didn’t see any yet, but instead we found a huge wreck with some interesting fish hovering over it, which was definately the highlight of our snorkeling experiences so far.

It has been quite a while since our last blog post, but we didn’t come as far as we planned due to several technical problems. Instead of being on the atlantic crossing right now, we are still on Gran Canaria and hope to finally be able to leave for Cape Verdes tomorrow. But no worries, we have the time.

After some more days on Lanzarote with more exploring of this fascinating island, we did a small leg south to Isla de Lobos, which is a small unpopulated island north of Fuerteventura. We stayed for two days in a quite nice but unsheltered anchorage with clear water in front of a lagoon until the wind direction shifted and it got too uncomfortable due to waves coming in.

At high water it is possible to enter the lagoon by dinghy, and if you stay until low water you have to carry the dinghy over the rocks at the entrance. Luckily our dinghy is not that heavy at 32kg without the outboard, so we didn’t have to care too much about tides.

We tried some snorkeling in the lagoon which was refreshing but not as interesting as we hoped because the water in there was not as clear as outside in the anchorage. We would have loved to go snorkeling there, as we could even see a big stingray hovering over the ground behind Mila, but the currents between Isla de Lobos and Fuerteventura were to strong to go in the water.

So we went on to Gran Canaria and did an overnight upwind sail to Las Palmas. I was really looking forward to sailing upwind again, because we had not done this for such a long time, only boring relaxing downwind sailing. Well, when we went out and the wind increased to 30 knots, i quickly remembered why no one loves upwind sailing. It was exhausting as it always is, but we did fine and arrived in the Las Palmas anchorage in the late morning.

We decided to stay there for some time and get some repairs done. After 3000nm several of our sails (the main, the large genoa and the booster) had smaller problems and we found a sailmaker who did good work (as far as we know until now) for a fair price. So if you need any sailwork done on your boat, go to Sunny’s yacht service in Las Palmas. He is a bulgarian guy and former circumnavigator who is living on his boat and has a loft for sailwork, canvas work and steel welding.

We also finally installed our second water tank, now we have 200L of water which lasts quite a long time when only used for cooking and drinking. While this project went unexpectedly well, our now completed freshwater system lasted only for two days, then our freshwater pump (that we installed new in spring 2015) failed shortly before we wanted to leave to Cape Verdes. Knowing about the situation there for spare parts we decided to order a new pump in Las Palmas and wait for it to arrive. The old pump still pumps, but the pressure sensor that stops the pump when the taps are closed stopped to work. So we ordered exactly the same pump and if this one will break again we hopefully will be able to built a working pump out of two broken ones.

When the pump finally arrived, there were only some days left until Teresas 30th birthday, so we decided to stay longer to celebrate with the several people we got to know in Las Palmas or knew from Portugal and Morocco.

We had a really nice party with sailors from Sweden, Norway, Chile, Canada and Germany with loads of beer and Gin Tonic. Even if the two of us are all in all 60 years old now, the celebrations lasted the whole night until it was 6:30 in the morning.

We also decided to rent a car again to expore Gran Canaria. This works really nice on the Canaries, you simply go to the car rental, fill out a paper and then you get a car for a nice price. We paid even less than on Lanzarote, 26€ for 24 hours including unlimited kilometers and with complete insurance coverage.

We used the car to go south fast on the highway near the coast, visited Maspalomas which is very touristy and then went back to the north over the center of the island, with very small streets through the mountains.

Several days later we finally completed all preparations for doing the 850nm trip to Cape Verdes. We went to a supermarket that offered delivery to the harbour and bought provisions for 350€, filled up on Diesel, Gas and Water and set sail to Mindelo, Cape Verdes.

Or, at least this destination was the plan. When we left the Las Palmas anchorage wind speeds increased and due to this the load on the steering system also increased, which is normally no problem. But this day, we heard a strange squeaking noise coming from the steering system that we never heard before. While the weel steering worked as expected and we have an emergency tiller if it ever stops to do so, we decided to head back in to Pasito Blanco on the south end of Gran Canaria to find out what is wrong.

The next morning, i started disassembling the whole system. The steering wheel turns a chain that is connected to a steel wire that finally moves the rudder. There are several pulleys that guide the steel wire to the rudder, and i noticed that one of the pulleys was not aligned correctly. As there was some paint over the pulley mount, it must have been like this for a long time or even from factory. So i removed all the pulleys and had a close look at them and noticed that the shaft of the misaligned pulley had a lot of wear due to the sideways loading.

While this 20mm shaft that was worn down to about 18mm probably would have lasted for quite a long time, we decided to sort this problem out properly as we already had all the parts removed. The next day, i took the folding bike and found an ancient metal workshop run by a guy from Cuba below a shopping mall. He made us two new shafts (so now we have one as a spare) for 20€. We put everything back together and now the squeaking stopped, even when putting load on the rudder.

So we were ready to leave again, but this time the weather didn’t want us to. We had quite strong winds in the last days which at first made it impossible to back out of our very tight slip and then brought loads of very fine sand dust from the Sahara. This is called Calima and looks like being a quite common thing on the Canaries. Everything is covered in dust and when going out, it takes only some minutes until your eyes and throat start to hurt. Not the best conditions for going out on a boat like ours where you have to be outside to see anything in forward direction.

So we celebrated christmas in Pasito Blanco inside the boat and had a nice christmas dinner with homemade german potato salad with a recipe of Teresas mother. And i got a new haircut.

 

Today, the Calima winds started decreasing. The air was still a little bit hard to breathe but much better than yesterday. So we went out to the Maspalomas Dunes to take the obligatory handstand picture.

Hopefully we can leave for Cape Verdes tomorrow. We’ll probably spend New Years eve at sea then but we are looking forward to that.

Oh, and i forgot: Somewhere in between first one of my cameras died and then my phone died. Both items are replaced now but it was quite a hassle to find acceptable replacements.  Experienced long distance-sailors say long distance-sailing means repairing your boat in the most beautiful places of the world. We start to get strong believers in this thesis. And we like it.

Written by Lukas

We stayed in Oeiras for quite some more time, enjoying the heavily floured buns from the marina for 13 days. The reason was that we decided to sail to Morocco instead of Madeira and therefore needed a steady North. When it was finally there, we still had to wait for a packet with some spare parts from SVB in Germany. The good thing was that we could celebrate Lukas birthday with all our boat friends with a nice bonfire at the beach. Also we bought a foldable bike in Lisbon, which made us so much more mobile. Sadly we had to say goodbye to Landkrabbene and Rosanna. And also to Oda, whom we only met one evening. She is sailing to Australia on her own, quite impressive!

Finally our packet arrived and we left the harbour with Tuuli, which also was going to Morroco. We were very happy to be out at sea again. We had the best sail ever, with 10-18 knots from behind, perfect for our booster.

In the evening of the the third day we arrived in Mohammedia. The harbour was quite full, we had to go alongside to a Moroccan boat that lay at the end of the pier. The harbour master sent us to the immigration office. We were surprised that the officer there kept our passports and the boat papers. When we came back to the marina the harbour master told us to wait for the harbour master of the outer harbour, where the big container ships are docked. So we waited in his office, watching some Moroccan television. When he came he told us that we have to pay 26€ per day for being in the big harbour plus 4€ for the facilities of the marina, a hot shower and wifi in front of the building. We were quite shocked about that price as we expected something close to 13€, like we read it in the internet. But apparently they changed the fees a bit since 2004. We were told that the customs officer would visit us in the morning. So we tidied up the boat and were not sure if we should hide some of our booze or just be honest about it. We have not really found clear information about how much alcohol you are allowed to import. In the end we settled for being honest if they asked about it.

We got up at 10 in the morning and thought the customs guy would arrive every minute. But instead another guy from the marina arrived and told us to go alongside another boat and not be so much in the way for the fishers anymore. Another German boat shortly came alongside us. After some hours we saw a very official looking guy with an uniform heading for us. That was the customs officer. He requested to see our boat papers and passports. When we told him we had to leave them at the police station he said he will come back with the police officer. We waited some more and saw that all the boats that arrived after us got their clearance before us. So we asked him. Then apparently he had lost interest and told us we were free to go. Oh, in the meantime also a guy from the coastguard came over and wanted to see our papers. Well, we wanted to take the train to Rabat, so Kristy and Thomas from Tuuli and Lukas and I went to the police office and got our passports and a 3 day Visa which we had to show to the guards at the barrier and after just 3 hours we were able to leave the harbour. The street was scattered with feathers and smelled of blood. We manged to find the train station, which was very modern. In Rabat we strolled over a market and stood a little bit too long on a crossing checking our phones to decide which way to take. Suddenly we had a guide who took us to a beautiful cemetary at the sea and showed us the medina. Well the thing about „don’t worry about it, you just pay what you want“ was more like „pay at least 30€ or you are a very bad person, most people pay 50€“ Before catching the train back to Mohammedia we ate some tagine and drank some awesome coffe in a restaurant. The tagine is a kind of stew served very hot in a clay pot. That restaurant even had a vegetarian option.

In the evening of the next day Tuuli and Mila left the very noisy harbour of Mohammedia to El Jadida. Unfortunately we had no wind so we had to use the engine for the whole trip. When I tried to talk to the harbour master of El Jadida on the radio I got no reply, I guess women are just ignored on the Moroccan radio. At least we could hear his conversation with Thomas so we understood that we were supposed to anchor just under a fort in the harbour. The Royal Yacht Club of El Jadida consists of 3 little boats rotting away on a pier. There were no showers or toilets, no wifi and we had to pay 26€ just for anchoring. Quite a difference to what you pay for food there, 90 cents for a sandwich and fries. The harbour was crowded with traditional fishing boats and we felt a little displaced with our yacht there. Even tough the water smelled like fish some children swam around in the harbour circling Tuuli and Mila. The city of El Jadida was less touristic than Rabat.

The next day Kristy and I took a train to Casablanca in order to visit the Hassan ll Mosque, one of very few mosques you are allowed to enter as a non-Muslim. It was an impressive builing and we learned a bit about the Islamic culture on the tour. As we did not feel like going trough another struggle with all the authorities in the next harbour we decided to leave Morocco and head for Lanzarote next. We were definately glad that we visited the country and had a lot of impressions to process on our next passage. And also I had some amazing sugarcane and pomegranates to nibble on.

When we approached Lanzarote after 3 days at sea we decided to first visit the Isla La Graciosa north of Lanzarote so we could arrive in daylight. The island is just about 29 squarekilometers big and looks like a mini desert with three volcanoes on it. It has no ashalted roads and just one village, the other village just consists of holiday houses. We climbed up one of the craters and went for some swimming and snorkeling in the superclear water. Also we had a very good pizza and some rum with honey for desert.

The next day we left for Arrecife on the eastcoast of Lanzarote. The water was so clear that we could see our shadow on the ground of the ocean in about 20 meters depth. The marina Lanzarote is huge and very convenient, it has lots of shops and restaurants. There is a Burger King directly at the gate of our pier. So it is kind of hard to keep Lukas from going there at least once every day. We rented a car and explored the island. Visited some caves and looked down from the cliffs that we saw from La Graciosa. The next day Lukas drove me to the Timanfaya National Park, I took a bus tour through the volcanoes there and ran 29 km back to Arrecife. Especially the first part of the track was very beautiful with the black lava fields. It was interesting to see how the farmers here are cultivating plants on the black lava sand.

Yesterday we found the courage to restart our project watertank. Since we found out in Hohensaaten that we couldn’t stop them from leaking, we have been using water canisters. We ordered new tanks to a shipyard in Oeiras and have been driving them around since then. We managed to install one of them and for once it worked, not leaking… yet. Big day for Mila and us. Let’s see when we will find the courage for the next tank.

Today we want to leave the marina and go to anchor somewhere close before we proceed to Fuerteventura.

(It’s possible to click on the pictures now for a bigger version)

To sum up the last weeks, we were a little bit lazy and just did some short passages down the Portuguese coast. Nearly all Portuguese harbours are in river entrances and can get quite rough even with moderate winds because the Atlantic swell works against the river and tidal currents.

We had some great days in Porto with crews from other boats and our friend Moritz who joined us from Povoa de Varzim to Peniche. We explored the city, had an exceptionally good sushi and did a Port wine tasting that was included in the marina fee.

After some days we headed south to Aveiro and anchored in the nearby Sao Jacinto anchoring bight, because there is a high voltage cable crossing the river that goes to the Aveiro Marina. According to our charts the minimum height below the cable is 18m, but as Mila has a height of nearly 17m including the VHF antenna we decided not to try out the accuracy of the given cable height.

The entrance to the river delta was quite rough although there was nearly no wind and only about 2m of swell outside in the deeper water. But as we approached the shallower entrance the waves got steeper and quite chaotic. It didn’t help that we arrived exactly between high and low tide. When we walked to the entrance the next day at high water the conditions were a lot calmer.

Going to Sao Jacinto turned out to be a wise decision, because it is an interesting place that is much less touristy than Aveiro. We were the only boat in the anchorage at first, and then another french boat joined us. We went to the only existing bar in the village, which was only populated by locals and had two nice evenings with cheap beer and funny karaoke singers. As this was the only place to go to there were people of all ages, and on the second evening we noticed that there were not only exactly the same people but they even sat in exactly the same spot. So we wondered whose spot we occupied…

Moritz and me went to a fish restaurant and I ordered grilled sardines and got a delicious plate of six of them. This has been the first time in my life that I ordered fish in a restaurant and was not able to eat all of it, but fortunately Moritz was able to help.

From Sao Jacinto we went to Peniche and originally planned to visit the Berlengas Island which is about 5 nautical miles west of Peniche. But this island has no harbour and there was to much swell to use the dinghy to get to land, so we just motored around the island and then went to Peniche.

When we arrived we were welcomed by the norwegian girls of Paloma which we already knew from Porto. We had told them before that we are really sad about not being able to make pizza on board because we don’t have an oven and so they invited us over for a really nice pizza dinner.

We stayed for some days and walked around the peninsula, went for a swim and to a local bar. The weather was changing a lot between warm sunshine, strong rainshowers and extremely thick fog.

Next stop was Cascais in the Tejo river nearby Lisboa. We didn’t like this town as it is a rich people’s area and so were the prices in the harbour, not only the high marina fee but also 13€ for using the washing machine and the dryer. Because of the conditions on the river we had to stay some days but then went on to Oeiras closer to Lisboa as soon as possible.

Approaching Oeiras was as rough as the other Portuguese river approaches, but this time we had a funny encounter with a portuguese submarine warship. We arrived in the darkness and the submarine was black, had no AIS transponder, the wrong navigational lights (actually it had the lights that a sailboat shows when sailing without the engine running and therefore having the right of way). The lights were mounted so low that i saw the boat at first when it was only about 50-60m away. But all went fine, probably they saw us much earlier and kept clear of us.

In Oeiras we met up again with some of the other boats. The marina has its own pool that is naturally only open during daytime but as we decided that all of us are in need of a swim in the late night we unfortunately misunderstood the pool area fence for a pool area boarding ladder. This worked quite well for about 10 minutes until the very relaxed pool guard arrived. He approached in normal Portuguese guard pace (means extremely slow) and friendly informed us that the pool is closed till the next morning. So we went back over the pool area boarding ladder and decided to go to the next beach for another swim and the usual bonfire.

In contrary to our original plans we decided not to head to Madeira next but go further south on the coast and then cross the strait of Gibraltar to go to Morocco. While Madeira would definitely have been nice too, we’re interested in going somewhere that is a little bit off the normal cruising routes, so we plan to visit El Jadida and Essaouira because those are the only harbours that we can enter with our 2m draft and do at least have some sort of small pier where a yacht can go to. After Morocco we will get back on our planned route and therefore sail to the Canaries.

Olá dear readers, I am sorry I did not write my blogpost sooner, we were too busy enjoying our life the last weeks and I never found the time.

We have a new crewmember since sunday, our friend Moritz came from Berlin. I’m pretty sure he will catch a fish before Lukas, who still caught nothing but some seaweed and a bird. But more about that later.
About three weeks ago we left Mila all alone in the harbour in Brest and went to Berlin with the Flixbus, which only cost us about 60€ per person but was of course extremely uncomfortable. It took about 22 hours, with a little break in Paris.
We were happy to meet our families and friends and to have some drinks in our favourite bar, the Flop. On the 25th I ran my first marathon in 3:56. Five days went over really fast and then we headed back to Brest to continue our journey. It was a strange feeling to return to the harbour, like dropping into a completely different life again.
After we made sure everything on the boat was fine we drove to Camaret sur mer, just 11 nautical miles from Brest. We arrived in the dark and I was super tired from the travelling but Lukas convinced me that we should go to the Irish pub and eat a pizza and drink some pints. When we arrived there it was too late for pizza sadly, so we just had the beers and watched the barkeepers’ impressing games of darts.
Camaret is much more charming than Brest. We were especially fond of the ancient ships rusting away on the side of the harbour.

The next morning we got visited by some customs officers that were anchoring in front of the harbour. As they were a lot of officers coming to watch one guy filling out some forms Lukas didn’t invite them inside but let them sit outside in the rain. Fortunately they still found nothing to complain about. So we paid the harbour fee, got some water in our canisters and bunkered 150 liters of diesel for the crossing of the Bay of Biscay.
Due to our detour to Berlin we couldn’t cross it together with Tuuli and all the other boats with young crews that they met in Camaret, so we went on our own.
The leg started pleasant with about 10 knots and a crazy crowd of dolphins hunting for jumping fish around us in the first night.
The next night was less pleasant with about 35 knots in the peaks. We sailed through it with just the jib up and were racing along with up to 8,4 knots. I took this photo the next morning, when the waves already got smaller.

In the evening the wind died and we had to use the engine until the harbour. It took us 63 hours from Camaret sur Mer in France to A Coruña in Spain.

In A Coruña we had a great time partying with sailors from Norway, England, Sweden, Germany/US, Belgium, South Norway. One evening we tried to fit 12 people into a tapas bar.
For sobering out Lukas and I wanted to visit the Hercules tower, which is situated on a cliff north of the marina. The tower was already closed when we arrived there, but the view from the cliffs below the tower was amazing enough anyways.

We also got out our snorkeling gear and went for a dive with Sigurd and Tobias from the Landkrabbene. It was fun, although the water was too agitated to see anything.

When we had enough of A Coruña we left the harbour together with the sail boats Tuuli, Rosanna, Landkrabbene, Divina Remi and Danae. We were starting a bit later than the others because we had to get some diesel in the morning. I am proud to say that we still arrived in the bay of Camariñas first 🙂 Our colourful booster did a great job in the steady wind from the north, driving us forward really fast.

Oh, almost forgot the fishing story. Lukas came to wake me up for my shift and suddenly we heard the fishing rod making sounds outside. When we rushed out we discovered it was a big bird, we think a kind of grey gannet that bit on the rubber octopus Lukas was fishing with on the surface.
My stomach flipped over at the thought of Lukas having to pull out the feathers of that bird, spill blood everywhere and eat it, because when it’s dead anyway you should at least eat what you caught. I helped him to carefully pull the heavy bird onto the boat, trying not to break its neck. When it sat there in the net in the back of the boat it was alive and we saw that it spat out the lure already so we didn’t have to risk our fingers getting near its sharp bead. We got him back to the water as quickly as possible and were extremely releaved to see him fly away. Unfortunately there was no time to take a picture for the blog. After we were not shaking anymore Lukas started fishing again with a heavier lure, that was not staying on the surface. And … had bad luck again. The reel broke when he caught a giant bulk of seaweed. I have to confess that I was happy he wasn’t able to fish for some time then until he bought a new reel.

All the boats were anchoring next to each other in the bay in Camariñas and we had two nice campfire evenings with two guitars on the surrounding beaches.

I also paddled into the river with my paddleboard and found a beautiful little beach just for myself. See here:

Lukas came by with the dinghy and we went for an exploration up the river. It was really interesting to see the colour of the water changing from the shallow mouth towards the inland where it got a lot deeper. We could see a lot of fish under us in the clear water.

We pulled up the anchor on Saturday midday and had perfect sailing conditions until the Cape Fisterra, where the wind picked up a lot and we had to steer by hand as the windpilot started to steer a zigzag course which caused the boat to lean from one side to the other side in every wave which was slightly annoying.

In the evening the wind decreased a bit until it died completely. We had to use the engine and had some dolphins visiting us again in the dark. After a while a heavy fog appeared reducing the visability to about 30 meters. I started to sound the horn every two minutes making it impossible for Lukas to get any sleep. But as we still didn’t install our radar I was a little bit scared we might run into a boat without AIS. Luckily there were almost no ships around us except of some fishers. When we reached the harbour of Póvoa de Varzim in Portugal at 8 in the morning everything was still covered in fog and the harbour was filled with hundereds of mullets eating stuff on the surface of the water. We slept for a while and then visited the city centre to get some breakfast. We got breakfast and 4 pairs of shoes for 50€. And we also went to a Portuguese Lidl to restock our provisions. In the night Moritz arrived with the metro. The next day he had a walk in the city while Lukas tidyed up the boat and I went for my first run after the marathon.
Well, that was yesterday, in the afternoon we motored about 3 hours to Porto. When we arrived we were greeted by Emilie from a Norwegian Hallberg Rassy. Had some lovely cheese and port wine on a big new German boat without the Germans, but with an Irish guy and the Norwegian girls. When we moved to our boat we also conviced the Crew of the German boat Kobold to join us and in the end had about 11 people in the saloon heating up the air quite a bit 🙂
Was a really cool evening, thanks to everyone for making our first night in Porto awesome. We learned that it is really more communicative to park the boat with its butt to the pier, so that other sailors can see the home port, which is a great conversation opener.

Puh, I think I’m through now. As soon as Lukas is back from getting our outboard engine fixed we can finally go and explore the city.

Adiós for now, don’t let autumn get you down in Germany 😛
Well to be honest, sometimes temperatures are getting lower here as well, so it’s not the weather for t-shirts all the time anymore, actually I’m sitting in the cockpit at the moment with a blanket wrapped around me.

Our next leg from Saint-Germain-des-Vaux was to Guernsey. We were accompanied by the Tuulis (check out their website). We motored the whole way through the so-called “Race of Alderney”. It’s called like this because of the very strong currents that can occur due to the tide. But we arrived a little bit early and so the Race was not as exciting as we expected.

Shortly before we approached St. Peter-Port which is the main harbour of Guernsey we had a small thunderstorm coming along our way. Wind speeds increased from zero to nearly 40 knots in minutes and decreased shortly after we finished berthing, which went surprisingly well for those conditions.

The marina has a very motivated harbour master. We arrived in the middle of the night at about 3:30 and he instantly came over in his small dinghy and pointed us to the right berth.

Guernsey was the first “country” where we had to clear customs, but it’s a quite easy procedure. You simply have to fill out a form with all your personal and ship data (and list all alcoholic beverages and all vegetables and meat onboard) and then put the form into a postbox when leaving your boat for the first time.

 

The yacht harbour has a sill to keep the water inside at low tide. Tidal differences are quite high.

 

Guernsey was nice to visit but at least St. Peter-Port was not as interesting as we would have liked it to be. For me, the most remarkable thing was the extraordinarily good Burger Menu i ate.

 

We should have stayed for another night to explore the other parts of the island. Instead, we decided to continue Southwest and went back to France to Roscoff due to a very good weather forecast which turned out to be wrong, we had to use the engine most of the way.

Roscoff is a nice little city with stores that have a quite long lunch break, and when we decide to walk to the next supermarket we usually arrive five minutes after the beginning of this. So instead of cooking we went to a creperie and had some crepes and coffee. Afterwards, we went to a marine chandler and got some emergency parachute rockets. We would have liked to buy them before we started our journey, but in Germany you are not allowed to buy these without a special license. In France (and probably everywhere else on the world except Germany) you simply go to the store and buy the stuff.

We stayed in Roscoff for two days and went to the beach both days. The first day it was a nice relaxing stay, the second day it wasn’t, because we arrived at high tide and there was no beach any more.

 

From Roscoff, we had a nice relaxing sail to L’Aber Wrac’h. We had to sail close-hauled again and made really good progress due to the wave patterns. While our french boat that has been built in La Rochelle in the middle of the bay of biscay really struggles to go upwind in the short and steep waves of the baltic sea or the english channel, it works like a charm in those long and even Atlantic waves. We’ve had waves of probably two to three meters and it was a lot more relaxing than sailing against waves of less than one meter on the baltic sea.

The next leg was through the Chanel du Four to the Rade du Brest (Bay of Brest) where we’re at anchor now about four miles south of the city. We went there by dinghy today and explored the city center.

The next step will be crossing the bay of Biscay, and we hope to get nice weather for the whole passage (about 350 miles) in about a week.  It gets quite cold here now at night so we hope to be in the warmer south soon.

In Dover we stayed in the Tidal Harbour, which was with 30.80 pound the most expensive harbour on our trip so far. Unfortunately we were stuck there for 3 days, due to weak wind and fog. But during our stay we met the crew from sailing boat Milan. The skipper participated in the Tall Ship Race the year before and now also wants to cross the Atlantic. We could have seen them in Aalborg last year when we came back from our first vacation with Mila on the North Sea. We had a little bit too much Jägermeister from Helgoland with them.
We liked the promenade, with its yellow to orange stones on the beach and smooth pavement, perfect for longboarding. We didn’t like that you couldn’t even look down from the hill with the castle without paying the overpriced fee.

After some foggy days in Britain we were happy to get wind force 3 from South West on Tuesday, planning to sail to a wild anchorage in France and hopefully find the summer again.

On Friday midday we had to use the engine as the wind faded. After some hours one of the seals in our motor started leaking, so we searched for a Vetus Service nearby and it turned out one was on the Isle of Wight. Lukas was a little bit happy that he got to see this sailor’s mecca even though we wanted to skip it in order to get to the Bay of Biscay earlier.

We moored at Cowes Yacht Haven. A mechanic came aboard the next day and fixed the problem and also did the next engine service as it was due again.

The people from the marina wanted us to leave as soon as possible because the whole harbour was booked for the participants of a race. So we went to Osborne Bay just West of Cowes to anchor there. We had quite a bit of swell there but we were happy not to spend any money for some time after having to pay for the engine service. Over the phone payment, by the way, if someone from payleven is reading this 🙂 The bay is private property of the Queen, so we were not able to take the dinghy to land. We spend two relaxing days in the bay as the wind was too strong to continue our trip. Lukas tried to catch a fish and failed. I got the guitar out of the rear bunk and practiced a bit.

As soon as the wind decreased a little bit we pulled the anchor and drove to the western end of the Solent and out in the Needles Channel. The sea can be quite rough there when you don’t pass it in high tide, it was not too bad when we went through.

After about 16 hours we arrived at 8 in the morning in a cosy little bay in Saint-Germain-des-Vaux. We slept for some hours and then took the dinghy to shore in order to explore the area. I went running for about 30 km on a beautiful track on the coast. Lukas bought some fish from one of the fishers, I stole some corn from the fields and we had a barbecue on the beach. Yesterday we visited the closest supermarket, which was 8 km away. Luckily the longboard carried the heavy stuff for us again, hill up and hill down and through tiny old villages.

We’ve been to Netherlands – France – Great Britain in the last days. While Belgium would have been nice to visit too, we decided to go to France directly and ended up in Dunkerque as the wind died and our fuel tank was nearly empty.

As we liked the beach we stayed for two days. Teresa took the opportunity to run 28km to Belgium and back. There are a lot of marine hardware stores and so we stocked up on fuel filters and oil filters. Unfortunately, Henning had to get back home from Dunkerque so now we’re on our own again.

Initially, we planned to go from Dunkerque to Isle Of Wight, but as the wind increased again we decided to stop at Calais. We arrived late at night and opposed to what we expected, there was nearly no ferry traffic. As the harbor only opens at high tide, we weren’t able to get in and stayed on a mooring buoy for the night. There was quite a lot of swell in the harbor but as the buoy was for free that was okay. At some times, it was impossible to have a can of beer standing on the table without holding it securely.

As the weather forecast predicted southwesterly winds with force 3 (about 10 knots), we decided to cross the english channel and then continue to sail west to Isle of Wight. But about half way of the crossing wind speeds increased and soon we found ourselves sailing close-hauled against force 8, we measured some wind gusts over 40 knots. So still no Isle of Wight for us, we’re in Dover now. And we’re having to eat massive amounts of eggs before they go bad. Very delicious!

So far, everything works great, except that we are wishing for more winds from the north or east. But considering the pilot charts for this area, those strong westerly winds seem to be normal.

We’ve sailed nearly 900 miles now and Mila works as we expect her to, except for a small leak (or leaks, who knows…) we haven’t found until now. When sailing close-hauled at force 5 or more our bilge pump removes about a small cup of water every hour. Nothing dramatic, but we would like to have a dry bilge.

Lukas

This is day 29 of our travel, we made 735 nautical miles and finally we have good wifi and some time to get started with the blog, thank you for your patience 🙂

We are in Stad aan Het Haringvliet at the moment, a little village south of Rotterdam.

What happened so far? Well, we untied our lines on August 1st in Hennigsdorf, thinking we would arrive at the Szczecin Lagoon in about 3 days. But as we arrived at the Hohensaaten locks, the water level of the Hohensaaten-Friedrichsthaler-Wasserstraße, the channel behind the locks, was too shallow for Mila’s 2m draught. So we waited there for 10 days and started to think we would never even get to the sea and just chill in Hohensaaten for 3 years. Luckily we got a cold beer delivery from our friend Andreas every few days and a visit from my brother, which made the waiting much less frustrating.

When the water level rose over 2 meters on August 12th we were thrilled to be able to go through the locks finally. We stopped in Mescherin for a night and arrived in Ueckermünde the day after. Mila became a real sailboat again when we stepped her mast. My parents came with their caravan for our farewell and helped us a lot with cooking food for us, picking up our bimini top from the sailmaker in Greifswald and driving us to Szczecin for provisioning. My brother visited us as well and helped us with connecting the solar panels and getting the boat ready for sailing.

 

 

We left Ueckermünde on August 17th and decided to sail directly to Kiel to make up for lost time. In Holtenau we took our friend Henning on board, who will spend 2 weeks with us on the boat. We drove through the Kiel Canal in one day and had to come alongside a group of 3 ships in Brunsbüttel. One of them wanted to leave the harbour at 5 in the morning, the other one at 9, tough night.

Next we headed to Cuxhaven, a nice and big harbour, which is quite expensive. We got the washing done, it was raining most of the time. Lukas made a pizza out of old buns in our Omnia oven. A seal was lying on the pier for half a day.

Our next stop was Amsterdam, where went to the Sixhaven. The city is beautiful and we really enjoyed watching the small boats having traffic jams and partying in the canals. So we decided to take our dinghy for a ride trough the canals on the next day. It’s been a lot of fun but turned out to be a bit difficult because in a lot of canals you are only allowed to go trough one way. Lukas and Henning dropped me off at the Van Gogh Museum.

In the night we departed for Stad aan Het Haringvliet where we met Kristy and Thomas from Sailboat Tuuli and had a great BBQ at the beach next to the harbour.

Our next stop will be France, probably Le Havre, let’s see what the wind will do with us.

Teresa