Spain and France

2 May 2002


At anchor in Porto Colom harbour. If you look closely you can see this is the Rhodesian flag hanging off the back of our boat. Later we got a British one.

After four months of getting to know our boat, testing ourselves and our capabilities as cruisers, and satisfied so far, I now felt ready and allowed Mike to take me further afield. Stopping in Palma for a brief visit, we sailed over to Andraitx on the east coast and spent three pleasant days there though there were no facilities for yachts not staying in a marina. In early May we set off on our longest sail yet, my first overnighter actually, to Barcelona on the Spanish mainland, in what we believed to be a good weather window with 10 to 15 knots of wind forecast. We have learned since then to take almost no notice whatsoever of weather forecasts. A few hours out of Andraitx, we hit a truly awful storm, very short lived, but quite shocking in its severity. The boat lay almost flat over, and being a bit new to this sailing lark I seriously thought we were going to flip right over. We didn’t, of course, but Mike nearly amputated his fingers in the foresail outhaul trying to reduce sail. A few hours later, there was no wind at all and we had to motor for a while – something Mike really hates – and then a few hours later another hefty storm blew up. It also poured with rain a lot of the way and was an exhausting trip all in all. I didn’t enjoy the night watches but didn’t get the opportunity to be bored as there was always too much going on. However, we had a large group of dolphins (who seemed to love the bad weather) swimming with us a lot of the way which cheered us up no end. We had discovered that storms in the Med can be vicious and very sudden.

Barcelona is a gorgeous city with loads of atmosphere, and I can understand why so many boats make it their wintering spot. There were loads of liveaboards there and we had a good time socially. The marina is set in the basin right in the centre of the city which is fantastic for the sailing community. Some marinas are set in extremely inconvenient locations and cruisers have to walk for miles to find any facilities.

After a week we left Barcelona and cruised north up the Spanish coast, perfecting the art of goose winging in between various pleasant anchorages until we reached the Bay of Roses, near the French border. In the Bay of Roses we went into a lovely place called Santa Marguerita which was like a mini Venice with lots of very shallow canals where we scraped our bottom for the first time. Mike accelerated the motor furiously and we churned up this huge brown muddy cloud around us. Nasty. We couldn’t find any sort of marina or official public area and realised we probably oughtn’t to be there, but it was getting dark and we really didn’t fancy trying to get out of there again. All the docks seemed to be private so we just parked on one and hoped for the best. Luckily for us, no one complained and we spent a quiet and peaceful night.

We got out early the next morning before anyone woke up and immediately set sail across the notorious Gulf de Lion. I’d heard many scary stories about storms, but we had a pleasant, uneventful overnight sail to Frioul Island, France. After a couple of days there we moved into the vieux port at Marseille. Having enquired prices from the private marinas, which were horribly high, and been refused by the municipal marina, we just tied up on a spare bit of dock.

Later that evening the port captain came by in his dinghy and asked what we were doing there. I explained in my best pidgin French that we couldn’t afford the private marinas and needed somewhere to stay. He was very nice. He said he was the night captain and we could remain there that night, but he would be back early in the morning and move us to a proper berth (at the very reasonable municipal prices) before the day captain came on duty, who he advised was a lot less obliging than himself. He didn’t ask for a bribe and we didn’t offer one, but were very grateful. True to his word, he moved us the next morning and we remained in the cheap municipal marina for a number of days getting various jobs done on Forever.

We had a couple of major problems with the main sheet traveller and the boom traveller. We met a charming and wonderfully helpful Frenchman called Josef at a sail loft who spent days with us and assisted in the repair of both. He took almost no payment from us and when we asked why he said that English sailors had been very good to him once and this was his turn to pay back. Weren’t we the lucky ones? Marseille was a nice lively city, and like Barcelona, is built round the harbour making it very convenient.

The entrance to Marseille Vieux Port.

Once all our repairs were done we went off cruising. The French coastline between Toulon and Marseille is dotted with calanques – long thin bays gouged into the coast – where one can anchor with a stern rope tied to the side. They were very picturesque and perfect at night once the endless round of tourist boats left. We took long walks in the hills above the calanques.

Summer had arrived by now and the weather was perfect. We loved France. Contrary to popular belief, the marinas were cheap (both Frioul Island and Marseille charged only E10 per night), and the anchoring was good (free of course). The people were friendly and the food, well – enough said.

24 June

Mike's daughter, my beautiful step-daughter, then 10 years old, came to join us for a two week holiday from South Africa. We anchored in the calanque Port Miou, a long (sometimes hot and tiring) walk to the picture perfect town of Cassis. We were lucky enough to make friends with a French boat Bigoudi IV with a daughter of a similar age and the two girls got along well. We cruised around that part of the coast and travelled with our French friends to Porquerolles in the Isle d'Hyeres, which is a fabulous cruising area near Toulon.

Melanie in the head - she was
delighted with the video camera.

A budding sailor!

After tearful goodbyes to Melanie, and Bigoudi IV, who were going on to Greece, we continued eastwards and stopped in the town of La Ciotat where we splashed out and bought ourselves a 2 h.p. Honda outboard for the dinghy (though Mike still preferred to row everywhere), a 1000 watt Honda generator (to charge the batteries and provide power when we wanted to watch videos), and a hand held GPS.

Going for a snorkel in the bay of Cassis. Spot the new outboard.

The French are a keen sailing nation. Children are taught to sail at a very young age.

We returned to Port d’Hyeres and met a French catamaran whose skipper introduced us to the electronic chart software “Maxsea”. Very impressed, we bought it for the frightening cost (for us) of E1000 including one chart of western Mediterranean and a nifty little connector so we could plug the GPS in. We discovered that individual charts thereafter were prohibitively expensive, so it seemed we had wasted our money somewhat. We most certainly could not afford to keep buying charts. However, the software was exciting and we were able to use the chart we had for our current cruise. Next stop Corsica.

Sharpening up our sailing skills

January 2002

Towards the end of January, we set off for Porto Colom on the south east coast, driven out of Palma by the sudden increase in marina fees for the ‘season’. Porto Colom is a quaint little fishing village situated in a secure natural harbour, where one could hang off a buoy in the harbour for a small fee and use the showers and facilities ashore. We bought a new (second hand) inflatable dinghy to replace ours which leaked, but had no outboard, so we (for we read Mike, as I just couldn’t row the damn thing straight!) kept fit rowing into shore every day.

Mike spent his days working with some of the men re-fibre glassing the hull of a boat, whilst I bought myself two huge plastic buckets and got to grips with the delights of hand washing all my laundry, there being no Launderette in the village. I would do the washing and rinsing in the shower block, using the slightly brackish water, then take it back to the boat and hang it out all over the rigging. Real sea gypsies! The posher marinas (which we rarely could afford) frowned upon this practice but we never let that worry us.

I found a small café that allowed one to use their computer as an internet café. Once again there was a small foreign cruising community, most of whom spoke English, and we soon made a few good friends with whom to share a glass of wine and a plate of tapas. Mike and I, being very much the new kids on the block unashamedly tapped our friends’ knowledge bank of the mysteries of the cruising world. There still seemed to be so much to learn.

Mike suffered three strokes some 19 years ago, and is now obliged to take the medication Warfarin every day to thin his blood, which doctors don’t like to prescribe without regular blood checks. However, we managed to find a friendly Spanish doctor at the village clinic and all the tests and pills were provided free on presentation of his E111 form. The doctors in the UK had increased his daily dosage quite considerably from when we were in Zimbabwe, which diagnosis Mike never fully accepted. He was so annoyed about it, he’d frequently ‘forget’ to take them at all, and it was an endless battle to get him to take the correct dosage.

We did quite a bit of cruising around the east and north coast of Majorca, sharpening up our sailing skills. We also took a five day sail to Minorca, anchoring in beautiful little calas and taking long walks in the country. The Balearics were lovely at that time of year. Sailing back from Minorca, we hit head winds all the way, and were now to discover that Forever did not sail well to windward. We spent all afternoon tacking, making what we thought was good solid progress, only to discover when looking at the map section of the GPS that we had simply been tacking back and forth on our own path, making no more than a couple of miles forward in several hours. It was all very dispiriting, and we eventually started the engine and motored all night, pitching uncomfortably into a strong head wind.

The problem is the sail system. On Forever both the main and jib have roller furling and you just don’t get a good sail shape. However, the benefits of roller furling are not to be denied, and as we planned to goose-wing around the world with trade winds following us, we hoped our inability to make good windward progress would not be too much of a problem.

Up until now we had been flirting with the idea of buying a small apartment in Majorca with the idea of renting it out and thereby earning a small income and we had done some serious property hunting. However, as we had spent rather too much of our very limited funds on the boat and would have ended up with too much of a mortgage, we eventually talked ourselves out of it and decided to keep our lives as simple as possible. Having a bad tenant to worry about when you are on the other side of the world seemed like more trouble than it was worth, and this was a decision we never regretted.

Forever in Palma

19 December 2001

I arrived in Palma late that December, where Mike was already living on Forever. I was laden with as much clothing as I could carry, my precious laptop, a colour printer and a brand new video camera. In those days we didn’t have a digital camera, regrettably, and most of the earlier photos I have included here (scant as they are) are stills taken off the digital camera. The quality from such a process is not good at the best of times, and made even worse by the fact that I was THE world's worst video camerawoman.

Mike had made a few friends prior to my arrival amongst the not inconsiderable English speaking live-aboard community in the marina and the next month passed in a pleasant daze making friends, getting used to the liveaboard life and getting to know our boat. We spent a boozy Christmas Eve on the yacht of another English couple with various fellow yachties and an assortment of landlubbers associated with the nautical world – boat surveyors, sail makers, riggers, brokers, charter company personnel, etc.

On Christmas day I successfully cooked a small chicken, roast potatoes and all the rest of it for a Christmas dinner. We swapped small gifts, but our best Christmas present was the arrival in the post from Devon the previous day of the large box containing all our bedding. Bliss, warm nights at last. On New Year’s Eve there was a fireworks display in Palma’s harbour – the best fireworks we have ever seen.

Mike was dead keen to head straight for Gibraltar and cross the Atlantic that December, but I put my foot down firmly and said I was not ready for that – not yet, and good thing I did, too. Our first attempts at sailing together were disastrous (in particular the in-mast roller furling main sail) and the less said about them the better. Suffice to say we finally, sort of, got the hang of it. Nonetheless, I remained very unsure of our competence to make an ocean crossing and persuaded Mike to wait another year. He agreed, reluctantly. Mike’s good friend from South Africa, Nick, came to visit for a week and we took him sailing along the coast to Santa Ponca for a night. He was politely complimentary, but I think our sailing skills left him a little green about the gills and he was relieved when we got to port.

The weather was mostly good – warm sunny days and cold nights. We found a restaurant, officially catering to the marina yard workers, that served a substantial and appetizing menu del dia, including wine, water and coffee for E6 a head. After such a lunch we would feel duty-bound to indulge in the delightful Spanish habit of siesta and duly retreat back to our bunks till early evening when life began again with enthusiasm. Now we understood why the liveaboard yachties weren’t early risers.

We loved Palma, an elegant, interesting, charming city. It is lively, vibrant and busy, a little dirty and smelly, and a very nice place to spend the winter, as there are few tourists and all the festivals occur then. On the night of the 5th of January the Three Kings arrived in Palma. They sailed into the harbour by yacht and arrived in the old town, all dressed up in their flowing robes. They then mounted camels and rode through the streets followed by all sort of fantastic floats and people in costumes playing music and throwing sweets to the children of the town. The streets were packed with folk, young and old. When the festivities finished and the Kings disappeared, the children went home and were given their Christmas presents on that night, not on Christmas Day.

Later there was the feast of San Sebastian, the patron saint of Palma. Every major Plaza was manned by musicians, all playing different types of music - jazz, pop, flamenco, reggae, and the rest. There were huge bonfires burning whilst thousands of Majorcans of all ages thronged the streets laughing and chattering, cooking sausages on the bonfires, drinking wine, flamenco dancing and singing along with the bands. It was an incredible evening.

We visited the beautiful old Moorish cathedral, the Almudaina Palace and the Arab Baths. One can ignore the rows of hotels and apartment blocks stretching along the main Esplanade and just concentrate on the fascinating old town which is situated right on the waterfront, a stone’s throw from the marina. You walk along these narrow cobbled streets lined by shabby walls interspersed with enormous metal doors, everything cracked and crumbling, dirty and overgrown with weeds and you think you must be in a poor part of the town. Then suddenly, there’s a door open, you peer in and see a whole different world; an enchanting courtyard, spacious and cool, with intricate mosaic tiles on the floor, a fountain and potted trees or shrubs, stone columns, elaborate arches and a sweeping staircase to the upper floors. It’s quite extraordinary. Outside, shabby and mean looking; inside, well tended and beautiful.

Here is our beloved Forever, our cosy little home for the next seven years:

Cockpit

Saloon

Fore Cabin

Aft Cabin - our cabin

Chart Table

Galley

The Head

Competent Crew

December 2001

Mike found the boat he wanted in one of the hundreds of sailing magazines he’d spent his idle hours drooling over. It was berthed in Majorca and though he hadn’t actually seen it - a Hallberg Rassy and therefore, in his opinion, the Rolls Royce of sailing boats - he put in an offer which was accepted. He then flew out to Palma to view and arrange a survey all of which, quite extraordinarily, went according to plan. I remained behind, again, and finished off the sale of the pub. I packed and posted to Palma what few items we could take with us, sold a little, binned the rest or sent it to charity (the village hall fund raiser did very well out of us that year) and then headed down to Southampton to do a five day ‘Competent Crew’ sailing course.

That was a load of laughs. I was the only woman on the course, sharing a small boat with five energetic male stoics. I felt very feeble. Actually I was very feeble. Not remotely stoical, I whined and whinged constantly about the cold. This was December in the Solent, fergawd’s sake, there was no heating at all on the boat and I nearly froze to death. Being the only woman I was given a small side berth, rather like a refrigerated coffin. The instructor, also our captain, took the other side berth which he valiantly claimed was quite snug. The four remaining men shared the main central cabin which also served as sitting cum dining room. By the time we all bunked down for the night a nice fug had built up and their combined breathing and snoring kept it relatively warm all night. Stumbling through to the head in the dead of night it took all my willpower not to crawl into bed with one of them. Had I still been a cute young chick I might just have risked it, but being the oldest person on board I judged it wisest not to.

Only two of us were at the competent crew level, the other three blokes were taking the Yacht Master course and the instructor naturally devoted most of his efforts to these worthy gentlemen. They were good guys, good sailors and happily they all passed. Me, I don’t think I really learned much except a few basic knots and how to make endless mugs of ‘Cup-a-Soup’.

We did many ‘Man Overboard’ manoeuvres – an important skill for any sailor, especially in those freezing waters. The instructor would hand control of the boat to each aspiring Master in turn then fling an old fender bound up with ropes over the side shouting “Man Overboard”! The appointed captain would allocate various jobs to each of his crew and I invariably got the easy job of keeping my eye on and pointing to the hapless m.o.b. When we’d circled round and come up on our man in the water, it was then my job to lean over the side clutching a boathook and hoist him back on board. They all thought it rather droll that I always got to ‘pick up the buoy!’ This job was relatively easily done in calm waters with five crew members, the ‘man’ being a rubber buoy with a convenient loop of rope attached. It would be a very different story if I were the only crew member left on board in heavy weather and the man in the water weighed 12 stone like Mike and was either injured or, worse still, unconscious.

I mentioned this to the instructor and he agreed soberly adding that, statistically speaking, if you did have the misfortune to fall overboard your chances of survival are very slim indeed. The most difficult part is getting the man out of the water and more than one sailor has drowned whilst his crew mates struggled to pull him back onto the deck. He went on to note that most dead bodies later retrieved had their flies undone indicating that the poor chap had been taking a pee over the side of the boat at the time he fell in. Women don’t seem to come into the statistics much, there not being that many women sailors, I guess. Even less that pee over the side.
Anyway, the moral of the story is: don’t fall overboard in the first place. Yup.

When I informed my fellow crew mates I was going sailing round the world with my husband, they asked what boat and when I said it was a Hallberg Rassy they all said “Aaahh – nice”. When I added that it was a 35 footer their smiles faded a little and the one said “snug”. It’s all about size with men.

Cap'n Pugwash

Captain Pugwash and his mate

There is nothing unique or even particularly extraordinary in buying a sailing boat and going cruising. All you have to do is chuck the home, cars, family, pets (though some cruisers do manage to bring them along), and jobs as well as the attendant financial security they bring including regular medical checks and access to acceptable medical services, and of course, routine: television and newspapers, golf and football, bridge and bingo, theatre and cinema. Some things, like internet access, telephone and post, are available intermittently as and when you stop somewhere for long enough to find out where and how. Many cruisers have SSB (Single Side Band) radios from which email is available and the more wealthy ones have satellite phones which work everywhere, but at enormous cost.

As a way of life cruising is fabulous. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Apart from a vague plan to sail around the world (and avoiding seasonal hurricanes/cyclones) we had no schedule, no deadlines to meet. When ready we would just lift anchor and sail off to the next destination, which we may only have decided ten minutes earlier, and even then we’d sometimes change our minds about where to go whilst en route. We’d stop wherever and whenever we wanted. We visited all manner of exotic places - we’d tour the countryside, try the weird and wonderful local food, listen to their music and attempt to learn bits of the languages. We met so many new people, both locals and other cruisers. People in the cruising network come from incredibly varied backgrounds and are therefore a most interesting group. We made some excellent friends some of whom we bumped into again and again further on down the line, and we are still in contact with many of them today.

September 2001

“Let’s sell up, buy a boat and sail around the world.” Those were Mike’s first words, after a resounding ‘hello, I’m so pleased to see you again’ kiss when he returned from a three month crewing sojourn in the summer of 2001. He was promptly christened ‘Cap’n Pugwash’ by the locals in our pub, the one I’d carried on running whilst he was away.

It was in north Devon, the only pub in a small, very rural village. Good locals, mud and manure on their boots, straw in their hair, black and gap toothed smiles, fags hanging on lips from which fell words so strongly accented with West Country brogue and obscenities it took us some months to work out what they were saying. They didn’t care for us to begin with. “Bloody incomers,” they’d mutter, loud enough for us to hear, but we learned not to take offence as that same insult would be flung with equal venom at someone from the next county or even a neighbouring village. It took three years, but they got used to us and our strange foreign ways and I believe they were rather sad to see us go when we finally did that December, three months after Mike’s return.