Clearing out

I woke up this morning ready to go back to sea again.  Looking forward to going to sea even.  Thinking about the routines of being at sea, and not inwardly tensing up in anticipation of the nights.  Thinking about Tonga, 1300 miles away in a straight line. Not so far.  Maybe nine days.  Is that one or two fruit cakes? I wonder.

Au revoir to the girls who wear hibiscus behind the ear

A sea change takes place in both of us before every passage. It has to be that way otherwise we’d never get home.

We needed help to separate the pump from the electric motor 

I couldn’t get enough of French Polynesia these past two or more months.  I was a bit envious of the people we met who were staying on longer,  either putting their boats up on the hard in Raiatea or going back on their tracks to the Tuamotus and/or the Marquesas to sit out the South Pacific cyclone season there or planning to sail to Hawaii from the Marquesas at the end of the year once the threat of hurricanes north of the equator fades. 

Gone troppo - coconut and lime sorbet and locally-made accessories

On our way back to Bora Bora from Raiatea a couple of days ago, with our mended watermaker, we passed Wavelength going east.  Mark and Eileen made their call back in Tahiti when we first met them, weighing up the risk of a cyclone in an El Nino year, and deciding they could live with it.  We’re going west, and we should be doing that soon. The trade winds are forecast to settle in again this week, how strongly and for how long who knows.  El Nino again. 

At the dock in Uturoa, Raiatea, where we provisioned for the next leg

 Yesterday we went to see the gendarmes. The checkout procedure in French Polynesia is convoluted. ‘Come back tomorrow afternoon,’ they said, ‘and we should have the paperwork from Papeete by then’.

This morning we wake to find the wind fresh, and cooler. It’s got some south in it, finally.

Bora Bora is an easy place to leave from.  It sees far too many visitors to want to open its heart to them. It sloughs us off like so much dead skin.  We saw more of local life by waiting 45 minutes to buy a stamp at the post office than by going to Bloody Marys for a cocktail, that's for sure. That said, we leave Bora Bora not having experienced much more than the honeymooners do in their resorts. But while they’ll be back at work in a week, we’ll be at sea. How good is that?

We’re looking at the famous rock now, from the cockpit. It’s clear of cloud, unusually, and its outline, seen from the lagoon, seen on approach, will become our most vivid memory of Bora Bora.

Bora Bora on approach for a second time - where the whales play

Family Christmas

The only present we unwrapped this Christmas was from our electrician, with a card signed "from Marco and Julie". It was bottle-shaped, and very drinkable. At times like these you can come to think of a tradesman who is generous with his time, and saves your bacon with his superior skills and available wares, as a friend. Who's to say he isn't?

Marco figuring out what's what on Enki (and below)

The gifts which came unwrapped were the ones we loved though. Emails and phone calls from the heartland. I'd go so far as to say that the price we paid to be still in port on Christmas Day was not too high. To see Alex transfixed by the sight of his fair-haired grandson wedged into a high chair and downing mouthfuls of ricotta pancakes on Christmas morning in Sydney was to witness a man gobbling up love. We're only too aware of how short our rations are. "Next year," Alex said to Dave, "perhaps we'll be there with you".....to which Dave replied, "There are quite a few people who'd really like that." We know that too. We hear it in their voices.

This is our third Christmas away from our family. Three Christmases away is a lot.  Even when you are living the dream.

Breakfast on Christmas morning, and the maple syrup is good 

It's their local brew - a gift from Nova Scotians on the yacht Defiant

Waves breaking over the walkway by the anchorage (below)

For a few days the seas have been up and the sun has been blotted out by dust storms blowing in from Africa. You can manage those things when you're underway, but it's not pleasant to leave in such conditions. So we've been waiting. Marco installed a new course computer on Saturday, and on Tuesday we took the boat for a spin in the shelter of the cruise ship port to re-commission both autopilots. But there wasn't enough space to manoeuvre inside the port to "teach" the autopilot (the technical term for the procedure is auto-learn). The turbulent seas outside would have given the intelligent machine the wrong idea of what normal sea conditions are. You need a relatively calm sea to put your autopilot on the right track, so to speak.

Waves breaking over the walkway to the Castillo San Gabriel (below)

Marco will be with us again tomorrow morning - we could do the auto-learn ourselves, but he insists it is no problem for him to work on Boxing Day and we get the distinct impression he'd like to finish the job himself.  Boxing Day is not a public holiday in the Canaries. Here, Marco told us, the biggest celebration is not Christmas Day, but January 6, the Feast of the Three Kings. That's when people exchange gifts and everyone gathers with their families to eat up large. So what's Christmas Day about? He wasn't sure really. It's two years since he and his wife made a fresh start on Lanzarote (he says the level of corruption in Italy now is such that it's impossible to run an honest business). Some island customs were still strange to him, but his Canarian friends were teaching him.

One more time - tapas at a favourite of ours, La Bulla, on the Charco San Gines

The fruit and veges we're carrying on the boat are now over a week old, so we've decided to wait the extra day,  go to the Saturday produce market and then leave (again). It's a bit like pulling teeth, yes, but it's what this kind of travel demands.  Be prepared. The weather outlook, we're advised, will be much of a much-ness Friday or Saturday... improving. There will be no fanfare this time. You'll have to watch the departures board.

False start

We got out, and then we turned around. One hour from letting off the lines to tying up again. Such a shame.

Here are the positives: there's an experienced marine electrician in Arrecife, a portly Tuscan called Marco who speaks pretty good English. He can sell us a new "old" (i.e. older model) autopilot course computer exactly like ours. The one that doesn't work anymore.

The thing is, we got no warning. Both autopilots, the first (which is 9 years old) and the second (brand new, and unused) were doing what they are meant to do when we commissioned and tested them 10 days ago. But as soon as we turned on the autopilot yesterday, it displayed all the right things but we got no response. Dead. "You're on your own with this one," I said to Alex. He pulled out the instruction manual - the error message on the screen indicated excessive current draw, meaning a short circuit or motor drive jammed. He upended the aft berth and peered down, checked the wiring connections. There was no short in the external wiring and the drive was not jammed. He knew in his heart that this was too hard for him.

Do you need an autopilot? Bridget asked in an email today. She'd been tracking us on the AIS, seen us turn back and understandably was worried that something had happened to us or the boat. The answer is YES. We do need an autopilot. Hand-steering across 3000-odd miles is just something we're not prepared to contemplate, which is why Alex had a second autopilot installed. "We may never have to use it, " he told me. Many cruising sailors don't have this luxury - it's expensive - but they all dread the prospect of autopilot failure. Hand-steering a big boat in an ocean swell, even for a few hours at a time, is exhausting. For a middle-aged crew of two, a long ocean passage without an autopilot is unthinkable.

Never been so well prepared for a passage before - even had the passage berth ready!

Our previous boat, Kukka, had an electronic autopilot and a wind vane on the stern. That's another type of autopilot which doesn't rely on electronics. It is directed by the wind and a series of pulleys. Very nifty. We loved our Hydrovane, but you can't have davits (which allow you to winch the dinghy out of the water and carry it off the stern) and a wind vane. We opted for davits. So we have two electronic autopilots now. Or rather, we had.

We turned around because we have a long way to go, and it made no sense to start our Atlantic crossing with one dead autopilot. Marco came aboard yesterday afternoon, tested everything, praised Alex for his wiring job, took away the course computer (the electronic brain of the autopilot), and this morning gave us his verdict: "solidly dead". He could fix it, but what with Christmas and New Year just about to break over us, he estimated the spare parts would take a minimum of 10 working days to arrive from Holland.

Which means that Enki gets a Christmas present. A new course computer. Not something we'd counted on having to fork out for, but it helps me to remember what it was like running a car. Similar things happen. And the cost is always unexpected, and far too much, but you make a choice, don't you?

Marco will be back on the boat tomorrow, he says, and we hope we can make another start either tomorrow afternoon or Sunday morning. The weather forecast, of course, will be different. We are actively considering a stopover in the Cape Verde islands if we get down there and see either no wind, or wind from the wrong direction in the mid-Atlantic. The Azores high is being pushed about by a low pressure system which seems bent on ruining Christmas Day out there.

Peperonata to give us a kick along

I'm cooking up more vegetables for the freezer - as some kind of compensation, I get to go to the Saturday morning farmers' market tomorrow. The vegetables we bought from the supermarkets in town on Wednesday were not much chop. Here's hoping we leave with better quality veges and as good a weather forecast next time we cast off.

The pace quickens

We didn't stop in Sardinia, but pressed on to Mallorca, the largest of Spain's Balearic islands. It's hard to know why you make the decisions you do when you're travelling. So much is done by feel. Sardinia has many more anchorages than Sicily, and God knows, we're desperate for an anchorage, but something was pushing us along, not the least of it the absence of strong winds from westerly quarters. We are heading west from now on.

We all agree that breakfasts are the best meal of the day

For two days we willed the forecast easterly winds to materialise, but they didn't. We motored, and we motored some more. Towards the end of our third afternoon at sea, Alex stopped the engine and allowed the boat to drift with the current on a dead calm surface. Claudia and I tentatively lowered ourselves down the ladder and swam alongside and around Enki as she wallowed. There is something outrageous about swimming in the open ocean. You ought not to be able to do it. You'd be mad to even think of it in Australia. But here - well, nothing was moving for as far as the eye could see, and below the water, only our legs treading the clear sapphire blue liquid.  Below that, who knew.

At 7.30 pm we watched the sun go down and a full moon rise in perfect synchronicity over horizons ahead and behind us. We ate dinner in the cockpit, laying a table and using china plates and Turkish ceramic serving bowls. The candle stayed alight.

But dinner isn't too bad either - rice paper rolls on Turkish plates

She's found her sea legs

Then, while we were passing the dishes down below and preparing ourselves for the night watch, the air around us began to stir, and by 9 pm we were sailing. The direction wasn't bad either. We sailed the rest of the way, more or less, to the cliffs of Mallorca, hitting 8 knots across the flat waters of the bay of Palma. We could have kept going, to be honest - it was that much fun - but we were tired, all of us. On the fourth night after our departure from Sicily we ate squid ink pasta and vongole and tuna (all staples of Sicilian cooking) at a pavement table under the shadow of a Spanish church. Our host was a German who spoke perfect English. Palma is a cosmopolitan city.

Enki close-hauled on a flat sea in a moderate breeze

Milling about at the entrance to RCNP marina

Palma cathedral

It's also a yachting hub, the biggest in the western Mediterranean.  The night lights around us at the Real Club Nautico de Palma glitter red. Superyachts with masts so tall they're considered a potential hazard to air traffic are obliged to show a red anchor light, even in port. For glamour though they can't compete though with the floodlit cathedral of Santa Maria. That huge church (the second largest Gothic cathedral in Europe) took me completely by surprise as we closed on the city from the sea - its shock value is something like that of Chartres cathedral rising from the wheat fields of northern France.

Palma's a good place to source nautical bits and pieces. We've had an almost dead electric winch (the one which helps with the mainsheet and the genoa furler) for some weeks now. Alex has being doing forensics on it  - in Levkas we put on a new, thinner furling line, thinking the old one might have been too thick and the friction causing the winch to stall under too much strain. That wasn't the problem. Then we pulled apart the electric motor housing hoping that the problem might be carbon dust around the brushes which could be vacuumed out. Sadly, no. Instead of carbon dust, Alex found oil in the electric motor. He suspected a faulty seal between the gear box and the motor, and anticipated having to replace the whole unit somewhere down the line, perhaps Gibraltar, perhaps the Canaries. But as of today, the problem is fixed - a new seal, and a new motor (the gearbox was ok). I might just keep on winching manually though - the effort gives the shoulders a new kind of definition!

We are of course now in Spanish territory which means another language, another internet provider (woeful pre-paid internet options in Spain compared to Italy, by the way), another mindset. Claudia, who has very firm opinions about such things, judges the Spanish to be cooler than the Italians - but really, what is Spain, and what is Italy? These nation states are so modern, comparatively. There are more ancient loyalties, provincial and religious, which you get to understand only after you've been kicking around somewhere for much longer than we plan to stay around Palma.

Western entrance to Palma cathedral (cathedral also below)

Heat shield

Which flavour? Italian ice-cream rules, even in Spain

Palma streets

Part of the Parliament building - Palma is the capital of the Balearics

The Catalan painter Joan Miro spent the last 30 years of his life on Mallorca, and though it's the last thing I expected of this crowded summer holiday island, I have to think that the brightness and joy and freshness in his works owes something to the spirit of this place as well as to his creative genius.

Flag fall

We did leave Marmaris. Not without regrets, and not without a minor operational glitch, but hey, who ever leaves port without something not working the way it did when the boat was tied to the dock?

And look where we find ourselves... Could it be anywhere else but Greece?

Enki in Symi harbour

Enki (right) alongside Nutmeg (Malo 39)

Real estate sign going up signals the opening of the season

Evening in Symi harbour, near the customs house 

We spent our remaining lira on 2nd hand books in Datca

Datca, the charming coastal town where we checked out of Turkey, is so close that you feel you might hear the call of the muezzin if the wind were blowing from the right direction (mosque loudspeakers are certainly pitched loud enough these days). Symi is one of those Dodecanese islands which fit inside the curves of the Turkish coastline like a ball cupped in the hand. From Symi harbour, the Datca peninsula looms hazy blue in the afternoon heat, thunderous-looking clouds rising like souffles above its jagged ridge lines. Ah, but that's Turkish weather over there, isn't it?

Enki at anchor in North Bay, Datca

Between Datca and Symi we crossed a line on a chart. What of it? The sea which traditionally provided a living for Symi sponge divers and shipbuilders is the same brilliant blue as along the Turkish Aegean coast where the same wild herbs grow out of the rocks - oregano, thyme, sage. But there is no denying that we are in another country here. You can manipulate the physical boundaries, but religion, and the history of religion, draws heavy lines between peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. We've left the strictures of Islam over the water. Tomorrow no doubt church bells will ring out across Symi harbour.

The best view is always from the church

I fell hard for the beauty of Turkish ceramics

The ferry from Rhodes arriving in Symi harbour

We're waiting for Freddy. He'll be here soon, on the evening ferry from Rhodes. I can't think of a more perfect Greek harbour in which for him to arrive. The English couple whose Malo 39, Nutmeg of Poole, is tied to the sea wall alongside us (yes, we still burn a candle for Malo yachts) say it's the loveliest one they know of. Their opinion has some weight - they've been sailing the Aegean for 17 years.

You could stick around Symi for a lot longer than we plan to. But if that were to happen, I'd want to get off the boat, rent a pastel-coloured house high up above the harbour, and....well, who knows what would happen then.

Let's not deviate.

Mehmet (left) and Ismail (right, and below) figuring out the autopilot installation

He's done it

There's more to tell about our last weeks in Marmaris, but I'll let Alex go into detail on a separate boat page. He's the one wiping the white board clean on the day we left the marina.  It's his list. He's solved the problems, some of them expected, some of them quite unexpected, around the installation of a new (spare) autopilot.

We prevaricated about whether we would spend the money on a back-up unit but as ever, we decided in favour of safety and paid the money. We might never use this expensive piece of gadgetry, so we're thinking of it (like all spares) as insurance. Ironically, just as we were leaving Marmaris, we bumped into American friends, Bill and Bunny Bailey, who were bringing their Norseman 447 cruising yacht, Onset, back into Marmaris because their autopilot had died a few miles down the coast.

Cathy (Waverunner) and Bunny (Onset) at happy hour at Yacht Marina