We have had some quiet days with home schooling and preparations on the boat. Since we wanna get to Las Palmas in good time before we start the Atlantic crossing with the Arc, we have reported arrival in Las Palmas port on October 20th. In order to have the opportunity to wait for good weather and make a small stop in Tangier in Morocco on the way, we need to leave here by October first at the latest. This gives us 15 days left to get the last things sorted on the boat, plan sailing, buy food and get all the safety equipment in place.
Bad news about home schooling; we have been refused access to Unilogin all the places in the danish bureaucracy, we have tried to contact, and are now embarking on our plan b; to acquire teaching materials ourselves. It turns out that all the digital materials for education are linked to Unilogin, and it’s not possible to buy digital teaching material either. Now we are ordering physical books and getting them shipped to Spain. Sigh!! Sometimes the digital systems seem far more complicated than the old physical world.
Besides homeschooling we are still spending a lot of time on getting the boat ready for sailing. The problems we had with leak from the salt water pump in the engine room is now fixed and we have also got a new VHF antenna and anemometer fitted at the masthead. Yesterday we were lifted up at the yard again, this time only for about 5 hours. We had the transducer for measuring depth and speed replaced with a new one that is a bit bigger. At the same time we also had the propellers cleaned, which had got a coating of biofilm on them already. The anodes for the propellers, which were also new, were already corroded due to water leak in the engine rooms and some loose wiring in the water from the last time we were in the yard. Now the anodes have also been changed once again. Here you can see the just one month old anodes corroded half way through.
Although new things keep popping up that needs fixing, they are smaller things now and we are starting to see the end of all the deficiencies and repairs that we didn’t expect to have to do on the boat. The day before yesterday we managed to make a list of the things we still need to buy or test before we leave Cartagena and head for Gibraltar. The list is almost 2 A4 pages long and there are many items to be checked off in the next 15 days.
The previous weekend we went on a sailing trip to a small beach nearby, Playa De Portus to practice some sailing and try out our dinghy, which we haven’t tested yet. Here is a map of the route to Playa de Portus.
The trip over there was quite peaceful. There were some waves from the south, but not as big as the ones we had on our last trip to Mar Menor. There wasn’t much wind either. After an hour and a half of sailing we arrived at the beach and dropped anchor.
Martin and Anton started to hoist the dinghey and its outboard engine from the hoist system on the boat. It took about 40 minutes. When they were finally in the water, Martin couldn’t start the outboard engine. After a long struggle in increasing waves, he gave up and had to hoist everything back up. When we were in the yard yesterday, we found out that there is a dead man’s switch that had to be held out and a split inserted there in order to start the engine. Well, we’re learning new things every day.
Later, Elliott and I cooked dinner in the galley with increasing swell. I got seasick being down there. Up in the cockpit you don’t feel the swell so much, but down in a very small galley, you can really feel the waves. We did get to cook and had a good time eating dinner and watching a moonrise behind a mountain near the beach. It’s another kind of coziness than sitting in the couch together and watch TV. There’s not a lot going on. You just become more aware of the landscape around you, and still find something to follow.
A little later the wind changed direction from being onshore wind to offshore wind resulting in the wind coming from the opposite direction of the waves. And then the swell got even worse and we kept rolling all night. Next to us there was a monohull rolling from side to side, giving us associations of our sailing course last year in same kind of weather in a monohull. That time we all got very seasick and Martin had even doubts about going forward with fulfilling his dream.
In the morning we woke up to a beautiful morning with the sun low in the sky. Martin and I were so tired because of the rolling all night, but the kids had slept like stones. I miss being young. We decided to sail back to the harbor early as the weather reported increasing wind during the day, and we wanted to avoid making docking manoeuvres with too much wind. We’ve tried that before and it didn’t go very well.
We practiced some sailing on the way back. It’s like the boat is going faster one way than the other. We had also wondered about that on a previous trip. We then found out that the top of the mainsail is in collision with the toppinglift. We need to find a solution for that. We also found out that we don’t have a booster sail for the headsail to make the boat more capable of sailing upwind. There were many extra sails on the boat, but they were all too big to be used as a booster for the headsail. So the status is still that we can’t really sail in headwind.
Anton steered at the helm and sailed us safely back. We had a really nice view with clouds over the mountains. Something you don’t see from land, but out at sea you can really see how the clouds only just covered the land and snuck around the mountains. It’s hard to capture on camera, but here’s an attempt at showing it anyway.
