After a few months of visiting our home town of Portland Oregon and becoming grandparents, we are flying out tomorrow to our beloved Anna Mae. She is awaiting our return to show off all the new upgrades we have commissioned.
The Bahamas and Caribbean…
Greetings! My apologies for this report coming out weeks after when I should have sent it. You may have heard that the Cabo San Lucas area, where Roberta and I live four to five months a year, had a direct hit by a Cat 3/4 hurricane. I am the President of our homeowner’s association in Cabo and over the last week I’ve been consumed by coordinating our community’s disaster recovery effort and getting information out to homeowners. This particular blog entry is being rushed out and probably isn’t as good as it could have been, but… it is what it is.
No worries though. The blog will be back next year, and it should be a very good year for the blog, and a very good year for Roberta and I. I have lots of ideas for ways to make the blog more fun and more interactive, and some cool surprises for the blog that I just never had time for this year.
Roberta and I flew home to Seattle last Saturday and (excepting the incidents in Mexico) we are enjoying being back in America. For the first time in months I had fast internet! Roberta couldn’t wait to go to Starbucks! There are no words to describe how it felt to go into Costco here in Seattle. There is nothing on a similar scale that we saw in Croatia, Montenegro, Malta or Italy. The selection and quality of the vegetables, meats, and food is shocking when you’ve been out of the country for a while. It isn’t like we were traveling in third world countries, but.. America is unique in the world, and that fact is really driven home once you’ve been out of the US for a while.
We moved the boats over 2,000 miles and had some great times and we also had some challenging times. It was a year with high-highs and low-lows, that sometimes felt more like an advanced Captain’s training course than a vacation.
Here’s a quick map showing the route we took this year:
These maps show the over 2,000 miles that Seabird and Sans Souci covered this summer season. It’s hard for me to imagine that we did all of this in just a few months, but we started in Croatia, cruised down the east coast of Italy, explored the east and southern coasts of Sicily, cruised Malta, returned to Sicily, then out to the Aeolian islands, back to the west coast of Italy, out to the island of Ppnza, past the island of Capri, northeast Sardinia, the east coast of Corsica, past Montecristo, cruised Elba, returned to the mainland, visiting the Cinque-terra region of Italy, and finished in San Remo, on the border with France.
That’s a lot of paddling!
NOTE: CLICK ANY OF THE PICTURES IN THIS BLOG TO GET AN ENLARGED VIEW
At the end of my last blog entry, we had put Sans Souci into the Mirabello marina in mainland Italy, in the town of La Spezia. We had scheduled a date for some boat-mechanics from France to meet us, to accompany us on the last leg of the voyage. The boat was running fine, but I liked the idea of having someone in Europe who knew how to run the boat, just in case it would need to be moved for some reason.
Unfortunately, the guys who were supposed to accompany us were sidetracked, and wouldn’t be available for a week. We were fine with waiting, but were worried the weather, which had suddenly turned nice would turn nasty again. Our last ride would be a long one; over 100 nautical miles of open sea.
Roberta and I watched the weather reports closely, and when we saw a day of dead-calm seas followed by several days of bad weather, we decided to just go for it.
Roberta and I had planned to have crew along for our final 100 nautical mile cruise to San Remo. However, a couple of days before our planned departure a beautiful weather window opened and we decided to jump on it. The flat seas you see here were as rough as it got. It was a perfect way to finish the trip!
Roberta’s and my final trip was eleven hours long, on dead calm water, in perfect conditions. I had been dreading the trip, knowing that we were close to finishing the year with zero serious mechanical problems, and that it just felt like we were overdue for some crisis. I was confident that something would go wrong. Afterall, what are the odds that we’d get through an entire season with no major mechanical issues? As it turns out, the odds were 100%! We arrived at the boat’s final resting place for the 2014 season, at the Portosole marina in San Remo, without incident.
Several people we have spoken to, who have reading our blog entries have said, “It doesn’t sound like you had much fun this year?” I apologize for sending that impression, although I must admit that this was not our favorite year. It actually wasn’t so bad, and when we think back on it, there were some incredible highlights.
Perhaps part of the problem was that the last few years have been so incredible. We have been spoiled by Turkey, Greece, Montenegro and Croatia, all of which had spectacular anchorages spaced close together. This year we had long stretches where there weren’t really good places to anchor, and we also had a summer which was so bad that it made headlines in Europe. I read one article in the French press talking about this being a year where the luckiest vacationers were those who vacationed in September, after the summer was over. The weather finally stabilized and they were able to take advantage of the lower off-season rates. July and August were miserable at times.
Before you feel too sorry for us; keep in mind the old saying that goes something like, “The worst day on a boat beats the best day on shore.” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I would say that if you watch this slideshow that I quickly threw together you’ll agree that if this was a bad summer, can you imagine how awesome a normal summer is?
Click the link below to see a slideshow highlighting the summer. I think you’ll like it!:
http://www.kensblog.com/uploads/16765/2014_09_07_final/slideshow.html
The balance of this blog entry summarizes the effort to close up the boat for the winter. Some of it gets a bit techie. I did what I can to make it comprehensible to non-boaters, but … it is still stuff that some of you might be bored by. Form your own opinion. My feelings will not be hurt if you skip some of what follows.
With our journey finished, I was curious to analyze our fuel consumption and see how we did. The spreadsheet above shows that Sans Souci, our Nordhavn 68, consumed a whopping 3,600 gallons of fuel! Given that fuel costs around $9 per gallon in Europe you can imagine why it was important for us to fill up in the country of Montenegro where duty free fuel was possible.
Steven Argosy, on the boat we spent the summer traveling alongside, had to rub it in a little, as to how efficient his Nordhavn 62 is, by sending me this email:
“…I did some rough calculations. I averaged just over 5 GPH for the summer so far not including generator use. I used 1253 gallons so far on the main since Montenegro and 377 gallons on the generator. It works out to a bit more than 1.35 nm per gallon. – Steven”
While I am talking about the Nordhavn 62, I should probably mention something sad. Although the Nordhavn 62 is one of greatest boats ever built, it has been superceded (if not equalled) by newer model boats, and years ago, the molds from which it is made were literally put out to pasture. Finally, after years of the molds getting moldy, Nordhavn decided to permanently retire them. This article talks about the history, and end of the line of this phenomenal boat: http://www.nordhavn.com/news/headlines/rip_friend/
We only cruise four or five months a year, which leaves seven or eight months when the boat is alone. One would think that the solution is to just put the boat into a marina, turn everything off, and then fly home.
I wish it were that simple.
On a boat as complex as Sans Souci, there is much that needs done during the off-season.
Think of it this way…. Let’s say you had a million dollar bill, and were told you had to leave it lying somewhere in a foreign country, somewhere you had never been, and that you’d need to trust someone you’ve never met, and who doesn’t speak your language, to watch over it, and care for it, for seven months. You would want to be very careful about who you pick and where you place it. And the truth of the matter is that this analogy is not a good one for several reasons: 1) The boat costs more than a million dollars, and 2) A million dollar bill would be easy to care for and secure. Boats are complex!
Our search for a marina started months before this summer’s cruising even began. Moorage in Europe is not always easy to find, particularly when you are seeking moorage for two fairly large boats (Sans Souci and Seabird.) In some countries, such as France, there simply isn’t moorage available. To get a slip you have to know someone, have lots of money, and wait a very long time. Italy is easier, but even then, there is a bit of a game of musical chairs that goes on. During the summer slips are easily available for short-term moorage, as all of the boats are out cruising. At the end of the season, when the music stops, everyone returns to their home ports and the boats scramble to find moorage.
Before our search could begin this year, we had to determine where we would finish the season. That was a battle in itself, but resulted in us deciding we wanted to be somewhere near France. I then studied dozens of marinas, with only the information I could find on the internet to work with. There wasn’t much information. I wound up writing to many marinas to get pricing and availability. It was a long process with lots of back and forth.
We finally settled on a marina called Imperia, in Imperia Italy, about 50 miles from the border between Italy and France. I chose it because it was new, which would hopefully mean that the electricity was stable, and that there might be good wifi internet. It was also recommended by several other cruisers. Imperia required a $6,000 USD per boat deposit to hold space for our boats, and both our traveling companions (the Argosys, on Seabird) and ourselves wired money.
Months later, as the cruising season was starting, I stumbled onto a new article saying that the Imperia marina was filing bankruptcy! Emails to the marina went unanswered. I called them, and they assured me we would have moorage, but meanwhile their website disappeared, and emails continued to be unanswered. I received mixed reports from the cruising community. Some people said the marina was alive and well, while others asked me questions like, “Can you be certain that the security will be good? Or that the power will stay on?”
We spent most of the summer worrying, and hoping that someone would give us definitive information. I even paid some guys from France to drive to Imperia and have a look. They said good things about the marina, but we were still nervous.
To make a long story short… The marina continued to refuse to respond to emails, and we decided we couldn’t trust them. We bailed, forfeiting our deposits. We notified the marina and asked for refunds. The marina responding saying there were lots of creditors ahead of us, but that they’d tell the lawyers who would add us to the bottom of the list.
Midway through our season we stayed at a very nice marina, called Ragusa, on the southern end of Sicily. They offered a price for moorage for the winter that was roughly the same as the deposit we had paid at Imperia, and a lot less than we still owed Imperia. It was too good to be true, but was true. Even better, Ragusa is close to Tunisia where cheap fuel is available, and outside the EU [Note: For tax reasons we need to exit the EU every 18 months] and close to Malta, where we found great cruising! They also had a good shipyard, and offered dry storage on land if we wanted it. The downside was that it was 700 miles from where we had planned to finish the year. Steven said, “It’s only 700 miles, let’s just backtrack.” I said, “I don’t backtrack.” It would be 700 miles south, and then another 700 miles north. The savings just weren’t worth it to me, and I didn’t believe the savings were as big as Steven was thinking. It would be another 1,400 miles on the boats, and there is both a time and money cost for that distance. I didn’t want to split our two-boat group, but both Steven and I dug in our heels. I started the search over, finding it a little easier with only one boat to find space for, and settled on Portosole in San Remo, while Steven committed to Ragusa.
As I am sitting typing this, I know what happened after our two boats parted company, and it isn’t pretty. Seabird did make it south the 700 miles to Ragusa, but it was not a perfectly smooth trip. Steven and Carol have their own blog, and whereas my trip was boring, they will have a much more interesting end-of-season blog entry. I don’t want to spoil any surprises, but registering for Seabird’s blog at: www.seabirdlrc.com could be worthwhile. I have mentioned in the past that I always consider the blog a bit of a battle. When good times are happening, my blog is boring, and readers lose. When things go wrong, and I am least happy, the blog gets exciting! Steven’s blog (when he gets around to writing it) will win the competition between us for best final blog entry this year.
The town of San Remo turned out to be a wonderful surprise. From the marina to town is an easy walk, and there is all of the shopping and restaurants we could want. We drove over one afternoon to check out the other marinas that I had contacted, including the Imperia marina, and there was none I would have rather been at. We had somehow stumbled into a marina that was everything we had hoped for.
Our final days on the boat were more work than I had expected. Jeff Sanson, from www.pacificYachtManagement.com flew over for our last week, to help tuck the boat in for the winter. Jeff is a whirlwind of energy and whereas my plan was to relax and let him do all the work, that is easier said than done. We all stayed busy during the final week readying the boat for the winter.
One of the first things Roberta and I did after arrival was to look for someone to wash the outside of the boat. I found a local company who would wash the boat but they wanted to inspect it first. Their proposal surprised me: Five hundred euros (around $700 USD.) I didn’t love the price, but the boat was in desperate need of a good washing so I said, “Sure” and we headed off to lunch while they got started.
On return to the boat we were somewhat shocked. The cleaners had removed all the cushions, and basically everything outside the boat that wasn’t nailed down, and strung it all along the dock. The canvas you see dangling from the passarelle of the sailboat on Sans Souci’s port side comes from our boat! This picture shows only some of the “stuff” that was strewn down the dock. I can’t imagine what other boats thought. Perhaps they were thinking, “Oh look. Sans Souci is having a garage sale!”
It all turned out well though. The cleaners were unbelievably efficient and did an incredible job. They had a team of six people who brought their own hoses and brushes. The entire wash, which normally takes a full day was done in about three hours. The wash was well worth the money, and I tipped them well. Later, I went to thank the agent who arranged the cleaners, and he said they had been shocked by the amount of salt on our boat, and couldn’t imagine how we had gotten salt spray all the way up on the radar arch. Never under-estimate a Norhavn!
When I first spoke to the marina about a reservation they said they had no slips available for a boat my size. But then, minutes later, they wrote back to say that they had another large boat needing space, and could possibly wedge our boats into THREE slips on a dock meant for smaller boats. They needed me to commit within minutes if I wanted that option, and I took it. Why not? Well .. I was soon to find why not.
Access to the slip, and tying up at the dock were easier than expected. The three slips our two boats were sharing had all the space we could want, and then some.
We were delighted to find that our moorage at the Portosole marina, in San Remo Italy, was wider than our boat. It is very common for boats to fib about the width of their boat, because moorage rates depend on how wide your boat is. This means that you are often asked to back into a slip which is narrower than your boat, and you have to proceed backwards slowly, hoping that your boat will push aside other boats without causing damage. At some ports, such as St Tropez in France, this is a spectator sport. Huge crowds line the dock, particularly when there is a little wind to add to the “fun” as multi-million dollar boats struggle to shoe-horn into impossible places.
One of the many challenges with Med Mooring is the tying off of the bow line. The boat is tied at the bow by two lines which extend to the bottom of the marina, and at the stern (back) to two bollards (cleats) on shore. Because we would be leaving the boat for seven months, during which there would be heavy storms, we used the boats windlasses to make the lines tight at the front and the back of the boat. The bow line you see here, tied to a cleat at Sans Souci’s bow was trickier to tie than is apparent. That rope line you see is actually tied to about twenty feet of very heavy chain. The windlass is required to lift the chain off the bottom, and once you do that, you somehow need to get it off the windlass and onto a cleat. If you leave the line on the cleat a sudden surge from a wind-produced wave can wreck the windlass, meaning an expensive repair.
The only slip available for our boat was actually one and a half slips. This sounded fine at first, but then I discovered that there were complications. The bollards (on shore cleats) were positioned assuming a boat smaller than ours. We needed to center the boat by tying to bollards that were spaced incorrectly for our boat.
Because the bollards behind the boat were spaced for normal usage, and Sans Souci was spanning one and a half slips, there was no way to tie the boat correctly. We needed bollards in places where there weren’t any. We had two that were much too far apart, plus one that was in an awkward place centered behind my boat. Another concern was chafing. The lines will take a beating over the winter and whatever we do needs to hold up to extremely strong winds and surge. The first couple of pictures above show how other boats on the dock were using chain to tie up, and gave me the inspiration for what I should do on my boat. I drew the picture on the right to show how I could use chain to simulate having two different points to tie to behind the boat.
The drawing went through a number of iterations as I spoke to people in the port. The original version had shock absorbers on the lines, and I received a bid for $7,000 USD to put it together. I quickly removed the shock absorbers and simplified what I was trying to accomplish. My final solution still involved writing a nearly $3,000 check. Argh.
Tying the boat was a challenge, and then I hit an electrical surprise.
Because Sans Souci was tied up on a dock normally used by smaller boats the electrical power was also sized for smaller boats. We had three slips being shared by ourselves and a 100′ sailboat that was on our port (left) side. We moored within an hour of each other, and discovered simultaneously that the shore power wasn’t going to work. It was the wrong kind, and there wasn’t enough of it. [Note: Sans Souci is moored at a dock with 32 amp single phase 230v shorepower, whereas the “big boat” dock has 380v 64 amp 3-phase power.]
We knew when we equipped Sans Souci that we’d be cruising around the world. One of the many challenges of world cruising is that different countries have different electrical standards. When we are away from the dock, it is irrelevant. We generate our own electricity. However, when we are in a marina, we usually try to connect to whatever shorepower the marina has to offer.
At most marinas you are not permitted to run your generator and must connect to shorepower. Running a generator while tied up within a few feet of other boats will make you extremely unpopular. Modern generators are very quiet, but they still have some noise and exhaust. No one wants to smell my generator exhaust all day.
Sans Souci gets around this by having a huge, heavy, expensive and fragile device called “The Atlas” which converts virtually any dockside shorepower into the same type of electricity (voltage, frequency) that we have at home in America. I am sure that the company who makes my Atlas would disagree with my calling their device “fragile” but I’ll stand by those words, and have the long history of repairs to back up what I say.
Despite this, I would install an Atlas again today, and consider it a must for the kind of world cruising Roberta and I have been doing, but the flexibility it offers does come at a price.
Actually, I’ll back off a little on my comment. In a “normal” environment, I am sure the Atlas is fine. However, we travel to places where the power is not only different than US standards, but often different at different parts of the day. We have been many places where voltage at the dock is best described as “random.” The voltage rises and falls based on events well beyond our boat. If someone in town runs their dryer, voltage can drop at the dock. We’ve been in marinas where the marina staff thinks nothing of turning off power to the dock several times a day. And, then there are the winter storms. These can create major power surges and long outages.
Another major disadvantage of the Atlas is that it consumes some percentage of all the electricity it is given, and has a fairly high minimum power requirement just to be operated. In some marinas electricity is very expensive, and the electricity consumed by the Atlas, even with virtually nothing on the boat using electricity, can cost a thousand dollars a month or more. We’ve also had issues with heat generated by the Atlas. When we are in extraordinarily hot places, such as when we were in Hong Kong, the Atlas was throwing out so much heat that my lazarette (where the Atlas lives) was overheating, causing problems with other electrical components, like my inverters. Luckily, I have good air conditioning in the lazarette and could bring the temperature down to a reasonable level, but the incremental air conditioning also cost electricity, and reduced my cooling capacity. In addition to heat, when the power at the dock is severely limited (not many amps available), the amps that the Atlas pigs for itself doesn’t leave many for the boat.
To make a long story short, I’ve decided that the right answer for when we are not on the boat is to run the boat off of the batteries. The boat has inverters which convert power stored in the 24v batteries to US-standard electricity. I should have done this years ago, and just didn’t think of it. The inverters only power the 120v appliances and electrical outlets. The heavy appliances on the boat, such as the washer, dryer, dive compressor, and air conditioning, aren’t used during the winter, so I don’t need to think about them, and the safety electronics, such as the bilge pumps run off 24v, so as long as the batteries are charged, they will operate.
To run off the batteries, I need a way to charge them, and I have a battery charger which is very flexible. Like the Atlas it can accept virtually any electricity thrown at it. This is fairly typical of most battery chargers. I am guessing that power surges and frequent outages can also “blow up” a battery charger, but instead of a $50,000 highly complex specialty item (the Atlas) needing repair, it is a $1,000 battery charger that can be found and replaced fairly easily.
For more than you ever wanted to know about how Sans Souci is wired, and how I’m running from shorepower, this is a slideshow I put together mostly for my own use. I tend to forget how these things work from year to year and need to leave myself some degree of documentation: http://tinyurl.com/ke9zwp4
Ordinarily I have no problem attaching to shorepower, but at the Portosole marina we were at a dock intended for smaller boats with lower power requirements. We battled for nearly a week to get shorepower working, and even brought over a specialized electrician from France on three seperate trips. But, finally, we did it! We got it working just in time to turn it all off, and stop using my fancy international power transformer (the Atlas), as we put the boat into winter-mode running off a battery charger.
See those silver buckets? They are each full of five gallons of 15-40w motor oil. I purchased five of them in order to change the oil on my two main engines, and two generators. You will be shocked by the cost: $1,100 USD! Gas, oil, diesel, and electricity are all much more expensive in Europe than what we pay in the United States.
Some of you may recall that earlier this season I had an oil hose pop off while changing the oil and manage to spray myself, and the entire lazarette, with dirty oil. I swore that I’d never do it again.
However, as this picture shows, my resolve not to spray oil didn’t last long. Jeff, my US mechanic who flew over to help me put away the boat for the season, asked me to start the pump so that we could test that it was working. He was holding a hose we were using to drain the starboard engine and thought only a trickle would come out. As you can see in this picture, it was more than a trickle. I can confirm that the oil pump was working quite well indeed.
Our final days on the boat were spent cleaning and packing. Here’s a picture of Roberta cleaning out shelves in the master bath while wearing headphones to listen to music. She has a pad of paper in her hands. One of the last tasks she does on the boat is to go through everything and make notes about what we need to bring back to the boat next year.
She won’t be happy I put this picture into the blog, but I thought she looked cute!
Just hours before we left the boat for the final time, the toilet in the master head broke. Someone (who shall remain nameless) was cleaning the toilet and had a brush down the throat when the ball valve at the base closed around the brush, stripping the gears. We carry lots of spares, and here we see Jeff being an incredibly good sport about swapping the guts of the toilet just hours before departure. (I was conveniently elsewhere at the moment)
Our final days were not all work. Our good friends from Cabo, Ray and Karen Hoffman, were on a small cruise ship that docked at San Remo. Interestingly, just before their arrival in San Remo, their cruise ship traveled to the south end of Corsica. This is noteworthy because at the time there was a huge mistral wind blowing. The mistral wind is a fierce wind (typically 30-60 knots) that can last for days in the Med. It was a good day to be in a marina, but their cruise went anyhow. They had an uncomfortable ride, but I guess cruise ships operate on a schedule, and have to move regardless of conditions. I prefer how we do it on Sans Souci. If the wind is blowing we sit still.
And, we didn’t know it at this time or we wouldn’t have been smiling, but wind was soon to play a larger role in our lives. Our homes and community in Cabo would soon be seeing winds over 100 knots.
One of our last projects on Sans Souci was to cover up the windows. This keeps the sun from damaging the interior over the off-season. We also bring in all the chairs, cushions, etc.
Our favorite cruising ground thus far has been Turkey. This puzzles some people, and we often get questions about, “Why Turkey?” The answer is: “Great anchorages, great people and the chance to see history close-up.”
I mention that because of a thought-provoking email I was sent earlier today. It was sent by a cruiser to everyone who receives his blog, and is somewhat self-explanatory.
Thanks for listening.
Lee and Zehra Myrina Limnos Gr …”
The media has not said much about the hurricane that struck Baja California, where we have owned a home for nearly 17 years. Our community in Cabo is approaching two weeks now with no water or power. We are in Seattle, but I speak with people in Cabo many times a day. I would like to share that the devastation was much worse than you have heard, and that the recovery is happening much quicker than anyone would ever have thought possible. I already had tremendous respect for the people of Mexico before the hurricane, and far more than that now.
Below are links to two longish, but quite compelling, videos that tell a bit more of the story than you may have heard. One shows the destruction, and the other shows the clean-up that is already happening. My prediction is that within a few short weeks tourists will start arriving back in Cabo and for most it will feel as though nothing ever happened. However, if you view these videos, you’ll know the rest of the story.
Video 1 – Hurricane Odile and the aftermath: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqwwTwuTNTM
Video 2 – The reconstruction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evgvoy_ZyR4
If you missed the prior blog entries from this season, you may view them here:
If you haven’t been receiving my blog entries via email, click this link to register. It will be many months before I send another blog entry, but… why wait until the last minute:
http://www.kensblog.com/register
That’s it for the summer 2014 cruising season. Another year has come to an end. Thank you all!
Ken and Roberta Williams
ken(at)kensblog.com
MV Sans Souci
Nordhavn 68
Morning coffee in the village of Glatteri with our guide, Marco
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The Gibilmanna monastery and its church dating from the 17th century were of special significance to Marco as he got married here
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The monastery’s stunning gold altar
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A beautiful archway leads into a hidden courtyard
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The mountains of the Regional Park rise to nearly 2,000 metres
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At the village of Pollina we came across a group of young boys playing soccer and Mary asked them to line up for a group photo – they were happy to oblige
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Pollina is set on a mountain top
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View of Cefalu area from Pollina
Laurie, Di, Mary and Doug at Pollina
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Nuvarra is yet another stunning village
Our favourite village was Castelbuono where we enjoyed a sumptuous lunch of wild boar hocks in the stunning wood-paneled Ristorante Nangalarruni, set in the middle of a maze of cobbled lanes – we’d never have found it without our guide.
Wild boar hocks for lunch
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The castle here was built in 1316 and remains in great shape, supposedly haunted by a ghostly apparition of Queen Constance Chiaramonte.
After leaving Cefalu we’d planned to berth at Marina Capo D’Orlando. Arriving outside the marina with a 20 knot onshore wind and one to two metre swells we peered inside but couldn’t see any yacht masts or larger motor vessels, but did notice some sand banks and apparent silting. Not wanting to take any chances in the adverse lee-shore conditions we cruised on to anchor inside a lagoon sheltered by an extensive sandbank south east of Capo Tindari, near the village of Marinello. While most of the anchorages along this coast are fully exposed except to the south, this one had reasonable shelter from all directions except the east, and we stayed a couple of nights.
August is peak holiday time and ashore is busy with mostly local tourists, while large RHIBs between five to nine metres predominate on the water. There are no apparent safe boating regulations, such as we have in New Zealand, so all day long RHIBs, jet skis, ferries and other vessels travel at speed close inshore and close to other vessels, creating large wakes and making us thankful for our flopper stoppers.
TECHNICAL – nothing to report
Once again, Istaboa is our dream being realized. Some will remember…
And, yes I know, there are those who feel there’s no better life than full time living aboard our boats, but we’ve been doing the cruising thing for many years. We like to think of the boat life as a dream being realized, but sometimes, for us anyway, it’s fun to hop on the bus and say — there’s no place like home — and our dream remains floating somewhere awaiting our return.
Istaboa also has a new home in Jupiter where we bought her a slip. She’ll only be a couple of miles away and when we’re not cruising, I’ll enjoy her everyday as my office.
She’ll return to her previous role, no longer home, but our escape.
And a great escape she is.
Adios,
Istaboa
Our house is a very, very fine house
with two dogs in the yard…
Okay, I took liberties with the old CS&N tune and the rest of it doesn’t apply, but you get the point.
Picking up from the last post — Like the tide, change is rising and about to wash over us part?
Well, the little house in the above photo is the catalyst for these changes.
Meet ‘Spearfish’, our little bungalow by the sea in Jupiter, FL
Going on 15 years now, Crew Istaboa has cruised the watery stretches between the Gulf Coast, the Keys, the East Coast, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Bahamas. All along the way, in every marina where we’d tie up, Mel and I would take time to imagine what it’d be like to reside in that particular place. We explored each one thoroughly and they were all contenders in the hunt for the eventual/inevitable dirt dwelling where we knew one day we’d settle in.
Yes, we’ve unintentionally annoyed many realtors throughout the course of our travels.
For the last couple of years, The Jupiter area has become our home-port to return to.
For Florida, Jupiter’s a fairly progressive/live and let live kinda place. We enjoy it’s good food, the nice folks, and it’s seemingly kind attitude. Even during season the traffic’s not too bad, and the water’s truly beautiful.
Jupiter has one of the best beaches on the East Coast. It’s a dog friendly stretch of shoreline and seems pretty human friendly as well. We’ve found we like it here much. The Boyz love the beach and they’re really gonna enjoy the freedom that comes with the small fenced yard.
So unless something unforeseeable happens with our real estate transaction, it appears, on dry land anyway, we’ve finally found what we’re looking for. Or, maybe it found us.
And, we’ll call this home –> ‘Spearfish’.
Another chapter in our story.
More later —
Adios,
Istaboa
Finally got that sunrise…Nordhavn Exumas Abacos Bahamas trawler Caribbean Pickwick Boat dogs
Memphis Downtown
Siracusa Italy, on the island of Sicily, was not on my personal bucket list. Since everyone else, my wife Carol and the Sans Souci’s, Ken and Roberta were excited about it, it was fine with me. I was surprised at how much I loved it.
Map of Siracusa, Sicily
After we arrived from our overnight passage, we were all tired and decided to lay low for the day. We were planning on staying for a few days before heading south to Malta, so we were in no hurry to get ashore. We weren’t picking up my sister in law Tina in Palermo for a few days so we had plenty off time to wander about town.
Siracusa, like many big towns in Italy, had a fortress-like inner city that was built 2500 years ago by the Greeks. Over the centuries it was taken over by various empires and invaders and it is amazing that it remains in tact, albeit with many upgrades and improvements since it’s inception.
Siracusa, Sicily Walled City
Within walled city is a massive network of narrow streets and buildings housing restaurants, shops and apartments where thousands off inhabitants live.
Outside the walled complex is a beautiful city of 125,000 people. We had heard about the famous Siracusa markets, but to experience it is really something else. Italians are very expressive people anyway, but the marketeers take it to a new level! As you walk by the booths filled with fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, cheese and pastries, not only are your sight and sense of smell overwhelmed, but your ears too! Imagine a hundred people presenting their products all at the same time, acting as if you would be a fool not to buy from them and their products are the freshest you will ever find at the best prices! All in Italian. Did we understand them? Nope. But with their loud, flowery speech, arms waving in the air and their hands touching their chests over their hearts, you got the idea!
At the end of the market there was a deli, of sorts. Out front there was a team of women dishing out samples of cheeses, bruschetta and bread. They were not quite as expressive as the others, but we ended up spending a fortune because everything was so good.
PALERMO
Carol’s sister Tina arrived in Palermo a few days after we arrived in Siracusa for her annual visit so we rented a car from Avis and drove to pick her up. She was arriving at 6am so we decided to get a hotel room the night before in Palermo. After picking her up at the airport we wandered about town for a few hours and then headed back to Siracusa. Tina is a Special Ed teacher and school had just finished. She was fried and looked forward to some relaxation on Seabird! The only problem for me is that now I had two of them and they don’t like to sit around. I was outvoted constantly for two weeks and had to participate in many, many excursions. On the plus side, Tina likes food as much as I do, so it was a Roman Feast nearly every day!
I lost the original photo, but this is what we saw from the boat at 2am!
I didn’t mention this in my previous blog, but while cruising overnight on June 16th from Crotone to Siracusa, Carol was on watch and noticed a bright orange light in the sky to the north of us. She radio’d Ken on Sans Souci about it, and he thought it might be a reflection from the rising sun. OK, Carol thought, but she looked at her watch and it showed 2am, which was 4 hours before sunrise. She looked through the binoculars and discovered that it was red hot lava flowing down the side of a huge mountain! She realized then that it had to be Mt Etna. When I arrived for my shift at 3am, she showed it to me and we then decided that one of our trips in Sicily would be to visit Mt Etna close up. We were witnessing the last major eruption from the relative safety of the pilot house on Seabird!
After Tina arrived and she had her fill of Frozen Margaritas and a bit of rest, we planned our trip. I have one of these little Garmin navigation systems that we bring with us. It saves us tons of time trying to find places. It did not work so well in Sicily, at least around the Mt Etna area. We had a lot of false starts and hit a lot of dead ends before finally arriving at the main tourist base. On the way there, it was like traveling on the moon. The lava fields extended 10 or 15 miles from the volcano and roads had to be carved out from the cooled rock.
While the base was really a disappointing tourist trap, the tour up the mountain to the volcano was not. It consisted of a long tram ride followed by a ride up in this strange looking vehicle that looked like a cross between a school bus and a Hummer.
our transportation to the volcano
I was surprised at how cold it was up there. When you suddenly realized that your feet were warm, you knew you were in Volcano Country. Although the air was a chilly 45 degrees F, the ground was warm, very warm to the touch, even though the main crater was still miles away. Mt Etna encompasses 459 square miles. I would not want to be around if there was a cataclysmic event there.
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO MALTA……
We like to think of ourselves as “flexible”cruisers. Weather patterns, change of heart, unexpected repairs, all of these play a part in what we end up doing on the boat. Our plan had always been for Seabird and Sans Souci to cruise directly to Malta from Siracusa. The passage from Siracusa to Malta was 82 NMR, or about 10 hours. Since we wanted to arrive to clear customs by 4pm, that meant leaving Siracusa at 6am. If we had to, we would, but we started looking for alternatives and found a small town in southern Sicily called Marina Ragusa, which was only 59 miles, or 6 hours from Malta. It was a nice new marina and it looked like a fun place to stop for a few days.
Carol and I have gotten pretty good at Med Mooring. An invaluable addition to this process was a set of two way headsets that we purchased. When we Med Moor, I need Carol in the back of the boat to guide me in, i.e. “Go left”, “go right”. Or “STOP!!!” Which means I am about to hit something. Anyway, when I am backing in between two boats set apart by only the width of my boat and the entire area behind the boat is one big blind spot, these headphones help a lot!
Siracusa to Marina Ragusa – 59 miles
It was really a nice marina. The people were friendly and it was a safe, calm harbor.
Carol, Tina and I took a bus to the town of Ragusa, which was about 10 miles from the boat. The town was kind of a cross between a typical European city and something out of a fairy tale. The oldest part of the city, which we viewed from above, looked like a painting. Look at the photo below. It pretty much sums up exactly what we saw.
While we were at the marina, I decided that it would be interesting to find out what it would cost to keep our boat there for the winter. Both Ken and I had given several thousand dollars in deposits to Porto Di Imperia marina in northern Italy, but our emails to them were unanswered recently and we found out that they had financial problems. In May, they declared bankruptcy. We had also heard that the security there was suspect. I hated to lose the deposit, but we were concerned about leaving our boats there under the current financial strain.
I was astounded by the quote! The cost for the entire winter was about the same as one month at Porto Di Imperia! In addition, they had a great guy there, George, who spoke perfect English and looked after many of the boats there. The weather is mild so there is no need to winterize the boat and Tunisia is only a day away for cheap fuel and meeting the EU requirements for avoidance of the dreaded Value Added Tax (VAT), which could be up to 20% of a vessel’s value!
To me it was a no brainer. I would save over $15,000 on storage and probably another $15,000 in fuel costs.
Ken and Roberta hedged on the idea and decided that they did not want to backtrack to Sicily at the end of the summer, so, the plan was to part company in Elba and meet again in the springtime. Call me cheap……..
After 3 days in Ragusa. It was off to Malta….
Siracusa Italy, on the island of Sicily, was not on my personal bucket list. Since everyone else, my wife Carol and the Sans Souci’s, Ken and Roberta were excited about it, it was fine with me. I was surprised at how much I loved it.
Map of Siracusa, Sicily
After we arrived from our overnight passage, we were all tired and decided to lay low for the day. We were planning on staying for a few days before heading south to Malta, so we were in no hurry to get ashore. We weren’t picking up my sister in law Tina in Palermo for a few days so we had plenty off time to wander about town.
Siracusa, like many big towns in Italy, had a fortress-like inner city that was built 2500 years ago by the Greeks. Over the centuries it was taken over by various empires and invaders and it is amazing that it remains in tact, albeit with many upgrades and improvements since it’s inception.
Siracusa, Sicily Walled City
Within walled city is a massive network of narrow streets and buildings housing restaurants, shops and apartments where thousands off inhabitants live.
Outside the walled complex is a beautiful city of 125,000 people. We had heard about the famous Siracusa markets, but to experience it is really something else. Italians are very expressive people anyway, but the marketeers take it to a new level! As you walk by the booths filled with fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, cheese and pastries, not only are your sight and sense of smell overwhelmed, but your ears too! Imagine a hundred people presenting their products all at the same time, acting as if you would be a fool not to buy from them and their products are the freshest you will ever find at the best prices! All in Italian. Did we understand them? Nope. But with their loud, flowery speech, arms waving in the air and their hands touching their chests over their hearts, you got the idea!
At the end of the market there was a deli, of sorts. Out front there was a team of women dishing out samples of cheeses, bruschetta and bread. They were not quite as expressive as the others, but we ended up spending a fortune because everything was so good.
PALERMO
Carol’s sister Tina arrived in Palermo a few days after we arrived in Siracusa for her annual visit so we rented a car from Avis and drove to pick her up. She was arriving at 6am so we decided to get a hotel room the night before in Palermo. After picking her up at the airport we wandered about town for a few hours and then headed back to Siracusa. Tina is a Special Ed teacher and school had just finished. She was fried and looked forward to some relaxation on Seabird! The only problem for me is that now I had two of them and they don’t like to sit around. I was outvoted constantly for two weeks and had to participate in many, many excursions. On the plus side, Tina likes food as much as I do, so it was a Roman Feast nearly every day!
I lost the original photo, but this is what we saw from the boat at 2am!
I didn’t mention this in my previous blog, but while cruising overnight on June 16th from Crotone to Siracusa, Carol was on watch and noticed a bright orange light in the sky to the north of us. She radio’d Ken on Sans Souci about it, and he thought it might be a reflection from the rising sun. OK, Carol thought, but she looked at her watch and it showed 2am, which was 4 hours before sunrise. She looked through the binoculars and discovered that it was red hot lava flowing down the side of a huge mountain! She realized then that it had to be Mt Etna. When I arrived for my shift at 3am, she showed it to me and we then decided that one of our trips in Sicily would be to visit Mt Etna close up. We were witnessing the last major eruption from the relative safety of the pilot house on Seabird!
After Tina arrived and she had her fill of Frozen Margaritas and a bit of rest, we planned our trip. I have one of these little Garmin navigation systems that we bring with us. It saves us tons of time trying to find places. It did not work so well in Sicily, at least around the Mt Etna area. We had a lot of false starts and hit a lot of dead ends before finally arriving at the main tourist base. On the way there, it was like traveling on the moon. The lava fields extended 10 or 15 miles from the volcano and roads had to be carved out from the cooled rock.
While the base was really a disappointing tourist trap, the tour up the mountain to the volcano was not. It consisted of a long tram ride followed by a ride up in this strange looking vehicle that looked like a cross between a school bus and a Hummer.
our transportation to the volcano
I was surprised at how cold it was up there. When you suddenly realized that your feet were warm, you knew you were in Volcano Country. Although the air was a chilly 45 degrees F, the ground was warm, very warm to the touch, even though the main crater was still miles away. Mt Etna encompasses 459 square miles. I would not want to be around if there was a cataclysmic event there.
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO MALTA……
We like to think of ourselves as “flexible”cruisers. Weather patterns, change of heart, unexpected repairs, all of these play a part in what we end up doing on the boat. Our plan had always been for Seabird and Sans Souci to cruise directly to Malta from Siracusa. The passage from Siracusa to Malta was 82 NMR, or about 10 hours. Since we wanted to arrive to clear customs by 4pm, that meant leaving Siracusa at 6am. If we had to, we would, but we started looking for alternatives and found a small town in southern Sicily called Marina Ragusa, which was only 59 miles, or 6 hours from Malta. It was a nice new marina and it looked like a fun place to stop for a few days.
Carol and I have gotten pretty good at Med Mooring. An invaluable addition to this process was a set of two way headsets that we purchased. When we Med Moor, I need Carol in the back of the boat to guide me in, i.e. “Go left”, “go right”. Or “STOP!!!” Which means I am about to hit something. Anyway, when I am backing in between two boats set apart by only the width of my boat and the entire area behind the boat is one big blind spot, these headphones help a lot!
Siracusa to Marina Ragusa – 59 miles
It was really a nice marina. The people were friendly and it was a safe, calm harbor.
Carol, Tina and I took a bus to the town of Ragusa, which was about 10 miles from the boat. The town was kind of a cross between a typical European city and something out of a fairy tale. The oldest part of the city, which we viewed from above, looked like a painting. Look at the photo below. It pretty much sums up exactly what we saw.
While we were at the marina, I decided that it would be interesting to find out what it would cost to keep our boat there for the winter. Both Ken and I had given several thousand dollars in deposits to Porto Di Imperia marina in northern Italy, but our emails to them were unanswered recently and we found out that they had financial problems. In May, they declared bankruptcy. We had also heard that the security there was suspect. I hated to lose the deposit, but we were concerned about leaving our boats there under the current financial strain.
I was astounded by the quote! The cost for the entire winter was about the same as one month at Porto Di Imperia! In addition, they had a great guy there, George, who spoke perfect English and looked after many of the boats there. The weather is mild so there is no need to winterize the boat and Tunisia is only a day away for cheap fuel and meeting the EU requirements for avoidance of the dreaded Value Added Tax (VAT), which could be up to 20% of a vessel’s value!
To me it was a no brainer. I would save over $15,000 on storage and probably another $15,000 in fuel costs.
Ken and Roberta hedged on the idea and decided that they did not want to backtrack to Sicily at the end of the summer, so, the plan was to part company in Elba and meet again in the springtime. Call me cheap……..
After 3 days in Ragusa. It was off to Malta….
Well, the storm was a bust… not even rain. Maybe a sunrise.It’s nice being here at Old Port Cove; a nice distant horizon with an ocean breeze and a view of the rich and famous.We’ve still not gone home to The Bluffs or Memphis yet, but I’m feeling ch…
Views from our anchorage at Scialandra
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We find many modern super yachts lacking in style but this grand old lady looks stunning
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Along the coast of Sicily there are dozens of ancient watch towers
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Although a few other boats were anchored off these beaches, none of them offer complete shelter and fortunately the winds were either southerly or very light northerlies with little swell. Again we were surprised by the very large number of RHIBs – at Mondello there were several hundred at anchor with people just sunbathing and swimming off them. In New Zealand you’d normally beach your RHIB or anchor it very close to shore and spend your time ashore, but here motor boats are not allowed in swimming areas so they have to anchor outside the buoyed swimming area. Considering the way Italians drive their small craft this is a very sensible precaution.
You rarely see a rooster tail like the one from this 70 footer
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We bypassed Palermo and headed to Cefalu, anchoring off the marina and with some protection from a large marina breakwater. This is a great, picturesque anchorage, protected from all except NE winds and dominated by La Rocca (the rock), 278 metres high and the site of Il Castello, a ruined Norman castle.
Cefalu and La Rocca viewed from the sea
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Some swell penetrates the anchorage but our flopper stoppers kept us comfortable as well as keeping other boats from passing too closely.
Envoy in stunning Cefalu anchorage
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View from Envoy at anchor in Cefalu
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Cefalu’s extremely crowded sandy beach is quite typical
Many people choose to swim off less crowded rocks
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Here in Cefalu our Kiwi friends Doug and Mary joined us for two weeks and we had no qualms about leaving Envoy unattended at anchor while we did some day trips ashore; although we’d spent some time in Cefalu in 2007 it was great to revisit this absolutely stunning medieval town with Doug and Mary.
A highlight is the Duomo di Cefalu, a stunning church built in the 12th century.
Duomo di Cefalu viewed from the sea
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And from land
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We found this very talented model maker in Cefalu – he charged us a Euro for taking his picture
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TECHNICAL I changed the Lugger engine oil and filter after 200 hours, a job made easy by the 12 volt oil-change pump. Our large RHIB had been in the water for 9 weeks and was becoming increasingly difficult to keep clean (it’s not anti fouled), so we swapped it over for the small RHIB, which is OK while there’s only two of us aboard. The small RHIB is suspended from Envoy’s transom when not in use so marine growth isn’t an issue. The large RHIB is too heavy to suspend in that way and we tow it.
ENVOY LOG As at 17/8/14, we’d spent 130 days aboard and cruised 1,166 miles for 212 engine hours.
