One Less Plane

Hooray hoorah i´m going to Antigua! Yes, i have finally found a boat which will take me across the Atlantic! Dirk and Ann, my new skipper & 1st mate (or wife) are a Canadian couple , in their 50s maybe 60s, and have lived and sailed on their lovely boat, Sail Away, for 20 years, all around the Pacific and the North Atlantic. Dirk says he thinks that i was sent by god to their boat, so i say thanks to god, and to Patchamama (for whom a did a ceremony on the beach last week, wishing for a boat), and thanks to coincidence and luck too.

This feels like just the right boat – i feel confident and secure with the boat and crew, though obviously it is still a bit nerve racking setting off into such wilderness and isolation for 3/4 weeks. This crew seem to be something in between the extremes i have met, they do use freshwater and soap to wash dishes (as opposed to Rob the dutchman, who´s dog did the initial rinse wth his tongue, followed by seawater), and i think they might use some fuel if the wind dies down (as opposed to Catain Jacek who would have sat and waited for wind forever), they have solar panels but not a wind generator, they have an EPIRB (emergency satellite beacon) and a litle GPS (little computer to tell you your global position and speeds) but no other electronics - course plotting is done on huge beautiful  paper charts with pencil and rulers, i love this, it´s so picturesque (and i can understand it better), and also feels more secure than electronics which can fail.

So, anyway, we will be leaving in the next fewdays, whenthe weather´s right,  now we are busy with enormous amounts of food shopping (i have found Las Palmas Wholefood Coop! (well, not co-op i think, but atleast i can buy local and organic!), Dirk´s doing some repairs (some very clever woodwork – bending wood around the edge of the boat, using clamps and water to bend it little by litte each day), and i am frantically trying to prepare myself physically and mentally for 4 weeks isolated from the world i am so use to, by weaning myself off the internet, emailing goodbyes, cycling lots, buying books, wool and knitting needles to occupy my mind and body in the long days and nights at sea…

OH IT´S SO EXCITING!!

So that’s the main news of the week – but if you want to read some more ramblings about volcanoes, goat´s cheese, puppets and boat hitching philosophy -  here´s a bit about my last week:

Fuertaventura was good fun, i enjoyed being a proper tourist for a few days, joining in with the hords of English and Germans having happy holidays on the buses and beaches, and bizarrely, with my basic Spanish and German even did some translating for the stubborn Germans refusing to learn Spanish and the local Canarians speaking defiantly back in Spanish…. From travelling through the countryside, and from my guide book, it seems that tourism is pretty much the only thing keeping the population of Fueraventura alive – there was so little cultivation or even vegitation, not because the earth isn´t fertile (which it is as it´s full of volcanic goodness), but because they get so little rain. When there is culutivation – you can see that every individual plant has it´s own little sprinkler desperatley dripping desalinated water on to it. What they do cultivate in abundance though is goats, so, as my usual Canarian staple diet of avocadoes was out of the window (extemely expensive and imported here), i reverted to goat´s cheese. My reasoning was that , from what i had seen of the island it seemed unlikely that there was any big cruel factory farms at least, and goat´s being pretty hardy don´t take up much cultivated land and don´t need lots of water (which all has to be energy intensively desalinated here). I did eventually see the goat farming, when i wandered out of touristville (Morro Jable), up into a valley. I´m not sure what to think, there were people living in tin roofed shacks with walls made of old doors, so then i felt glad to have supported the rural economy by buying the cheese, but then next to them all would be a small pen made of wooden pallets, holding a herd of goats . The goats had not much space, vegitation or shade from the sun, so then i felt bad for buying the cheese (not that i didn´t enjoy it´s creamy crumbly salty tastyness). I did see the occasional family of free range goats (or maybe escapees!), and someone (another tourist), told me that they don´t keep them in pens all year round, sometimes they roam the hills – but i wonder what they eat – do they suck the rocks for volcanic minerals?! Up in the hills i also met a a very very cute family of what looked like chipmunks (small rat sized, brown and white striped with little squirrel faces and thin but bushy tails), we sat and watched each other happily for quite a while…

Then it was back to the beautiful sights of Las Palmas, and back to work – boat searching. I tried to feel re-invigorated by my little holiday, but instead i was downhearted, all the boat crews seemed to be grumpy and annoyed by the continual pestering by us boat hitchers. However, what really cheered things up was two Italian clowns who came to join in the great boat search! They put on two fantastic shows at the Sailor’s Bar, of puppets, magic tricks and silliness, with a back track from Philippo – another boat hitcher and guitarist. My grand contribution to the show was to draw a monkey on their advertising poster (they have a monkey puppet). The clowns found themselves a boat within just a few days and are now heading for Senegal via Cape Verde…

To put things in a bit of perspective, it took me 4 weeks to find a boat, perhaps due to a bit of over-cautiousness, but i am the one whoś been waiting the longest as far as i know. I’ve watched several hitchers arrive one day, find a boat and leave the next day (as i watched aghast!), and even more find a boat within a week. As far as i can see, finding a boat and persuading them to take you on as crew, is down to mostly luck (being in the right place at the right time), but also perseverance, and the right balance of audacity and confidence and going with the flow. Nicely, all but 2 or 3 of the 20 or so hitchers i’ve met, have found a boat, and it seems that after chatting to atleast a few different crews, everyone sort of slots into just the right little boat family for them – Danish with Danish, German with German, Italian clowns with French documentary makers, lovely Philippo guitarists with grumpy single-handed sailing Croatian men, and even Captain Jacek finally found ’something to look at’ (his words) – 2 German girls decided to go with him.

This whole wierd, unique little world of sail boat hitching i have fallen into, i have discovered is a mindblowing minefield of trying to understand humans, cultural differences, relationships, how  i relate to men, to  women and how they relate to me in mind, body and soul. It sounds dramatic, but i think it is so intense because you are having to work out in advance if you are going to survive together – you are about to put your lives in each other’s hands and live in a very small space together for a long time with no escape. Having said that, i wonder if i had found a boat and left as soon as i had arrived in Las Palmas, and hadn´t had all this time to think about it, all these thoughts and worries may not have even crossed my mind!

I had a few lovely days getting used to the simple life on the nice old Dutch boat, anchored in Arrecife harbour, Lanzarote. In the long dark evenings on the boat Rob taught me some basic non-computerised navigation, all nice and proper with navigation charts, pencils, rubbers and a plotter (sort of ruler with a compass attached), i played with the dog, and i enjoyed listening to Rob playing his harmonica, and had a few lessons myself…

However, i still had a few niggling doubts about this boat – the lack of third crew, the disinterest in finding a third crew, the impossibility of finding a third crew whilst anchored in sleepy Arrecife, and the obviousness that the captain is looking for a ´partner´, rather than just crew…. So, for a few other reasons, and after some very lovely times, but also some extreme but quiet worrying by myself, i finally plucked up the courage to say i was going to head back to Las Palmas and look for another boat. After all my worrying, Rob was absolutely fine about it, and then even gave me his spare harmonica, and said i had to practice and we would jam together, next time we meet, so nice! I hope i will be able to play more than Frere Jaques by that time.

I´m taking a more fun route back to Gran Canaria, rather than the straight ferry, by bussing and ferrying through Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. Lots of desolate grey brown rocky lava flows, cactuses, beaches, tourist resorts, and hundreds upon hundreds of English and German tourists. In some ways this sounds and is not particularly nice, but i´m enjoying it! It´s fun finding the cheapest hotel possible, always more characterful, even if grotty, it´s utterly ridiculous to carry the weight of the rucksack i am carrying, and wonderful when you (for example) find, at the edge of the tacky and tourist full town, the main bus station is literally just a blank wall with door shaped holes in it (no signs, or buses), and you walk through the door shape and there is a lava flow (an old dry one) leading out for miles and miles up in to the barren volcanoes, and you can just keep walking… sea to your right, and the moon just coming up over the hills…

(Which is what i did today.)

Lanzarote! Where i find myself looking across the street to a half painted wall with´miserable´ graffitied across it. In the distance a desolate brown rocky hill with some wind turbines on top and another plane full of tourists is just coming in to land overhead.

I´m feeling all sad and lonely today, and homesick, for the first time since leaving. I think this is mainly due to being, excitingly, whisked away from Las Palmas where despite only living for a month i was already feeling quiet rooted. I met a Dutch sailorman called Rob (Ronaldo) Ypna, and his very cute dog Saphira on Friday night, visited his beautiful old steel 40 ft boat ´Beyond Beyond´ on Saturday morning, he´s heading for Trinidad, but has to do some maintenance first which he can only do in Lanzarote, and had to leave at 4pm on Saturday to catch the good weather window for sailing between islands. It sounded like a good opportunity to try out sailing with him, before agreeing to cross the ocean with him. So 24 hours later i found myself here in Arrecife, the wierd half desolate and industrial and half very commercial capital, with not much character, although the sea front is pretty in some ways, like a fishing village, but with a few high rise hotels. Now i´m in a bit of a quandry – in some ways i really want to go on this boat with this great lifetime sailor, harmonica playing Dutch man, on his (very low energy) old boat and adorable dog, however yet again i don´t think i´m happy to go without a 3rd crew member, and one of them is going to be very hard to find here in Arrecife, plus Rob is adament he won´t have another man on board, (as, he says, male crew always think they know better than him). Female boat hitchers are few and far between, and most of them come in pairs, so i am unlikely to find another one. BUT I JUST WANT TO GO!

Also, like all the proper old, life time sailors it seems, this guy doesn´t have a satellite phone or EPIRB (emergency satellite beacon), which also worries me a bit, but i wonder if a lifetime´s experience is more important than all this new saftey technology. (Obviously ideally you´d have both, but i am struggling to find a boat and crew like this!).

I´ve realised i never filled in my mention of journalists and picking oranges in my last post, or much in between, so here we go: For the last 4 weeks in Las Palmas i settled in to a bit of a routine of checking for boats / applying for Caribbean voluntary jobs on the internet at the library, cycling to the marina asking any new boats if they need crew, going to the beach (usually i´d find another fed up boat hitcher to come with me), then back to the marina to hang out in the ´Sailor´s Bar´(that´s a good tip for any wanna be boat hitchers – just sit there and chat to people and you eventually get a lead to follow up), then home for yummy food and watch ´Gran Hermano´ with my adopted Canarian mother, Maruxa. (We don´t understand each other´s language very well, but the rolling of eyes at silly crappy telly is universal!). So, in an exciting break from my routine last week, i went up to the mountains with a Canarian friend, and we taught each other English and Spanish whilst walking in a beautiful lush, green old volcanic crater. There was an old man living in a little stone house at the bottom of the crater and we traded some almonds for oranges which we picked from his three abundant ´naranjos´ (yowee! they were more like lemons, but oh so juicy and tangy mmmm). We then visited her family home and they dug me up some potatoes out of the red muddy earth, and we picked courgettes, spinach and mandarins in the rain surrounded by the pungent (in a nice way) smell of orange blossom, oh i was so happy! (And well fed!) So many people have been so nice to me like this, it is amazing.

Then it turned COLD here, i´ve even had to put a COAT on!!

In the few days before the ARC (see last entry for what this is) left, i kept a journalist, Rob Melotti, company around the marina, whilst he researched a story about the ARC for his magazine ´Practical Boat Owner´. That gave me an excuse to hang round the pontoons a bit more listening out for crys of ´oh no, we suddenly NEED another crew member´…… ´especially one who truly appreciates the energy efficiency, wind generator and solar panels of our boat!´. In return i introduced him to a few boats and crew i knew and gave him MY story of taking personal carbon footprint reduction to the extreme, (and maybe to the ridiculous), and the adventure of boat hitching. Apparently Practical Boat Owner is trying to step up it´s coverage of environmental issues (boat related ones), to get with the times. So look out for me in the next monthly issue which lands on your doormat, l might just be in it (unless Rob chooses to cover a more succesful hitcher in the end, one who actually definately makes it to the other side!).