One Less Plane

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!).

This week I have also leafletted and/or talked to almost the entire marina full of boats (about 250), found two possible rides from the Caribbean to Bermuda next May, been interviewed by ´Practical Boat Owner´ magazine, picked oranges in the mountains… BUT found no rides to the Caribbean.

Tomorrow (Sunday) leaves the ´ARC´ – an annual organised rally of 250 boats heading for St Lucia, and i have been told by many people all this week that many boats desperately need crew at the very last minute, because of crew dropping out, last minute panics, illness, flight delays… Several of my fellow boat hitchers have managed to secure places on boats in this way, just in the last week, so there has been an air of exciting possibilities to keep my spirits up, even if sometimes all the hanging around can get me down. So, i will still be checking my phone hopefully every 10 minutes tomorrow, and have my bag ready packed, as i wave them off from the shore! Having got to know quite a few of the boats and crew, from my journey here and from hanging around the pontoons so much, i am actually really excited for them, and sad to see them go, but hope i´ll catch up with them, when i do EVENTUALLy get there…

The good side to this is, once they have all gone, apparently the marina will refill with a whole new lot of boats, who have been waiting for places at the marina, so they can resupply and do repairs etc. in Las Palmas ready for their crossing. So lots more possibilities to come…

More about oranges and journalists another time… the biblioteca´s about to chuck me out!

Charlotte

It´s been two weeks and i am STILL buscando-ing los barcos, (and my Spanish isn´t improving!). Las Palmas marina has turned into, from MY point of you a crazy competitive market place. There are hundreds of boats going to the Caribbean, and more arrive every day, and just SOME of them need crew, it´s just you have to ask at the right time, or be there at the right time… so you have to be there ALL the time, just in case. I reckon there are about 30 of us looking for places on boats, judging by the increasingly creative posters springing up everywhere, and we are pretty obvious, hanging round by the locked gates to the pontoons, waiting to scoot in when someone comes out, then trailing up and down trying to get the attention of people on their boats, making friendly sorry-hope-i´m-not-disturbing-you gestures. It can be really fun, and exciting as you meet all sorts of people on amazing adventures, both those on boats and those looking for boats, and at the beginning people were really interested in what i am doing and would invite me on to their boats for nice chats, but it can also be horrible – i have days of being pretty fed up of the constant maybes and then knock backs, and now there are so many of us searching, the boat owners are getting fed up of being asked, so i´m getting some quite icy receptions.

Here´s some little stories – the boat possibilities which have come and gone for me:

There was a very alluring little boat full of excited, hopeful young men from Sweden, England and Belgium, and they were about to leave for the Caribben, via La Gomera (in the Canaries) and Cape Verde – oh my, that was sooo hard to resist - the boat and crew was so full of adventure and, maybe because they were so young it seemed like Swallows and Amazons or something – and how amazing to stop in Cape Verde on the way… but i just wasn´t sure as the skipper – the Belgian guy, about my age, as far as i could work out didn´t have much experience at all, and the others had barely even been on a boat before, and he was asking for 400 euros (which now, at this desperate stage, i would quite happily pay!)…. So i turned it down.

Another boat – with two 40 something Italian guys, who had been around the world a couple of times, had a lovely homey boat, with Bob Marley playing and stripey seat covers, the skipper had brought up two children on the boat, his wife even went through the pregnancy at sea!! But they were really smarmy, and were asking for 600 euros. They seemed really arrogant (but could be just their Italianess) and i felt quite uncomfortable with them, they smoked and I imagined 20 days on this tiny boat with them, i would be miserable. There was a Swiss girl, a 25 year old nurse, who´s heading for South America for travelling, also meeting this boat at the same time – she had literally just arrived here (by plane) and put up an advert, she snapped up the offer straight away and i wanted to whisper to her – ´you know, there´s loads of other possibilities, and probably cheaper´ - but now i pass her every day having coffee with the Italians – and i kick myself a little bit! And now, obviously knowing the amount of us now desperate for boats, they have upped their price to 800 euros!! I perhaps should have gone for it, but am trying to stick to a low budget, partly because i have too, but also i want to see how cheaply you can do this – to see if it could be, for example, an equivalent budget for a year long round-the-world air ticket, which so may people do these days. Anyway, I think the boat is full up now.

The other exciting boat was the Polish boat – Osprey, with Captain Jacek! After much traumatic dithering, i eventually turned this one down aswell, i just had a really bad feeling about it, despite the solar panels, the wind turbine, the sweet, homey, low energy boat, and the incredibly characterful Captain Jacek. I even recruited a third crew member for this boat, to asway my fears of being alone with one man on a boat for 20 days – a dreadlocked Swiss guy i found at a bar playing a sort of portable steel drum that sounds like chimes – i spoke French with him, and English with the Polish guy – who doesn´t speak French, so i woudl have had to translate everything, which i love doing, but mayeb would have been hardwork for such a long time, adn stressful in stressful stormy situations! I shed a tear as old Captain Jacek rowed away from the beach back to his boat, after i told him i couldn´t come, but i think it was the right decision – his final words to me were ´Well, it´s a shame because it´s always nice to have something to look at on a long passage.´  Is that an old Polish man´s way of complementing me innocently, or is that just a bit creepy?!

I was thoroughly fed up by the end of last week, and took three days off, to remind myself of where i am – on a tropical island!!! I went to a lovely Spanish birthday party in the hills, there was music, salsa dancing, paella (prawn flavoured unfortunately, but there was also some nice lentil patty things…), scones (i made them – with almond milk and banana – for a Canarian twist!), funny games, and i discovered they sing happy birthday backwards ´Cumpleaños (birthday) feliz (happy), cumpleaños feliz..´ etc. A lady there, Nuria, was all excited for me about my journey and gave me a necklace with a drop of glass pendant with ´energie de delfín´ (dolphin) inside to keep me safe at sea, how nice! Another girl from that party, Denise, took me snorkelling the next day, which was fantastic – and properly made me remember i am on a tropical (well maybe not technically tropical) island – there was black and white stripey fish, black ones with blue florescent edges, and multicoloured ones! I also put the free council bikes to the test as my couchsurfer host William pedalled with me north out of the city, in to the wierd desolate Gran Canarian natural landscape – there´s just brown rocky hills, with the odd prickly pear (cactus), leading down to the black volcanic rocks by the turquoise sea, which is where i had a yummy avocado and walnuts (yep-Gran Canarian walnuts!) sandwich.

Ooops, didn´t mean to write such a long blog entry, but hope it makes up for the lack of photos, i´m finding it tricky to upload them.

Lots of love and… cactus fruit (just discovered them, sweet and stodgy on the inside but painful to get into!)

Charlotte

This is, in possibly very bad Spanish, what i have been saying lots this week, followed by, ¨oh youŕe English – well i’m looking to work as crew on a boat to the Caribbean¨.

I am having a fantastic time in some ways – i haven’t stayed one night in a hotel yet, i’ve stayed with the Norweigiens on their yacht, spent two nights back on the Skyelark (the boat i left the UK in, but not the death trap one), which is docked nearby, spent a few nights in the home of William and my newly adopted Canarios mother (who i found on ‘Couchsurfers´ – an internet based travellers and hosts network), and few more nights with a crazy loud very musical and arty family who have two pianos in their tiny apartment (who are Śervas´ hosts – another traveller-host network). Every day i spend looking for boats and eating MANGOES which i discovered they grow here to my sheer delight, bananas, kaki fruit, tomatoes, avocados, and ‘Mojo de Alemandras´ a garlic and almond pesto sort of thing.

In fact i should really get going now, back to the marina, and keep looking. I have in fact found a boat, leaving on Sunday for Tobago – with Captain Jack!!! He is not Jonny Depp style pirate but IS a PROPER old salty sea dog from Poland (30 years at sea) and is in fact called Capt. Jacek Rajch, and his boat is lovely and old, called ´ Osprey’ and it has SOLAR PANELS, a wind generator and the engine propeller generates electricity too!! Itś just what i was hoping for, but am dithering about it because the captian is the only one onboard who knows how to sail really- so i wondering what happens if something happens to the captain?! I don’t feel confident that i could navigate myself into Tobago, with my very basic navigation skills…. BUt this is highly unlikely to happen. Also i will have plenty of time to learn the theory with 20 days at sea with a lifetime sailor, but then i shouldn’t really be relying that. Ooo i’m just not sure, but this might be my only chance – the competition is hotting up – more people hitching like me are appearing every day, and their adverts are much better than mine – many of them are professional cooks, doctors and experienced sailors…

So thereś a little window into my daily dilemmas!

Right off i go back to the marina, on my FREE YELLOW BIKE – these schemes seem to be popping up all over the place now – Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon/Cascais… I had to navigate my way through an entirely Spanish instruction book and go through an entirely Spanish application process on the local government website, but have now satisfyingly (and with now a much improved bureaucratic Spanish vocabulary) got my own special code so i can use the bikes – and itś fantastic whizzing along the sea front, with the warm sea breeze and bags of fruit in my little basket. I haven’t braved the city streets properly yet, and have stuck to the off road cycle paths, as i don’t trust my left-sided instinct, but i am practicing on the little quiet road and mini roundabout by the marina…

Love to everyone (and hope you enjoyed the snow those in the UK!),

Charlotte

One of things I was really surprised at, disappointed at, wound up about and have finally had to accept and reason with is the amount of fuel these yachts consume. Obviously I did realise that you need to use a bit of fuel to get out of harbours and out of the occasional difficult situations, but I suppose I came from a very idylic and perhaps quite unique introduction to sailing, in the form of Ĺearning the Ropes’ – which is a group of sailing enthusiasts in the UK who want to make sailing much more accessible to anyone who wants to learn (not just for those with plenty of money), and many of whom who see sailing as an alternative and more environmentally sustainable form of transport.

During my travels i have been interviewing people about their reasons for sailing and on one evening in Cascais this led to a particularly heated debate with some of the English crew i started with, where i was told ´you´re just another rich Westerner swanning around on very high fuel consuming yachts, which have used huge amounts of energy and materials to produce, and if you really want to have a low impact you should have stayed at home´, (and then this descended into another very boring global warming is not our responsibiility rant)… Anyway, this is all true really (not the bit about global warming obviously, in my opinion), and i did know this before i set off, but it was bit of a jolt and it set me off on a little moral panic and wondered, again, whether i should just fly to Bermuda, and come back and do something much more worthwhile, or not go at all. However, with a little councilling and some hasty rough calculations over e-mail from my family and friends, and 5 very long dark nights of watchkeeping at sea (nothing to do but think), i am unsurprisingly going to carry on. Mainly because, as i forget when am in the middle of a defending the earth conversation, i am not just doing this because it is the best thing for the earth, i am obviously also having a excellent adventure and learning lots. The other thing is that actually, according to two independent sources – Mukti and Reevesie (my friends but not biased!), based on the amount of fuel i have used so far, and based on some rough research on from Muktiś sustainable boat building / carbon calculator business on manufacturing and life span of yachts, they both reckon that this way is still much much lower in carbon emissions than both flying or than living in the average household in the UK, at this chilly time of year…

So, onwards i go!!

About an hour after I posted the blog entry from Portugal gushing about the lovely warm breezyness, winter suddenly hit Portugal! It was rainy, extremely windy and actually a bit cold – so, to my shock, out came the scarf and woolly jumpers again. So, instead of hitting the beach I went with a couple of my fellow sailors up to the incredibly dramatic ‘furthest Western point in Europe’, which is half way up a mountain and on a scarily high cliff, is the windiest place I have ever been, and was a brilliant poignant moment for me on my trip, as I could gaze epically out across the Atlantic, and picture me on a tiny boat heading for the other side, 2700 nautical miles away! The ocean looked really quite big up there and as if it was boiling up, with huge swells out at sea, and then where it hits land – a few hundred metres of white froth coming out from the shore from the enormous waves crashing on the cliffs. Breathtaking, scary and exciting!

Anyway enough of my wistful gushing like I’m in an epic film or something. After waiting a few days for the winds to die down a little and to blow in the right direction, we finally left Lisbon on Friday 7^th November. Some clever analysing of weather patterns by our skipper Bjorn, meant that we avoided some horrible wet gales further down the coast of Portugal (which many the other boats doing the same trip got caught in), and instead we headed towards Madeira and then headed South to the Canaries, and we really did do just about that – we only changed direction once (I don’t know if anyone else would find this funny, but I did, I suppose it’s just I’m comparing it to the only other navigating do – cycling round Leicester – usually changing direction every 100 metres!). This route meant that we had three days of pure, exhilarating, engine free, sailing!!

Every morning (after my sunrise watch shift – 4am – 8am), we said ´Morgan Capitain!’ as Bjorn appeared from his cabin. I shared my watches with Eric, another Norweigen who usually sails round the fjords, and the other member of the crew was Aud, captainś wife, the single most tidy and organised person i have ever met in my life. I was sick again, for the first three days, which was just horrible, again, and unexpected as i thought i got my sea legs, but it seems that in the 5 days i was on land on Portugal, my brain and inner ear forgot all that it had learnt on the first leg. ANd i take back any credit that i gave Stugeron the sea sickness drug, as all it did was make me sleepy and sick, rather than awake and sick. After all the luscious citrus fruit in Portugal, with the sickness i started to crave plain homely food like stewed bramley apples and marmite on toast, but i made do with the abundant stocks of Rivita instead. However, i am feeling more confident about dealing with sea sickness now – i know it will last for just three days, and i just have to be able to lie down most of the time, but i am still able to do my watches. On this luxurious boat this was no problem at all as the cockpit had a cosy tent-like cover, cusions, pillows and blankets for the night watch, and Eric and i took it in turns to have little snoozes. The disadvatage of the cover is that you can´t see the stars so well, so i got bored much quicker, and it meant it was harder to play the old favourite game from the other boat – count the shooting stars.

So one of the things i learnt from that boat is just how BORING long passages can be! The day time is fine – you can read, write, chat, make food, watch the waves, look for whales, dolphins, birds, look at the clouds, steer, play games. In the night, unless it is a beautiful full moon, you can´t do anything that involves light for any length of time as this uses to much battery power and is bad for eyes, you can´t see the sea or the clouds, you can´t spot dolphins, it´s hard to keep conversation and word games going for 8 hours a night every night (if you even have a watch mate), and if you do have a watch mate who isn´t really into singing then singing is sort of out of the question (quite specific to my situation that one!)! Star gazing is wonderful, but doesn’t really occupy 8 hours a night…

So, any advice on that conundrum – please do e-mail: what can you do to occupy your brain, without having to see or make any noise? I´m thinking about getting some audio books – stories and learning Spanish – i can play them on my wind-up MP3 player.

I managed to cook up a tasty vegan feast on the last night of that trip – bean, pea and mushroom fritters, with carrot and sunflower seeds salad and other salady things. I think i managed to satisfy and even please these very fishy Norweigens! Other foody news – You will see from the photos that i introduced to atleast one boat the plastic bottle bean sprouter (as invented by Bicycologist Dan for sprout loving cyclists on the move), and in fact introduced sprouts, and in FACT introduced the idea of another variety of bean to the baked bean.

Actually – another request – especially from vegan sailors (i know atleast a couple!), any ideas for very simple but tasty and filling food for around 4 people, using one gas burner and not much space, and maybe an oven, and not lots of fresh ingredients.

Arrival in Gran Canaria was very very excting, we had just spotted land before the sun went down, then as the sunlight faded, the lights from Las Palmas looked really bright and it felt like we were really close, everyone came up on deck, Abba Greatest Hits was turned up full volume,  and much  buzzing around the  navigation instruments, but by the time Abba had sung us their last tune, the lights looked pretty much the same, and it took another 2 hours before we actually hit land, so it was a bit of an amusing anti-climax!

Mmmmm it´s so warm…..

Just to let you know – after another 6 rocky days at sea, plenty more vomiting, lots of Abba, 500 miles further South-West or so, and i have rocked up in Gran Canaria! Will write lots more soon, but right now, there´s bananas to go and eat! (And trans-atlantic boat rides to find, possibly more importantly.)

Love Charlotte