Magic

If you want magic, you will have to search in yourself.  Everything out there, that can be seen, touched and explained, is to me decidedly un-magical.  Magic is in the moment, in the unexpected, in your mind.

Watching you sleep is magical

Discovering that your goal is more impressive than you imagined, is magical

Picking sweet cherries by the pool with you is magical

Exploring the unknown with is magical

Staring at the horizon is magical

The Helje

The old derelict looms above us in the darkness as we approach in the dinghy. We spotted her on our arrival here in port, and instantly knew we needed to explore her. There is a mystical, magnetic pull that draws me to old ships, and this one has it stronger than most. We pass under the stern, with "Helje, Kherson" written in faded white paint, past rust scales that look as if they would kill a man if they dropped.. After tucking the dinghy safely out of sight between the ship and the dock, we find a sturdy fender chain and climb aboard.

The deck is absolutely covered in crap that nobody cares about any more. Lines, oil barrels and miscellaneous detritus all abandoned in a fantastic jumble. We gingerly make our way across wooden deck covering rotted to mush, listen to the creaking of the old steel plates, painfully aware that there is a ten meter drop into the cargo hold beneath us. Up rickety stairs, maintaining separation so we don't both fall if one of us goes, up three deck levels to the bridge roof.

Wow, the size of the thing! She is big. Not really big, of course, but at three hundred feet or so, the deck is absolutely vast compared to the ones I'm used to staring at. Quietly, careful with the flashlights so as to not alert the dock guards, we start searching for a way in. Open doors lead to electric utility rooms, deck lockers and god knows what, but all the doors leading inside have been welded shut. Astrid finally finds one that has been cut open, and we step into the darkness, flashlight beams playing across the bulkheads.

The place gives me the creeps. I'm usually pretty comfortable around shipwrecks, having left my boyhood fears behind, but not with this one. Before I'm to steps inside, the hairs at the back of my neck are standing on end, telling me forcefully that this is an evil place. We go forward. Old pyrotechnic distress signals are strewn about everywhere, covering the floors in all the main deck level cabins. There must be a hundred kilos of the stuff, way more than would ever have been carried on board, and the distribution tells a clear tale. Idly wondering why the insurance scam never got further than that, we keep going.

The hallway to the galley is blocked by stacks of welding sticks. Nice, new, vacuum packed ESAB sticks, in quantities that makes me stop and wonder. What happened here? Somebody bought a half ton of welding sticks, and there it stopped. My feeling that something evil took place here deepens as we go down the hallway. Cabins, and lots of them. This thing must have carried a crew of thirty or forty. A huge crew, for the size of the ship. Posters line the walls, dirty bedsheets on the floors, and throughout are obvious marks of fighting. Doors forced open, cabins ransacked, broken bits of furniture.

One level down, and there are more cabins. Pornographic posters on the walls, more porn on the floors, mixed with postcards, Russian documents, tacky little books of bible quotes and cigarettes. Cartons and cartons of cigarettes. The infirmary stinks like no other place. Here too we see stuff strewn about, a huge medicine cabinet all stocked. Down the corridor and left through a watertight door into the engine room. A spare stream turbine rotor blocks the hallway, still in its crate. Spare parts and tools strewn everywhere. Two levels down, and we find ourselves deep in the bowels of the ship.

The water is just an inch below the deck plates, lapping gently against the bed plate of the massive, straight eight main engine. Everything is covered in Cyrillic writing. Astrid steps through a deck plate. Half finished maintenance, some of it shoddy work. A generator pulled apart, cylinder head and all left on the deck, unprotected. More tools, drawers full of fuses, spare electric motor brushes, huge machinery the function of which I can only guess at. Hilarious Soviet health and safety posters on the walls.

Three levels up, into a small, spare galley. The place has been used for keeping birds. Empty cages, must be ten of them, and bird seeds on every surface. Filth. Eggs wedged behind a fridge that smells like death. Soviet propaganda maps on the walls, with the United States omitted. Up to the bridge. The compass is missing, but the rest is there. The charts we found in another cabin. The radio room has been tossed worse than the rest of the ship, the floor covered in circuit boards, thermal printing paper, an inflated life raft, and more. Back down, and Astrid stops: "Baby, what is this?"

It is blood. Lots and lots of it. Sprayed on the walls. On the ceiling, even. Probably some on the floor, as well, but that has been lost in dust and gunk. I trace it back to where it started, by one of the starboard cabins, door forced. Spatter stripes. Drag marks on the walls. Fantastic amounts of blood on the left side of the corridor, around the corner, to the head of the stairwell. Down the stairs and to the right is the infirmary. So that's where he was trying to go. Poor guy obviously never made it further than the stairs, though, because that's where the blood stops.

It's beginning to make sense to me now. Crew confined to the ship, a bad captain losing control. Fights breaking out. Thirty men in that space with nowhere to go, it must have been hell. The murder is the last thing to happen on board, and they are all spirited away, leaving the mess behind for us to contemplate.

P.S:  Sorry about the pictures.  I uploaded them all correctly rotated, and Blogger somehow decided to convert them all to landscape.  You'll just have to tilt you head on the side.

Via Cadiz, Mellila and Oran to Bizerte

It's been too long since I wrote now. It's not that I haven't had anything to write about – rather the opposite. A short while after the last time I updated, Nimo got killed by a car. I sort of felt obliged to dedicate an update to him, but it was just too sad to get to grips with, so I put it off. Meanwhile, our little adventure started picking up speed, and in a short while it was snowballing so that I had neither the time nor energy to go find a wifi point.

St. Nazaire is now only a distant memory, 1800 miles behind us. Still, it is one that will stick with me for a while. I could write a ten-page description of the animosity of the locals, but instead I'll try to forget that part and focus on the positive inputs that I brought with me from France. St. Nazaire has an appeal of its own, basically being one big shipyard, about as far removed from Las Vegas as you can get.

The surrounding countryside has a special kind of beauty, and the roads are made for motorcycles. This provided the perfect vent for any kind of tension: Just hop on the bike and go discover something. We did long rides in the week-ends and short ones in the afternoons.

St. Nazaire was where Astrid joined the boat. We fell in love in Belgium, and she promptly decided to dismantle life as she knew it to join the boat as cook and sailor in training. She will be a big part of my foreseeable future, and I'm one happy sailor!

St. Nazaire was where I lost a bet - I thought I could climb in through one of the machine gun ports at the submarine bunker.  Once inside, we found parts of it pretty intact, including the transformer room in the picture.

St. Nazaire was also where we ran into Dieter, the aging German engineer with a thousand stories to tell. He's busy outfitting the thirty-foot fishing boat he bought for nothing with equipment he finds in the trash, in preparation for a circumnavigation. He's crazy, in all the good ways.

Three days before The Man was due to turn up, the harbor officials knocked on the door in the evening and asked us to please move the boat across the basin by nine the next morning. While I'd been building up to the point where I'd take the Daphne for a spin, I was taken aback by the short notice. They somehow managed to pick the exact moment when I had the main engine cooling pipes apart, and Bart busy welding on new fittings. No pressure, Dude! He rose to the occasion, and we went to bed that night with the genny running and the main engine preheating on.

At six the next morning I donned my engineer's cap and got her fired up. Then I put on my (brand new and temporary) captain's cap and talked Bart and Astrid through the maneuver before entering the bridge to carry out maneuvering systems checks. We let the lines go, and everything was going sweetly when the main sputtered and died with what felt like a case of fuel starvation. My captain's cap went back on the peg, I put on my engineer's cap and rushed to the engine room with a conscious effort to stay calm. Both the captain and the engineer were slightly troubled by the prospect of drifting around in an industrial harbor with ships moored all around, two tugs carrying out cable laying operations and a big bulk carrier expected through the lock at any moment.

The problem turned out to be a significant accumulation of water in the day tank, which had migrated throughout the system. Thus it was twenty-five minutes later when I'd drained the day tank, drained the prefilter, switched main fuel filters, bled the fuel pumps, bled the injectors and touched the starting handle to be rewarded with the highly satisfying sound of the engine running like nothing had happened. After that, it was all too easy.

The Man arrived just in time to get the provisions on board. That same day the weather, which had taken a consistent turn for the worse, suddenly decided to give us a three-day window to get out of the bay. We jumped at the chance, and the next morning we were steaming at nine knots into an unseasonably calm Bay of Biscay.

Profiting from the fair weather, we kept going past our planned stop in Portugal, all the way to Cadiz. The harbor authorities tried to put us into Port Sherry, but one look at that horribly bleak site of abandoned construction convinced us to stay at anchor in the bay. We had a stroll through the old town, marveling at the impossibly narrow streets, and Astrid and I discovered a pretty nice park at the seaside.

After two nights in Cadiz, we got going again, our minds set on the Mediterranean. We were still off the coast of Spain when I got off watch at nine in the evening, and I slept like the dead until Bart woke me up at three, just in time to take us through the strait of Gibraltar. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, with heavy rain squalls reducing visibility to nothing and all but blinding the radar. Approaching from the north, we had to cross the westbound lane of the TSS. With the rain clutter setting of the radar up to ninety-odd percent and the incessant stream of heavy shipping, that was no fun at all. In fact, at the time of this writing I still think it was one of the scariest things I've ever done in a boat.

Once through the strait, the weather changed abruptly, the wind dying down and visibility opening up so that I got to see the lights decorating the tall Moroccan coastline. Shortly after my first glimpse of Africa I got back to my bunk, and woke up to a splendid blue sky. Most of that day I spent together with Astrid, staring in wonder at the wild, rocky coast of Africa, the continent I'd heard so much about but never laid my eyes on. That night we put into Mellila, and for the first time I set my feet on African soil.

Even with my total inexperience with this part of the world, I realized that Mellila is an uncharacteristically clean and well kept city. It has that chaotic flavor, but without all the dust. Astrid and I got to spend another day walking hand in hand, seeing new sights, but then it was time to fire up the main and keep going east.

By the time we departed from Mellila, the weather had settled into the sort of north-easterly gale that the Admirality Sailing Directions warn "produces the worst sea conditions on the North African coast". As we left the peninsula behind and the fetch opened up, things got steadily worse until we were receiving a serious beating from the port stern quarter. The Daphne really showed her worth then – we got slammed over to unheard-of angles of roll, every loose item on deck got smashed and swept into the scuppers, and yet here I am, writing this.

Next port of call was Oran, roughly twelve hours later. We were all well shaken at that point, so we let the rest of the crew sleep while I did the approach with The Man. We were met by friendly harbor officials who got even friendlier when they discovered that we carried good quality drinking water on board. The immigration officials were less friendly, though. First one of them tried some moves on Astrid while she was showing him around (the left handed bastard!), then they left with our passports without returing them all Visa'd as promised. Consequently, we spent the next twenty-four hours locked up in a grim industrial port, staring at the alluring fort up on the hill to the west, until The Man got sick of it and put to sea.

From Oran we came more or less traight here, to Bizerte in Tunisia. Finally I'm getting a real taste of Africa, at least the north coast. We'll be spending months here, doing all kinds of interesting maintenance and upgrades, so I'll cut this rather long-winded and wooden update short at this point and bring you something fresher next time.

Belgium to St. Nazaire by motorbike

EDIT:  Bloggers editing interface is fucked up (AGAIN!), so all the pictures have to be at the top of the post.  I guess you can figure out what's what.

 Here's a fun job description: Procure two 125cc off-road bikes and bring them to the Daphne. Bart, being the speaker of the local language, got on the internet and promptly found two Honda Varadero 125s in good condition. The only slight "problem" was that they were both in Belgium, which meant that there was suddenly a sizable road trip on my calendar. I set off at six o'clock Wednesday morning, and subsequently spent twelve hours in the public transportation system, finally arriving in a small village close to Mechelen to survey the first bike.

All was well, so Bart (who had joined me at that point) and myself set off yet again for another little village, the name of which has escaped my memory, to have a look at the second bike. At that time I was getting well and truly tired of sitting on the train, a tedious exercise only interrupted by the odd railway station. Luckily, the Belgians haven't succumbed to the malady of reconstructing all their old railway stations in glass and concrete, as is the fashion in Norway, so at least there was some interesting architecture to break up the boredom. I especially liked the one in Antwerp, with four sets of tracks stacked vertically either side of a spectacular central gallery, all capped off by a lattice girder roof fit to put the Eiffel tower to shame. They sure don't build 'em like they used to!

When both bikes were finally bought and paid for, it was high time to get to bed. I spent Thursday making a trip to Oostende (which I'd never thought I'd see again), where Bart met me with the paperwork for the registration and insurance. Thanks, dude, without local support I'd have been helpless in the grasp of bureaucracy. While in town, I also paid Ludvig the engineer for the radar parts we need (the old Decca has fried its power supply board). Even though I started out at six o'clock the next morning to get my hands on the number plate for "my" bike, it was five in the afternoon before I finally disentangled myself from Brussels and started making serous headway for St Nazaire.

It quickly turned out that I'd badly misjudged the ambient temperature at night. Except for a helmet and gloves, I totally lacked proper motorcycle gear, riding in jeans and my trusty leather coat. I'd initially been a bit worried about getting too tired during the projected 12 hours of riding, but as the sun went down and the air temperature dropped to five degrees, lack of sleep was my least concern. I cut the ankles off a pair of socks from my backpack and put them around my wrists to lessen the amount of wind blowing up my sleeves, put on my dirty T-shirt for an extra layer and tucked my pants into my socks. Still, it only helped so much, and I was shaking so bad that the bike took a zig-zag line down the road. When I finally stopped being bothered by the cold and started entering the don't-give-a-fuck state, I realized that I was being irresponsibly stupid, and put up for the night in a B&B in Longeau, close to Amiens.

At that point I must have mad a serious dent in my core temperature, because when I woke up at six the next morning, I was still feeling cold and my legs didn't really work well. I jumped on the bike and kept going south-west, stopping for coffee at every service station, trying to preserve some heat. Still, the chill was absolutely brutal, so that when the sun got up and started heating the landscape, it was like the most wonderful gift I'd received in ages. The Varadero has the best chassis of any 125 I've ridden, but it's also by far the slowest, and really doesn't like to go faster than 100 km/h. Thus, I stayed off the highways, following the N- and D-roads, an ever widening grin inside my helmet as I finally started feeling at ease.

Even with the stopover, the trip to St. Nazaire made for a long day of riding. Sadly, I was a bit too preoccupied with making good on my goal to really enjoy the beautiful countryside rolling by, and it was with relief that I finally put the bike on its stand next to Daphne, thoroughly plastered with bug spatter. This morning, the sun rose into a deep blue sky on my beautiful Sunday, and since the trip from Belgium had been such hard riding, I decided to make a little trip purely for the pleasure of riding. The Varadero really is a fantastic little bike, and aside from the all too obvious lack of power, it feels like a much bigger machine. Not only did it keep me semi comfortable for the run down from Belgium, but it eats up bad roads with all the competence I've come to expect from a Honda off-roader. I picked a route around the marshes north of town, sticking to the smallest roads I could find, and took it easy all the way. I even took the time to stop for pictures, a small selection of which you'll find below: