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:

More on the GPS malfunctions - Help wanted!

As previously mentioned, we've experienced two GPS failures in the past few weeks.  I've been trying to google the issue today, with little luck.  There is a lot of chatter about different sources of GPS signal disturbances, and it seems to be picking up the pace, but there's nothing specific relating to our region.  Here's a detailed description of the problem:

We have three GPS systems on board.  They are all completely separate, from the power supply through to the antenna.  The signal loss occurs suddenly and simultaneously on all three devices.  The signal strenght drops to zero for all sattelites, and the units lose their fix.  The first incident (off the Brittany coast) lasted for about ten minutes, the second (in the northern part of the bay of Biscaya) approximately twenty minutes.  During the second incident, we were out of sight of land, and there were no other craft on the radar, nor were there any aircraft visible.  When the signal comes back, it appears just as suddenly as it disappears.

Due to the separate nature of the affected units, I'm certain that the source of the problem is some sort of signal disruption.  After the first incident we assumed that we were the victims of a jamming signal, but given our remote location during the second signal loss, that would have to be a long range signal indeed.  I'm also reasonably certain that the disturbance doesn't originate from anywhere on board, as no equipment was switched on or off during or previous to the anomalies.  The TV antenna amplifiers on board have all had their power supplies disconnected, as the system is decommissioned.

So far I'm drawing a total blank on this, and I'm getting a little worried.  The Man expects a definitive answer to the problem.  Any help or feedback wanted!

The Surprise Enema Machine

We departed La Rochelle at 3:30 on Sunday morning for St. Nazaire. There was a bit of a westerly coming in as we made our way out through the approach channel, and Daphne stubbornly dug her nose into the chop and sent huge sheets of spray flying in all directions. I had the con with Bart until eight o'clock, and we fought our way through the drowsiness until the time came to hit the bunk.

I fell into an uneasy slumber, and was more dead than awake by the time George gently called from the doorway an hour and a half later. The alarm buzzer was beeping on the bridge, and it was my time to shine. At this time the ship was rolling heavily over to Starboard every few seconds, and when I came up on the bridge I realized that we'd been hit by a serious Biscayne squall. The sea had turned an ugly, leaden shade of gray, and patches of spindrift were skipping from crest to crest. George quite calmly reckoned that the wind wasn't much more than thirty knots or so, but the conditions looked alarming to me, especially as he told me that the wind had only been up for fifteen minutes.

None of the lamps in the alarm panel were lit, but the buzzer didn't respond to either the reset or off buttons. I was jabbed by a jolt of concern for my baby, rumbling steadily away in the engine room, but apparently unhappy about something. I rushed downstairs and scanned the gauges. Temperatures: Normal. Oil pressures: Normal. Air pressure: Normal. As I went through my list, my heart rate slowly settled back to normal. All the while, we kept rolling fifty-odd degrees over to Starboard, so that I had to constantly brace myself on the scorching hot pipes around the main. This is why you keep the engine room floor clean at all times; If it had been covered in oil, I wouldn't have had a chance of keeping my footing.

As it turned out, there was an intermittent fault in the bilge water alarm circuit, so I deactivated the buzzer (Snip!) and told the bridge crew to keep a sharp eye on the red light signifying a main engine alarm condition. At this happy conclusion I suddenly felt the urge to take a leak, so I made my way down to the port side toilet. There was an awful stench in the air, and the whole area was fantastically dirty. Too tired to give a fuck, I simply took my piss standing up, as opposed to my custom of sitting down when the sea is up. Thank God for that, or I would have had my first surprise enema. The toilet slurped, gurgled and without further warning spewed its contents forth in a deluge of flying shit that reached at least a couple of feet above the bowl.

Applying my engineering mind to what was essentially a hygiene problem, I concluded that the waves slamming us on the port side created a pressure spike in the pipe, with said spectacular results. Oh well. I should probably see about freeing up that frozen valve so that we can shut it while at sea. Exhausted and disgusted, I stumbled back to my bunk and unsuccessfully tried to get a nap before it was my time back at the con. On the bridge for the final leg into St. Nazaire, I received the news that the GPSes had failed yet again. Same symptoms as last time – all of them had suddenly lost their signal. This gave me a bit of execise with the little Raymarine back-up radar, using ERBL/VRM to plot a more or less accurate track until the GPSes magically came back on line.

The harbor approach was somewhat tricky, as the ocean swell surging into the dredged channel conspired with the two knots of tidal current to make the autopilot near useless for maintaining a steady track over ground. Still, we made it without incident, and I handed the con over to The Man to go through the lock and to our assigned berth. That part went smooth as silk, even the lock certainly wasn't too big for us. In the picture (thanks, Gwen!), you have Bart and myself grinning at the clearance. In an instant we transisted from the noise and commotion of passage making to the surpreme calm of a ship on the dock, the generator quietly purring away in the engine room.

St. Nazaire is perfect for this month of maintenance. It's a seriously industrial little town, with a major shipyard servicing the big cruise liners, and it has everything you might need to repair a ship. It's also working class to the bone, and I'll have no problem fitting in with the locals. To top it all off, there are several HUGE German submarine bunkers in town, which look perfect for exploration. Look forward to an illustrated update if I find the time for that.

(Note the 20-odd thousand horsepower MAN diesel abaft of the two tugs)