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.
