How much water can that monster carry?
How much fuel? How much did you use to Bermuda?
If you have a chance, I'd love to see a stern view.

Two 200g water tanks
Two 400g diesel tanks

Photo later.

We just sailed out of Bermuda, now a couple miles out off the NE coast. Should be around 12-14 days to the Azores assuming decent winds and weather. Time to put the fishing line in the water. Yellowfin tuna one time, dealer!

Sweet, safe travels

Landed safely on the island of Faial in the Azores archipelago yesterday. Internet access is pretty bad so no photos yet.

Tons of stuff on the boat broke, including: main halyard, topping lift, clew shackle, VHF, radar (again), water pump from one of the two fresh water tanks, boom vang, and so on.

Saw infinite dolphins on the way over from Bermuda and a bunch of whales as well. Lots and lots of dolphin photos.

Didn't catch any non flying fish, but lost three lures and a treble hook. Got something halfway to the boat before losing it. Need to reread de captains fishing book again.

Holy middle of nowhere

Yeah we've still got about 1000 miles to go before reaching the European mainland. Content to hang out in the Azores for now and spend a week fixing stuff. There is a lot of stuff to fix.

Finally got a SIM card for my cell and have internet access. We arrived at the start of a holiday week so nothing was really open until today. Now I have a Vodafone SIM and some kind of data addon which I think is $4.25/week for 2GB/month. No clue why they don't just charge the full month at once, I probably don't understand something and Vodafone.pt is in Portuguese so I only partially understand it and google translate is only somewhat effective. We'll see. Nice to have internet after being without for a little over 2 weeks. Was starting to get the shakes.

I'll post a photo of dolphins swimming literally underfoot in a bit.

Here are some dolphins swimming six feet below me:

Arrived at Lagos, Portugal a couple of hours ago. Went Norfolk -> Bermuda -> Azores -> Portugal.

Haven't had decent wifi since Bermuda so no photos in a while. Hopefully decent wifi here so I can post some more sweet dolphin shots. Caught a tuna a few days ago and brought it on the boat but it escaped before I could secure it. There was an 8 foot long white tip shark chasing literally four feet behind it when I yanked it up onto the boat, was pretty crazy.

Hello, Portugal! Let's see what's going on here. Should be here a few days before heading out for the Cannes/Nice area in France.

losing the tuna had to be depressing.

hope the shark got him, haha

I hope the tuna got away. What a story for him to tell his other friends.

**** that tuna.

I hope his guts fed the crabs.

lol

I thought I understood what the phrase "curse like a sailor" meant before, but it wasn't until that tuna escaped right off the deck only to fall into the mouth of that shark that I had my zen moment of awakening and attained full "curse like a sailor" understanding. The ocean actually turned black for about 6 meters in all directions around me, such was my stream of profanity.

So, so tilting.

We sail out tomorrow morning, most likely to Ibiza. Today's goal is to find a Francesinha for lunch, based on recs from 2p2ers in the Portugal thread.


From wiki:

Francesinha (meaning Little Frenchie or simply Frenchie in Portuguese) is a Portuguese sandwich originally from Porto, made with bread, wet-cured ham, linguiça, fresh sausage like chipolata, steak or roast meat and covered with melted cheese and a hot thick tomato and beer sauce served with french fries.

I can't post the photo from wiki but it's worth googling. That sandwich may well kill me before we even raise sails tomorrow.

looks like a good way to go out though..

Survived the Francesinha. Also discovered pasteis da nata, which is a little pastry filled with custard and topped with cinnamon. If you ever get the chance to eat one, do.

Here's an update I just wrote up. Wifi here is still terribad so no photos yet. Hopefully it will be better in France and I can put up some photos.


We head out of Lagos, Portugal tomorrow morning at 0900 local time, headed for Antibes, France. Exactly three days here. Not nearly enough time in my opinion, but it's not my boat. Neither of the owners really like or enjoy Portugal, and both are anxious to get to France.

The trip over from Azores to Portugal was mostly uneventful. Slightly more success with fishing - we caught a small (25-30lb) tuna and brought it all the way up to the boat when a shark showed up. The shark was an oceanic white tip, about 8 feet long. This was around 11pm at night, two days away from Portugal out in the Atlantic.

Normally the plan would be to bring the tuna up near the boat, then either gaff it (basically stab it with a very large hook on the end of a broom handle) or tie a rope around its tail or through its gill to secure it. Once it is gaffed or tied, you bring it onto the boat. Because there was a shark chasing it, we didn't have time to do things properly, and I just yanked it up onto the deck by the fishing line. You don't want to do this because sometimes the line will break or you will tear the hook right out of its mouth. This time it worked, and I pulled the tuna up onto the deck. However, as soon as I got him on the deck, the leader (a length of metal wire connecting the lure and the fishing line to prevent fish with sharp teeth from biting through the line when they bite the lure) snapped in half, and since he wasn't otherwise secured, he flopped his way right back into the water with the lure still in his mouth - right into the mouth of the waiting shark. Totally demoralizing! I started to grab for him when he was heading back toward the water, but then I saw the shark was still right there waiting a few feet away and I didn't feel like having my arm bitten off, so I stopped short and away the tuna went into the mouth of the shark. Now I truly know firsthand what the phrase "curse like a sailor" means, as I immediately gave the shark my fully uncensored opinion on his arrival and the resulting aftermath. At least I got a good story out of it.

The only other thing of note was the arrival into Lagos. We saw land on the radar at 0330, and approached in the dark. I don't like approaches in the dark. I really didn't like this one as there were fishing boats out everywhere. The problem with fishing boats is that they are low to the water, so radar doesn't always pick them up. They also rarely if ever have AIS (an ID system that works over VHF to alert you to the presence of other boats), so they don't show up there, either. This means you are pretty much completely reliant on visual contact. That would still be OK, except that some fishing boats like to turn all their lights off at night so the competing fishing boats don't know where they are going or how well they are doing. That's a problem, because then you have pretty much no way of knowing where they are.

My watch is 0200-0600, so I was on watch during this approach. At one point I had 13 simultaneous contacts (a contact is what you call another identified/visible ship when you are out on the water). Of those 13, only 2 consistently showed up on radar. Another 2 were intermittent radar signatures. The other 9 never showed up on radar at all and I only saw them by their lights. One showed up on AIS. At least two kept their lights completely off until I was only 1-2 nautical miles away, then suddenly turned them on to let me know they were there. A mile sounds pretty far away, but trust me when I say it is not. We were moving along at 6-7 knots, so I cover a mile in 8-10 minutes. If the fishing boat is headed toward me, that time drops further. 8-10 minutes would be a lot of time if there weren't another dozen boats all around you that you need to consider before making a course change to avoid the one that just appeared. All 13 of these were within about a 3-4 mile radius. It was an extremely stressful challenge, and a good example of why I dislike night approaches.


The current plan is to sail close to the coast of both Portugal and Spain, then through the Straights of Gibraltar, then up along the east coast of Spain, then cut across the Mediterranean from Barcelona over to the French Riviera near Nice/Cannes. We plan to land at Antibes, which is halfway between Nice and Cannes. The trip should take about a week.

Once in Antibes, the owners are going to have the boat looked at (mostly due to the damage suffered during the first departure from Bermuda) and decide whether to have it hauled out there for work or take it elsewhere. We should be in Antibes for about two weeks regardless. Looking forward to some French croissants!

Waking up earlier tomorrow to go to the Lagos farmer's market for some last minute provisioning, then on we go.

Sounds like you will be cruising through $$$ area. Going to Monaco too?

No fixed plan but I may hop on a train and check it out. Definitely taking a train over to Italy and Switzerland while the boat is worked on. I've been to most of western Europe but not those two.

What kind of cat is that? The spreaders look ridiculously big.

It's a big custom cat out of New Zealand.

Haven't updated in a while because still no good wifi. Currently in a small port in Spain somewhat north of Barcelona.

Here are photos of a small 30-35lb tuna we caught a few nights ago right at sunset. This was about 25 miles offshore of Ibiza.

Right after driving a marlin spike into his brain and bleeding him with vertical cuts to the bloodline just aft of each pectoral fin:




20 minutes after that photo:



Yes, that's wasabi.


The next day at lunch:






We were crossing the Gulf of Lion yesterday and blew one of the engines so we're in Spain for at least a few days fixing it. If I get decent wifi I'll see about uploading some more photos and writing up more details. So far things are still going well, life is sweet.

It sounds pretty awesome.

It seems like things break on a pretty regular basis. Is that just par for the course or is your boat kind of old/prone to breaking? How worried are you about something important breaking when you're days/weeks away from help?

The boat is about 30 years old. Things breaking is pretty standard as a saltwater environment is rough on pretty much everything, and being on a sailboat adds a lot of continual rough motion to the mix as well. Together and over time, this chews up most everything except fibreglass and some plastics.

That said, more stuff has broken than I expected. This was effectively a transatlantic shakeout.

I'm not worried about stuff breaking when weeks out because as long as the boat floats and we have water and some food, we'll be OK. Don't even need to have much food as fish will be attracted to the floating boat. If the boat starts sinking, we have a life raft. If that fails, we have PFDs. We also have lots of emergency communication gear for sending out distress signals with our existing location.

I've been stuck on a boat in the ocean with no propulsion before. We had nothing to do other than fix the problem, which I eventually managed to do. One thing you have out there is time, assuming the boat isn't sinking.

We arrived yesterday in a small town between Cannes/Nice, so the planned portion of the adventure is over. Not sure if or how long I'll continue to stick around. Probably at least another week. May leave for a while then come back later.

Internet connection is still super slow so no photos just yet.

when you're crossing an ocean, do you ever see any other boats?

I'd imagine it'd be a bit disconcerting if one just appeared on the horizon.

also, what is the most scared (or nervous/anxious I guess) on the open ocean?

could be either from seeing another boat, or some key part of the boat breaking, etc.