Hello from the Atlantic

As I write this post, we are about 500 miles offshore.  We left Gibraltar four days ago, and by morning, we’ll make landfall on Madeira Island. There are four of us on Arcadia.  Neil and I are accompanied by a British captain, Anthony, who is well known to us from a previous passage.  We also have Mark, a crew member from New Zealand.  Mark is a recently retired manager of a huge marina in Auckland and has sailed the globe on many types of boats (often with his Irish wife, Fiona). We are extremely lucky to have such experienced crew.  So far, the journey has been pretty comfortable. Splitting the sailing and cooking duties among four people  is a treat, and means that we are rested and eating well. In fact we’ve had fresh fish a couple of nights because my very first time casting a line in the Atlantic netted us a good size mahi-mahi. 

Reaching this point in our journey required quite a bit of effort and planning. My last blog entry detailed our fun September in the south of France.  Since then, our days have been more disciplined. We spent October traveling to Gibraltar and attending to chores to ready the boat,  and ourselves, to cross the ocean. For much of this preparatory phase, we were blessed to have Katie Soden on board. She was a tremendous help and a lot of fun. 

In late September, Katie joined us in Toulon. Our departure the next morning held an unexpected twist as we found ourselves in the middle of French Naval exercises involving warships, a huge submarine, and paratroopers. A small military boat approached us and urged us to pass by quickly, and we complied, keeping as far from the paratroopers’ target as possible.  

After a couple days of westward travel along the pretty French coastline, we reached the Gulf of Lyon. The gulf is known for very high winds, but we were blessed with a comfortable journey across.  The big problem that emerged instead was a malfunctioning water-maker. Boats like ours are like tiny floating towns, in the sense that we are our own electric company (via solar, generator, battery bank), our own waste management system, our own telecommunications (Starlink dish), and our own water utility. Knowing that there are very few service providers are authorized to fix our water-maker, and that we would absolutely want to have it operating normally prior to the Atlantic Crossing, really put the pressure on us. 

Once we reached the west side of the bay of Lyon, we spent a few days near Perpingnon, France working with a water-maker repair team. Thinking (incorrectly) that it was fixed, we then traveled south toward the Spanish, Balearic Islands. We enjoyed that island chain last year and were happy to return, even briefly. This time we got to visit Minorca, the least touristy of the four Islands. It is known for beautiful hiking trails and we made good use of them. We also spent some time in a bay on Majorca where we ate authentic paella at a restaurant on a tiny island connected to the beach by a footbridge.  Too soon, big storms put an end to our time in the Balearics.  Given that a sailboat is usually the tallest thing around, and is essentially a giant lightning rod, thunderstorms can be scary.  We skirted the worst of the storms and headed toward the Spanish coast to continue our journey toward Gibraltar.  Unfortunately, the water-maker was still broken, so Neil spent a lot of time communicating with the manufacturer and working on it.  He was able to make some improvements and got it operational, but not fully fixed. In the meantime, we covered a LOT of miles.  By the time we reached Gibraltar, Katie had sailed almost 1000 nautical miles with us.  

It was nice to get the boat tucked into her marina slip in Gibraltar and take a rest. We’d arrived a few days ahead of schedule and needed a break from chores, so we took a ferry across the strait to Morocco. We spent three days staying in the old city center of Tangier. Our room was near the kasbah, which is the term for a walled fortress (and for three days, The Clash played on a loop in my head).  In Tangier, we wandering the streets, got to know the merchants, and ate well.  We also made a side trip to the Moroccan shore for some hiking and cave exploration. We felt far from home as we listened to the call-to-prayer broadcast from mosques five times a day, perused the spice stalls, side-stepped camels on the beach, and observed burka clad moms, waist deep in the ocean playing with their children.  

Back in Gibraltar we got serious again about our to-do list. We had our Volvo engines serviced, checked and double checked all systems, tried in vain (again!) to repair the water maker, and arranged for a rigger to come check the tension and reliability of our rigging. This was probably our most important task, but proved very challenging. The only rigger in town stood us up twice and then ghosted us. After much frantic searching we were able to find a team from a town an hour down the coast who drove to meet us.  They determined that the rigging needed some adjustment which they completed, and then gave Arcadia a thorough inspection including climbing the mast.  With a clean bill of health from the new rigger, our efforts turned to shopping, shopping, and more shopping. Supplies, boat spares, and a month’s worth of food were needed.  Another unwelcome twist emerged this time; our boat insurer abruptly decided that we needed an additional crew member with experiencing crossing the Atlantic.  The prospect of finding such a person a week before our transatlantic passage, let alone figuring out where they sleep made us lose our minds a bit. After some tense negotiation, the insurance reversed course and went back to the previously agreed on plan.

On November 4th, Mark and Anthony arrived, we filled our 400 L fuel tank and our 700 L water tanks, and set off for Madeira the next morning. And that brings us to today. We are almost to Madeira and doing well. We have aboard another replacement part for the water-maker and an appointment with a repairman in Madera. Fingers crossed that this works otherwise we will have to carry a heck of a lot of water with us. Either way, the plan is for us to spend a few days in Madeira resting while a storm passes by. Once we takeoff from there it’ll be about 28th straight days to reach Antigua.  Land-ho!