Now we know why the bean bags that were on the boat are a sand colour, – They don’t show the Sahara sand! Unfortunately everything else does, especially a white boat!.
Our first long sail from Almarima, Spain to Tunisia, was memorable for some hugely enjoyable sailing, NATO warships, large shipping vessels, and the sand.
The Sand: When you look at our sails they look brown, grubby and knackered.
In Almarima we took off the foresails and I set about trying to wash them. An impossible task, the brown grim was just engrained.
On the plus side, we discovered that they are actually very good sails:
-The Main has seen better days but it is a beautifully cut Hood main sail that looks bullet poof
-The working jib needs a bit of patching but it is actually in good condition
- The Genoa is a very well made North sail, again seen better days, but sets well
They just look terrible, we now know why – ingrained Sahara sand.
Sailing from Spain to Tunisia I washed the boat with sea water three times, rinsed with fresh water and within hours, – out of know where, the sand settled. By evening it was like walking around on deck in a sand pit. It didn’t rain – just a sun haze, always a heavy dew and the air was obviously full of sand – loads of it .
Sailing: Our first 24 hours were a cracking sailing, romping along at between 8 and 10 kts, we couldn’t stop smiling. The whole trip we just marveled at how much we were enjoying the sailing – even to windward – 9kts and 50 degree tacking angles, and the best bit, – the washing u liquid stayed upright!. We were in no rush, and decided to just go with the wind sometimes 2 kts sometimes 12kts boat speed– it was just good fun and fabulous to be at sea. It wasn’t until the last night we had to put the engine on and motor as we wanted to get to Bizerte (North Tunisia), before some nasty headwinds started to settle in.
Big Brother: We certainly felt like we were being tracked. As soon as we hit Algerian waters ( 40nm off the coast), The Algerian coastguard called, along with “NATO warship” con Channel 16 and asked the usual questions -departure, destination, POB, nationality. The Tunisian Navy were the same, four times in total - always polite, sometimes a bit difficult to understand but we certainly felt they had their eye on us.
We never heard or caught sight of any other sailing vessels, just large cargo ships and a lot of them. Thank goodness for AIS. We set the alarm for a 1nm protection zone and hourly it would go off and we would watch the large ships tweak their course to avoid us. Some of them looked and sounded awfully close but they always missed us!. It certainly kept us on our toes and maintaining a good lookout.
Gift to Neptune: A technical highlight of the trip was actually removing a water pump!. We have one of the two watermakers working well, this is a low powered 30 liters per hour great wee machine that runs off the solar panels. With family and friends visits scheduled, all who like showers – a lot.. John decided it was time to tackle Big Bertha an old traditional system which looks enormous and requires the generator to work and should produce 70 liters per hour.
John disappeared into the starboard engine room, a pleather of instructions were issued and then the rant started “I don’t believe it”, “what muppets”, “who on earth installed this”, “how the hell did they fit this”.
Eventually, the priming pump emerged and was plonked on the cockpit table. It sat in state here for three days. We tested it, – it worked in the cockpit. John disappeared again for an hour and every now and again he was demanding bigger and bigger hammering tools. He was trying to get an very old priming pump out of the engine room. Instead of removing it, they had fixed a new priming pump – according to John in a stupid place. Days later he was proved right as we put it below the waterline, near the seacock intake valve and it worked really well.
The victory was getting the old priming pump out – and with 3000 ft of deep ocean for it to reside in, and a lot of sweat and some remarkable contortionist maneuvers over the engine to honor, it was with great glea John ceremoniously tossed it overboard with an apology to Neptune.
As we rounded the bay into Bizerte, Tunisia, we had a first, - the marina called us, expecting us – and calling us to proceed to the dock where the officals were waiting.
Our 675 mile sail to Tunisia was a short hop in comparison to our ocean crossings but it did revitalize the spark. Every hour is different, the wind and sea are constantly changing, you have to adapt, to be self sufficient, you can tinker fixing things and enjoy making things better. The bad sea days make the good sea days sooo much better, you get to plan the next project or adventure and take time out to chill on deck and think, the best bit is being out in there at sea with nature . – Our happy space.
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