It’s Hard to Say Goodbye to Spain – The Sailing Journey Continues

“Patience Is Not the Ability to Wait:
 Patience is to be calm no matter what happens, constantly take action to turn it into positive growth, and opportunities, and have faith to believe that it will all work out in the end while you are waiting.”
― Roy T. Bennett

 

It’s been quite a while since I wrote a blog post about our sailing activity, almost six months. I wrote a few sailing articles but since we were not at sea, there wasn’t much to update about our sailing life. We took five months to travel back to the USA. We worked for a month, helped welcome our newest grandbaby to the family, and crossed the country from the East Coast to the West Coast, twice.

Since our children love to torture us, they split up and live on both coasts. That way, we have to spend more time back home when we do return because we need to travel 3,000 miles to see all our children. Then there are our parents, who of course live in the north and south. We have to visit them also. The car rentals and plane fares would be astronomical. To make the trip more economical, we get a great deal on a used car, drive it across the country, and then sell it when we leave. So far, we have sold the cars for more than we paid for them. Win-win!

 

Life Revolves Around Boat Parts

The upside of returning to the States is that we come back with a huge suitcase full of boat parts. Why do we do this you might wonder? First of all, we have an American-outfitted boat. It’s difficult to find parts for a US boat in Europe. In addition, we have no shipping address here. Shipping is very slow outside the US. It could take weeks or even a month for a part to arrive. We don’t want to hang around a marina that long.

We returned with two extra bags filled with parts and supplies when we came back to our boat on October, 2^nd. We purchased Starlink and carried the dish and all the parts in our suitcase. We had everything from engine strainer baskets to electrical parts we knew we would be needing. Lo and behold, what we didn’t expect was for our brand-new refrigerator to be broken when we returned. Dan just replaced it two years ago.

Our freezer stayed frozen, thankfully, but the thermostat on our fridge went bad. If there is one thing I need to be working on my boat, it’s my fridge. I knew we wouldn’t leave the marina in a week, as planned. We would need to stay until the part arrived and my fridge was fixed, adding more to the four grand marina bill from our five months away.

 

When Good Shipping Goes Bad

The good news was that Dan found the part we needed in Madrid, Spain, and promptly ordered it.  The company promised to ship the part in 24 hours and we are only five hours away in Rota, Spain. Since nothing we have ordered in this part of the world has shipped quickly, I was dubious, to say the least. Dan was optimistic and told me, “How long can it take, it’s only five hours away.” That statement was the kiss of death.

Unlike Amazon in the USA, the tracking system for packages over here is sketchy. We only had three notices: shipped, delivered to depot, and delivered to address. The following day, Dan smiled and said, “Look! Our part has shipped,” as the first notice was checked off. A stern warning followed the tracking: NO CHANGES ARE POSSIBLE AFTER THE ORDER HAS SHIPPED.

That’s when we got the bad news. We had to let the marina know we wouldn’t be leaving until our part arrived. We stopped in the office and let them know and informed them we would have a package delivered for us in the next couple of days. We have had many packages delivered to marinas over the years and knew we should give them a heads-up. That’s when the office lady told us, “No, that is not possible. We are a state marina and we don’t accept packages.”

I felt the color drain from my face. “Also,” the lady continued, “tomorrow is a holiday so there will be no deliveries.”

We left the office and I immediately asked, “What are we going to do now, Dan? We can’t change our order and the marina doesn’t accept packages.”

The entrance to the marina has a guard gate. Dan’s plan was to wait at the café next to the guard gate, every day until the truck came. The shipping company was MRW. Hopefully, the truck would have lettering on it. We would intercept the truck when it arrived at the gate. The plan was sketchy at best, but it was our only option.

Thursday was the holiday. There was another holiday the following Monday. Friday, we didn’t receive any notice the package had arrived at the mid-way depot. We spent the next five days getting our new satellite dish installed and preparing for departure as soon as the part arrived. We didn’t want to spend any more time at the marina than necessary.

 

The Shipping Waiting Game

Tuesday arrived. The part still had not shown up at the depot, but we couldn’t take the chance we didn’t get the correct updates, so the waiting game began. Dan and I took shifts. We waited beginning at 9:00 in the morning and stared at every truck entering the gate until 6:00 PM. This went on for two days. On day three, we received a notice that the package had been delivered to the depot. It had been exhausting doing nothing. Finally, Friday at noon, I went to the boat to make lunch. Dan took watch. I ate my lunch and left his for him to return to the boat and eat.

Around 1:00, I returned and sent Dan to the boat for his lunch. About half an hour later, lo and behold, like a mirage, a white truck with the letters MRW pulled up to the gate. I launched myself out of the chair and ran like a lunatic, waving my arms, and screaming “STOP! YOU HAVE MY PACKAGE!” to a delivery man whom I sure spoke not a word of English.

The startled delivery man opened the door and stared at me. I quickly pulled up my Google Translate. I asked him in Spanish if he had a package for Dan Gieschen. He looked down, then held up a small item. “That’s it!” I yelled and breathed a huge sigh of relief. I was literally trembling.

He pulled up a clipboard and said one word, “Passport?” Apparently, he needed identification to release the package. My heart sank like a brick as I realized I didn’t have any identification, just the shipping information and numbers on my phone. I held it up, hopeful. He shook his head no. It was a long way back to the boat. I felt sure he wasn’t going to wait for me to get a passport. I felt like crying.

Just then, Dan appeared behind me. “You got the truck! Does he have the package?” Dan asked excitedly.

“Yeah, but we need a passport,” I said with dismay.

Dan pulled out his wallet and took out his US Driver’s License. Hoping it would work, he handed it to the driver. The driver shrugged, pulled out his pen, and wrote numbers down on his clipboard. Then, he handed us the tiny package, one small refrigerator thermostat. I was happier than a kid on Christmas morning as I took the package from him.

The moment he backed up and pulled away, Dan and I did a victory dance right there on the curb. Then we returned to our familiar little table outside the café and ordered two beers to celebrate. We had never been so happy to receive a boat part. Unfortunately, while the repair only took minutes, there was a bigger issue looming on the horizon that would cause us further delays at the marina.

 

More Delays

Our game plan was to leave the marina as soon as we got the refrigerator fixed. However, since our boat had sat in the water for five months, we needed to pull her out, clean the bottom, and do a few repairs to our hull. We made the appointment for the next morning to have the boat pulled up. We weren’t allowed to do any work on our own boat so we had to find and hire a local man to meet us when the boat was pulled up.

We found our man and pulled our boat out of the slip bright and early the next morning. It’s a struggle to back our boat into the haul-out slip but after a few tries, we successfully had our girl in the slings. The giant lift pulled her up and out of the water. We wanted to stay in the sling and have the man do the work then lower her back into the water. The dock hands had other ideas.

They refused our request to stay in the slings and told us we had to be put on stands. The marina office had told us staying in the sling would not be a problem. Apparently, it was. Unfortunately, the rigging on the stern of our boat interfered with this process. This was not a new problem for us, we had the same problem with other lifts this size, which is why we requested to stay in the sling.

To make a long story short, it was not possible to place our boat in the stands, the man we hired never showed up anyway, so back into the water we went. Morning wasted. We returned to our slip. Dan planned to put on our dive gear when we got to the harbor and we would do our best to do the work ourselves.

However, the plans changed when Dan looked at the weather forecast for our departure and a short sail to the next bay over, the harbor of Puerto Sherry. There was heavy wind arriving in two days. Dan made a Captain’s decision not to be anchored in the 40-knot-plus wind event.

 

Big Blow in Rota

The first storm that came through, we didn’t blink an eye. There was lots of rattling and rocking, but we spent the day hunkered down, cozy in our salon, confident that we were safe and secure. Unfortunately, when Dan looked at the next few days, there was an even bigger storm headed our way. The winds were predicted to reach 60 knots. In our five years of sailing, we had not experienced winds in the 60s. I was happy to stay two more days and wait out the event.

Two days later, the real winds came. This was a storm that had an impact along the west coast of Europe. Reports of storm damage followed, and even in our very well-protected marina, the 60 knot winds took their toll.

Early evening the brunt of the storm hit. The wind sounded like a freight train whipping past the dock. Every boat shuddered, clanked, and groaned. Instead of being safely nestled in our salon sipping hot toddies and watching movies, we were riveted to the chaos. Boat coverings, dodgers, and sails became dislodged and shredded on boats around us. We were sealed tight as a drum and were faring well. Others were not so fortunate.

Dan left our boat several times and helped rescue flapping sails and unfolding fabric. Anything not tied down would be beaten to shreds. I was a nervous wreck as he tried to rescue one boat where the main sail became unfurled. The boat was healing dangerously into the dock with sail fully out. He and two other men bravely went aboard to try and furl it back in. However, the lines were jammed. Dan single-handedly resolved the issue as the boat threatened to toss all of them off and into the dock. With that crisis resolved, Dan went across the dock to another boat with an issue. This went on for hours.

The storm abated. I was more than ready to leave the marina we had now been in for over three weeks. The morning after the storm, the wind and seas had calmed. It was finally time to leave. We paid our bill, cast off the dock line, and headed out into the bay. There was still some chop to the water from the storm, but we put the sails up and started across the bay. That’s when the engine started billowing thick black smoke.

 

What Lies Ahead on Our Sailing Route

“Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.”
Lou Holtz

“

In the never-ending saga of what we must do to continue this journey, we have yet another issue to deal with. We will pull the boat out of the water in the marina in Puerto Sherry, with a much larger lift, and clean the barnacles off the water intake for the engine. Hopefully, that was the issue with the engine. We will get our bottom cleaned, do our repairs, and then finally be ready for a five-day passage to the Canary Islands. There is no good weather window in the next week or so, so wait we must. We will wait until we have a solid five days of a good forecast before we attempt the crossing.

Once we arrive in the Canaries, we are excited to explore them as we have heard about great things to see and do there from our sailing friends. Sometime in late November or December, when the weather is favorable, we will sail south to Cape Verde along the west coast of Africa, and then head across the equator to the Caribbean. At this point, Barbados is in our sights.

I say, “in our sights,” because we never really know where we will end up or when we will get there. Our plans are often a loose interpretation of our intended route. As always, my motto is, as long as we are still alive, still in love, and still afloat, it’s all good. We get wherever we are going when we get there.

 

Fair Winds,

Alison and Dan
S/V Equus

 

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