This was an insane journey! Left Pto Pollenca to go to Menorca, a mere 6-hour passage. I always carry 1.5 gallons of emergency water on board, but it's stored so far away that I would sweat a gallon just to get to that gallon and a half that I'm not sure it'd be worth it. And the idea of dipping into the last-resort water supply seemed like a terrible idea in principle. I did have another 1.5 gallons easily accessible, but it was such a bright sunny day with a sunny forecast that I wasn't sure it'd be sufficient for two days. On the food front, I had thought about adopting the backpacker trick of carrying some dogfood with me: you know it's dogfood, so you'll never consume it ahead of time, but if the worst came to worst, you could eat it and get some nourishment. But I had not found any petfood in Pto Pollenca, and I found the idea revolting anyway, so as far as food was concerned, Guizmo just carried a piece of bread, some cheese, some pastries hastily purchased on the way to the boat for the short passage to Menorca, and some freeze-dried backpacking food. On the route front, I was all prepared for Menorca, having measured the minimum and maximum headings, and programmed the destination coordinates into the GPS pilot.
Once out of Pto Pollenca, it was clear that the wind was ideal for a passage to Barcelona and not at all good for Menorca. It would have been a crime to not take advantage of the lovely westerly wind, even though I had no route information for Barcelona. My laptop could not be turned on because my battery had died about a week ago or so, just when I needed it. Somehow, I made an on the fly decision to shoot for Barcelona instead of Menorca; that is, 95 nautical mile overnight journey to mainland, short on food, short on water, and with no route guidance, instead of an easy 35 mile hop the nearby island.
This was my very first real long distance passage. The longest prior passage I ever made was in the San Juans in Washington state, but that was only 20-something miles. A 100-mile passage is nothing like a 20-mile passage. You are guaranteed to spend a part of those 100-miles at night. You are guaranteed to get sleepy. To get hungry. To get bored at times. And to get so much excitement at other times that it's impossible to tell if you or the boat will be capable of handling it.
I made the executive decision to keep the camera inside one of the sealed bags throughout the passage so I have no pics from the passage. But imagine a lot of blue in every direction. And no one. Not a single soul in sight as far as the eye can see, and more. On occasion, there were container ships, which I tried to hail on the radio and mostly failed. I realized that I had been taught how to hail other boats (suppose you want to hail "Northern Star," you go "Northern Star, Northern Star, Northern Star, this is Guizmo." What do you do when you don't know the other party's name?). I think that was even more depressing to see signs of life in other boats but to be unable to reach them. I finally did make contact with a commercial ship and got the weather report for Barcelona. He first told me, in great detail and with a Greek or Russian accent, the positions of the low pressure zones and their motion paths. I asked "what's the wind strength going to be?". He said "7". Force 7 in the Beaufort scale sounded scary. I asked "is that meters per second or Beaufort?" He said "2-4 knots." Ah, it's one of these "p and not-p" situations again, where we have two conflicting statements true at the same time, except it's really three conflicting statements. Is it 2-4 knots? Is it 7 m/s? Force 7? These are all very different from each other, but it was impossible to get a clarification on the radio -- he was not sounding super happy about some ill-prepared guy asking basic questions over a scratchy radio connection. I decided to interpret this as optimistically as possible, at "2-4 knots," and proceed along.
Sailing long distances turns out to be more of a mental challenge than a physical one. Your mind, freed from the regular pacing that daily activities and other people provide, starts racing when left to its own devices. This is why Feynman must have spent so much time floating in isolation chambers. I first went through, at 100 miles an hour, all the things I have to do. Then I went through everyone I've ever met and 'balanced the books' so to speak: did I do right by them? did they do right by me? After you get done with the living, you get to spend a lot of time talking to the dead, and it's a lot harder to balance the books there. It's no wonder that sailors were religious people. Your fate is mostly left up the elements and your mind is racing through everything that ever happened until it's exhausted. It's impossible, even for someone goal-oriented like me, to not turn inward. Sailing long distances is like a protracted reflection session. Imagine the "moment of silence" that people hold before a baseball game or whatever to honor the war dead. Remember how long and never-ending that minute of silence is. Now imagine that that moment was not just a single 30-second affair but a full 40-hours.
I did not know how long the trip would take ("around 20 hours" is what other people told me) and what my battery capacity actually was (these tests take forever and they're not good for the battery, so I had avoided them), so I held the tiller instead of letting the autopilot take over. I'm now incredibly good at holding the tiller within a few degrees of our destination, even while lying on my back, even with my eyes closed, even while dreaming/hallucinating from sleeplessness, just by the feeling of the wind on my face.
Most of the ride was a 3-point reach, that is, the main, the jib and the spinnaker were all fully open and pulling the boat along at about 6 knots.
I have three instruments that tell me where I'm going: the old-school analog compass, the digital fluxgate compass connected to the autopilot, and the GPS. All three show something different! They are all within 20 degrees of each other, but I suspect the analog compass has been corrected for the magnetic declination in Brazil, whereas the fluxgate has not been, so the two differ by 15 degrees or so. The fluxgate and GPS are close to each other, but they differ because the boat, even with the canards and the keel, has some sideways creep, where you point to 350 degrees and end up heading towards 343.
During the night, I pulled down the spinnaker for safety and the wind died down, so Guizmo was just bobbing up and down in the water for a while, only moving along at a few knots. In the morning, the wind clocked around, and I found myself sailing toward Barcelona at a decent clip.
The entry into port, 40 hours after departing from Pto Pollenca, having gotten little sleep and having had to ration food, was quite eventful. For one, it is vrey difficult to find the precise entrypoint into Port Olympique -- the lights are hidden from view. Once found, the entrance is a little dangerous; it is buffeted by rocks right below the surface that were put there to cut down on the waves without obscuring the crowd's view of the olympic races.
We had a very visceral introduction to Barcelona. My engine died just as I entered the harbor, so I had to coast into port, and got a tow to our berth. The guy giving us the tow gave us a very narrow slot, not realizing how awesomely wide Guizmo was, so we had difficulty fitting into our slot and would have collided with the neighbor boat. So I had to jump onto their boat to avoid a collision, whereupon I found myself looking down on a couple in the middle of being rather intimate is the polite way to put it, but really, it was more than your regular intimacy we're talking about. The girl seemed to be completely non-plussed about what must have looked like a line forming behind her, and the guy seemed to enjoy the audience as he had the biggest smile on his face. I guess I was the only one who thought the situation was a bit odd, but I couldn't easily extricate myself as I had to hold onto the boat and maneuver it into a slot that is obviously too small for it. Luckily, the guy disentangled himself and closed a hatchway, and Guizmo was soon tied up and safe.
At which point, hunger hit me. It turns out that the Barcelona club district is directly at the port. The town elders must have had the following conversation. "We need a club district." "It'll be full of women in skimpy outfits, guys with so much hair gel you could use their hair to start a fire, and overall, lots of people with STDs." "Ooooh, I know, we already have such a district, at the port! Let's put the two districts right on top of each other." So at 3am, I found myself having walked through one couple's kinky sex scene into the Spanish nightclub scene. As I paid 10€ for two hotdogs, clearly the most expensive hotdogs in Europe, I was surrounded by lots of girls in hot clothing (normally, by 3am, there isn't much left to look at in the US club scene, whereas in Spain, the night is just getting going), guys with too much cologne, and transvestites in leopard-print pants with such unnaturally round boobs that they looked like they purchased their boobage from the citrus coop in Soller. Just outside, no less than a dozen guys were trying to sell beer to me -- I guess if you've been to the clubs and can't get enough alcohol there, you might need a beer for the walk home or something. I don't recall the rest very well, but the transition from quiet contemplation into Spanish nightlife was rather jarring. I somehow found an overpriced hotel and slept for 12 hours straight.
Once out of Pto Pollenca, it was clear that the wind was ideal for a passage to Barcelona and not at all good for Menorca. It would have been a crime to not take advantage of the lovely westerly wind, even though I had no route information for Barcelona. My laptop could not be turned on because my battery had died about a week ago or so, just when I needed it. Somehow, I made an on the fly decision to shoot for Barcelona instead of Menorca; that is, 95 nautical mile overnight journey to mainland, short on food, short on water, and with no route guidance, instead of an easy 35 mile hop the nearby island.
This was my very first real long distance passage. The longest prior passage I ever made was in the San Juans in Washington state, but that was only 20-something miles. A 100-mile passage is nothing like a 20-mile passage. You are guaranteed to spend a part of those 100-miles at night. You are guaranteed to get sleepy. To get hungry. To get bored at times. And to get so much excitement at other times that it's impossible to tell if you or the boat will be capable of handling it.
I made the executive decision to keep the camera inside one of the sealed bags throughout the passage so I have no pics from the passage. But imagine a lot of blue in every direction. And no one. Not a single soul in sight as far as the eye can see, and more. On occasion, there were container ships, which I tried to hail on the radio and mostly failed. I realized that I had been taught how to hail other boats (suppose you want to hail "Northern Star," you go "Northern Star, Northern Star, Northern Star, this is Guizmo." What do you do when you don't know the other party's name?). I think that was even more depressing to see signs of life in other boats but to be unable to reach them. I finally did make contact with a commercial ship and got the weather report for Barcelona. He first told me, in great detail and with a Greek or Russian accent, the positions of the low pressure zones and their motion paths. I asked "what's the wind strength going to be?". He said "7". Force 7 in the Beaufort scale sounded scary. I asked "is that meters per second or Beaufort?" He said "2-4 knots." Ah, it's one of these "p and not-p" situations again, where we have two conflicting statements true at the same time, except it's really three conflicting statements. Is it 2-4 knots? Is it 7 m/s? Force 7? These are all very different from each other, but it was impossible to get a clarification on the radio -- he was not sounding super happy about some ill-prepared guy asking basic questions over a scratchy radio connection. I decided to interpret this as optimistically as possible, at "2-4 knots," and proceed along.
Sailing long distances turns out to be more of a mental challenge than a physical one. Your mind, freed from the regular pacing that daily activities and other people provide, starts racing when left to its own devices. This is why Feynman must have spent so much time floating in isolation chambers. I first went through, at 100 miles an hour, all the things I have to do. Then I went through everyone I've ever met and 'balanced the books' so to speak: did I do right by them? did they do right by me? After you get done with the living, you get to spend a lot of time talking to the dead, and it's a lot harder to balance the books there. It's no wonder that sailors were religious people. Your fate is mostly left up the elements and your mind is racing through everything that ever happened until it's exhausted. It's impossible, even for someone goal-oriented like me, to not turn inward. Sailing long distances is like a protracted reflection session. Imagine the "moment of silence" that people hold before a baseball game or whatever to honor the war dead. Remember how long and never-ending that minute of silence is. Now imagine that that moment was not just a single 30-second affair but a full 40-hours.
I did not know how long the trip would take ("around 20 hours" is what other people told me) and what my battery capacity actually was (these tests take forever and they're not good for the battery, so I had avoided them), so I held the tiller instead of letting the autopilot take over. I'm now incredibly good at holding the tiller within a few degrees of our destination, even while lying on my back, even with my eyes closed, even while dreaming/hallucinating from sleeplessness, just by the feeling of the wind on my face.
Most of the ride was a 3-point reach, that is, the main, the jib and the spinnaker were all fully open and pulling the boat along at about 6 knots.
I have three instruments that tell me where I'm going: the old-school analog compass, the digital fluxgate compass connected to the autopilot, and the GPS. All three show something different! They are all within 20 degrees of each other, but I suspect the analog compass has been corrected for the magnetic declination in Brazil, whereas the fluxgate has not been, so the two differ by 15 degrees or so. The fluxgate and GPS are close to each other, but they differ because the boat, even with the canards and the keel, has some sideways creep, where you point to 350 degrees and end up heading towards 343.
During the night, I pulled down the spinnaker for safety and the wind died down, so Guizmo was just bobbing up and down in the water for a while, only moving along at a few knots. In the morning, the wind clocked around, and I found myself sailing toward Barcelona at a decent clip.
The entry into port, 40 hours after departing from Pto Pollenca, having gotten little sleep and having had to ration food, was quite eventful. For one, it is vrey difficult to find the precise entrypoint into Port Olympique -- the lights are hidden from view. Once found, the entrance is a little dangerous; it is buffeted by rocks right below the surface that were put there to cut down on the waves without obscuring the crowd's view of the olympic races.
We had a very visceral introduction to Barcelona. My engine died just as I entered the harbor, so I had to coast into port, and got a tow to our berth. The guy giving us the tow gave us a very narrow slot, not realizing how awesomely wide Guizmo was, so we had difficulty fitting into our slot and would have collided with the neighbor boat. So I had to jump onto their boat to avoid a collision, whereupon I found myself looking down on a couple in the middle of being rather intimate is the polite way to put it, but really, it was more than your regular intimacy we're talking about. The girl seemed to be completely non-plussed about what must have looked like a line forming behind her, and the guy seemed to enjoy the audience as he had the biggest smile on his face. I guess I was the only one who thought the situation was a bit odd, but I couldn't easily extricate myself as I had to hold onto the boat and maneuver it into a slot that is obviously too small for it. Luckily, the guy disentangled himself and closed a hatchway, and Guizmo was soon tied up and safe.
At which point, hunger hit me. It turns out that the Barcelona club district is directly at the port. The town elders must have had the following conversation. "We need a club district." "It'll be full of women in skimpy outfits, guys with so much hair gel you could use their hair to start a fire, and overall, lots of people with STDs." "Ooooh, I know, we already have such a district, at the port! Let's put the two districts right on top of each other." So at 3am, I found myself having walked through one couple's kinky sex scene into the Spanish nightclub scene. As I paid 10€ for two hotdogs, clearly the most expensive hotdogs in Europe, I was surrounded by lots of girls in hot clothing (normally, by 3am, there isn't much left to look at in the US club scene, whereas in Spain, the night is just getting going), guys with too much cologne, and transvestites in leopard-print pants with such unnaturally round boobs that they looked like they purchased their boobage from the citrus coop in Soller. Just outside, no less than a dozen guys were trying to sell beer to me -- I guess if you've been to the clubs and can't get enough alcohol there, you might need a beer for the walk home or something. I don't recall the rest very well, but the transition from quiet contemplation into Spanish nightlife was rather jarring. I somehow found an overpriced hotel and slept for 12 hours straight.
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