Nor had I undertaken the fixup of an older boat. A boat that has not been actively maintained ends up developing a ton of little problems in all of its systems. I needed help with everything, from replacing the chafed lines to buying a quick-release hook for the fuel funnel.
It didn't help that I bought the boat in Mallorca, Spain and I didn't speak a word of Spanish. Ok, I had learned a few words from the movie Y Tu Mama Tambien, namely, "hey cholo!" and "hey pandejo!", which turned out to not as widely useful in Spain as they seemed to be in the movie. How do you describe the shackle that ties the anchor chain to the rode in a foreign language you don't speak? It turns out that the description takes a sheet of paper, lots of drawings and about 20 minutes. But it'd take less than a minute if someone just told you the right phrase.
And most importantly, I needed help with minitransat culture. There is a certain mental attitude required to outfit and sail a mini. It's hard to describe what this is -- it can only be learned from mentors. The closest I can come to is this: you need to cultivate an approach similar to a can-do attitude, but more like a "must-do" than a "can-do." One can't be too fussy on a boat designed solely to go: the loose one of the pair of backstays will rub on the cabin top and dig into the paint; the boom will hit the winch on occasion and get scruff marks on it because, to make the main efficient, it's placed as low as possible. You have to learn not only to not care about these things, but to firmly and deeply not want things to be any different. You would not want a higher boom that looks prettier but leads to a less efficient sail. If you embark on that tradeoff, you'll soon find yourself hauling lazy-jacks, a heated water nozzle at the transom and a holding tank on your boat. And you need to "just go," even after spending a day in a hotel, with all the comfort and amenities civilization has produced in the last few thousand years. It was this attitude, above all, that I needed to learn from experienced mini sailors.
I was incredibly lucky that I came across two incredibly knowledgeable and just as helpful mini sailors in Port de Pollenca. They went way beyond the call of duty to help me out. To Lucas and Pere Antoni, I'm eternally grateful.
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| Lucas | Pere Antoni |
Lucas and Pere Antoni run a yacht rigging and outfitting service in Pto. Pollenca. If you're in Mallorca and need expert repairs, they're the folks you should contact.
I'm also lucky enough to have an incredible shore crew whose virtual company made my first passage much less scary than it would otherwise be, and whose constant support made sure that things were taken care of on the home front. It helps that I have two of the world's most reliable people as part of my shore crew. In fact, one of them is a scientist who has made significant contributions to the science of fault tolerance and system reliability. To them, I'm eternally grateful as well.
