Comillas49

Last night I went surfing!

I don’t think my passengers thought that it was as fun as I did, but Sloopy had a blast going down those big waves.

They didn’t let me have all my sails, something about my going too fast. Even so, I did go fast and while it was fun, now I’m a little tired.

So, I’ll try and take it easy today. Later friends…

Ayer por la noche fui a surfear!

Yo no creo que mis pasajeros pensaron que era tan divertido como yo creo, pero Sloopy lo pasó cheverísimo surfeando esas olas grandes.

No me dejaron llevar todas mis velas, algo relacionado con ir muy rápido. Sin embargo, yo fui muy veloz y a pesar de que lo pasé muy bien ahora estoy un poco cansado.

Así que hoy, voy a tratar de tomármelo con calma. Hasta luego amiguitos…

Some of you have expressed a sense of bewilderment while following our course in the past 36 hours. From why do we seem to be heading north to Nova Scotia? To, wait, now we must be going south to Venezuela to visit Chavez. The answer thankfully is neither. We continue to Spain via the Azores, it is just that in sailing the fastest way to get from point A to point B is most often not a straight line.

This fundamental truth in sailing compounded by winds that were blowing opposite to what would be considered “normal” in the North Atlantic, would give anybody looking at our route the impression that we had just missed the on-ramp. Specially when considering that for the past 12 hours we have been sailing East. As if we were first lost and now have found our way. I think it was that 2,184,596th wave left of the dolphin to be exact where we should have turned…

Some background, in the Atlantic for the most part winds tend to blow in a certain way. Clockwise around typical high pressure systems in the middle of the ocean. That is why people going east typically take the northern route and people going west take the southern route. The exceptions are the Europe to Newport regattas which takes the northern route because it is the toughest and you end up having tack back and forth A LOT thanks to the winds coming straight at you.

So we are heading north-east in a nice curvy arc to the Azores when over a period of time we notice that wind was now blowing straight at us which is highly unusual, we opted to go straight north for a while hoping for a change back, nothing. So we headed back south to not get too close to Sable Island and just as strangely as the wind had shifted earlier it shifted back so we headed back east and are cruising once again.

The only take away is that nothing is “normal” in the Atlantic and we will do our best to not again miss the on-ramp or accidentally get off the highway by turning on the wrong wave.

Do you get mad when things don’t go quite your way?

I did last Thursday evening. Because the wind wasn’t going the way it normally does and I couldn’t go the way I wanted to go.

You know what sailboats do when they get mad? We count… and we wait, and we count some more…

While I counted and waited, I forgot that I was mad. Later the wind cooperated and I was able to go the way I wanted.

Now I’m going full speed East to the Azores Islands.

Os ponéis bravos cuando las cosas no salen como queréis?

Yo me puse bravo en Jueves por la noche. Porque el viento no iba por donde normalmente va y yo no podía ir en la dirección que yo quería.

Sabéis que hacen los veleros cuando se ponen bravos? Contamos… y esperamos, y volvemos a contar…

Mientras contaba y esperaba, me olvide de porque estaba bravo. Más tarde el viento coopero y pude ir por donde quería.

Ahora voy a toda velocidad rumbo a las Islas Azores.

Some of you may be familiar with the term MOB (men over board) Many of today’s equipment has a button with the acronym MOB just for the purpose of recording the location of a person should he/she were to fall overboard. On Wednesday we had a need for COB button or alarm. COB (and my father wants full rights to this term) stands for clothes over board. Yup, you heard me right, CLOTHES, as in a bag full of them that were in the process of being washed.

Taking advantage of the very light seas on Wednesday, my father tied one of those mesh bags used for separating clothes in the washer to put a bunch of clothes in them, soap them up and then rinse them in salt water. Except somewhere in the process the little rope used to tie the bag together broke from the stronger rope we had on the sailboat as my father watch somewhat incredulously as to what was happening to him. Those were some of his clothes that had kept him warm during the rough seas and cold of the storm, except now they were floating, kind of, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Since we didn’t have a COB button we used the closest thing we had the MOB button which recorded the location of when the button was pressed. That is a little piece of reality here. MOB doesn’t track the location of anything on the water. They only way to do that is to have a transmitter on whatever felt overboard. It tracks the location the sailboat was when the button was pressed and that is normally a sufficient enough approximation for someone with a bright red live jacket or live saver doing their darnest to make sure you see them. Clothes somehow don’t do that and as we later found out impossible to find once they are “sort of” floating and not quite visible on the surface.

But my father’s face of astonishment was only second to José Manuel’s surprise face when he accidentally pulled the self inflating lever on his life-jacket-harness. Just like that he had been transformed into one of those birds you see in National Geographic or Animal Planet with their necks all filled up during their mating routine. Somehow, to my bewilderment, I don’t have a photo of this event. I guess in between the laughing my head off and peeing my pants I forgot to capture the moment for prosperity. He shall not be so lucky next time 😉