RC Louise

Morocco is 75 miles from Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands, but we have not yet seen the coast of Africa. The harmattan, winter wind from the Sahara, crosses to here, laced with a metallic smell of desert, not ocean. During the day the sky is blue, but the horizon blurs brown and nearby islands disappear from view. Every pore and surface of the RC Louise has sand, thick enough to write one’s initials. The practicalities of our whereabouts are simple. From Spain we sailed quickly south, looking to make miles away from northern Europe gales and find places with resources to do a myriad of boat projects. On one painfully windless stretch we pulled into Nazare, a tiny man-made refuge with steep beaches on the coast north of Lisbon. Within a few weeks Brazilian surfer Carlos Burle surfed possibly the largest wave ever, right there, during the St. Jude’s Day storm in England. By then, we were safely in the flats of the Tagus River in greater metropolitan Lisbon. We bounced from marina to boatyard to anchorage to marina for many weeks. Then we left directly for the Canaries to meet up with Odd Arne Lande (pronounced “Ode”), a future Boreal owner and our Norwegian crew for the Atlantic crossing. We landed on Lanzarote after a pleasant six day sail, and are still here. People say “A new boat always needs lots of work”. It is kind of like they say “Having kids changes everything in your life”. It is hard to get it ahead of time. Months have passed where the measure of success was scoring a boat part or item for everyday living, finding a guy who did something we needed, collaborating with Boreal on issues. We are used to directing my 21 years of higher education towards medicine or Steve’s athletic mind (I said mind) toward coaching. The gritty determination needed to move the physical aspects of this boat forward in failing or bankrupt countries has been surreal and exhausting. Skip this paragraph if you like. One example of the above. The boat has a grey water pump absolutely essential for pumping water from two sinks overboard. We got three extra check valves from JFD in France; they got lost. They look like this: I Skyped, in Portuguese, on of the two Johnson Pump reps in the area. We had a few email exchanges over several days and he offered to deliver the entire pump (247 Euros) on his lunch our the next day, as he was unable to sell the two dollar piece of rubber. Later in Lisbon, we wandered the warrens of streets in the hardware store zone for half a day, showing the bit of kit we need, but finally got redirected to a chandlery where we had already been. They professionally entered all the serial numbers and said they would email soon. When they offered the same deal (the whole pump) we realized there is no inventory in Portugal. At this point I asked Boreal for the contact info for the chandlery in England, but since I want it mailed to our crew in Stockholm to bring with him, they forwarded me to a company in Sweden who then forwarded him to another Swedish company where with a lot of phone calls he finally got the five little black rubbers. The original check valve failed the day after he arrived. Multiply that sort of thing by many. Mostly in Spanish and Portuguese. nike air max 2017 dames Roze And add having to accumulate many things that are not really right at all but sort of do some job. Portugal…The photographic urge evaporated amid contrails of memories. I lived in post-independence Mozambique from 1979 to 1981 and was imprinted forever. But, I had never spent time in the colonizer…the fulcrum, resistance, opponent, mirror. asics gel noosa hombre It was inauspiciously after dark that we made landfall in Cascais and the mouth of the river was packed with small open skiffs with men jigging for squid with lamps. The next day, we motored up the Tagus to the gracious city of low lying buildings wrapped in mazes of easy ochres and pinks and tans.

My brain was blanketed with the shape of the breads, postures, skin colors, the piles of paper in offices, grilled chickens split in half for Sunday afternoon dinner, the thunk of official stamping of papers, the didactic tone and choice of subject of the weekly small town newspapers (“Man Cleans Public Beach Daily for 20 Years”), the very odors of the streets themselves, and of course the worshiped dry salt cod that looks like homemade paper and smells like food from yesteryear. nike air max 2017 pas cher Mostly, Portugal parsed my Mozambican time. Things and ways that I had seen as purely Mozambican reflected the Portuguese hand. Everywhere people were scraping part of a living from the land or sea. Each extra low tide people were up to their knees in mud clamming day and night. At the maritime museum, there was a paucity of truly informative text, but there were hundreds of models of the fishing boats distinct to each little section of the coast. On the street, we were taken aside by a woman from Cape Verde, a maid for an elderly Portuguese couple who whispered to us about how islanders were not respected. In Amara, the suburb which is home to many African immigrants, with rows of high rises with laundry on lines outside the windows, there were security guards at every major store. An elderly shopper showing me the way asked a few questions of some teenage African girls, who respectfully slowed to walk beside her and politely answer her questions. In Sintra, I saw how kings and queens lived, together with their nobility, in mystical hill country. Nike Dames My Portuguese did not come back like riding a bicycle, as my brain in now a minestrone soup of French, Spanish, and Portuguese. I am often unable to construct a sentence well, but can name the verb infinitive in three languages. Seixal, across the river from Lisbon.

We had accumulated enough carpentry, plumbing, and canvas projects to slink up shallow, silted waterways, barely recognizable as channels, to the Tagus Yacht Center in Amora. The competent, affable, and sympathetic brother Rafael and Nono, sons of generations of owners, brought us into the orb of the yard which became our next nest. We tied up at the holding dock for the crane, which set us in black mud at low tide. There was work going on in the commercial side, and certainly pleasure craft were frequently hauled in and out….but nobody but the yard workers was around. No cruisers. Finally, at night they came out. Riding bicycles from their boat projects to the john. Am American with a 1940s Swedish icebreaker which had been on the hard for five years. A Portuguese man who sliced the top off a cargo ship orange life boat and was rebuilding it as a cabin cruiser. A top notch Cape Verdean long line tuna captain, who had been instrumental in passing a law limiting mackerel fishing “so my children can eat mackerel even if they don’t fish”, and his crew did major structural work. A young camera man out of work who had rented out his apartment lived on his sailboat while he fiberglassed the interior. A local guy who fought in the Korean War for the US and got citizenship who just hankered for home and left Chicago, now sundowning in the depths of his boat. A young woman with a French boyfriend with a steel boat gave up her Dutch citizenship because she could not afford some financial requirements, and she is now a European only. Germans with elaborate shops retrofitting well-used craft. Us, trying to bring a new boat to readiness, worried about the kids, often unsure if we can pull this off. Every few nights we had potlucks in a dark behometh steel shed with rats the size of rabbits and cockroaches the size of cockroaches, where the blue plastic tarp kept out the rain and the fires burned hot and the people dressed up and shared. Cachupa, grain salads, bom bacalhau, hoarded sausage, store bought cakes, home made liquor…Dreams were dreamt and argued and fleshed out against the odds into the night. Who needed Fellini? Now we are in Lanzarote at Puerto Calero marina, the only purpose built marina/resort complex I have ever found tolerable. Nike Air Max 1 Heren groen The island is volcanic, with flows from 1730-1736 still looking alive. It was an agricultural and fishing island not that many decades ago. Cesar Manrique, a local architect and artist who took off to Spain (and fought for Franco) and New York returned home with a vision of avoiding the tourism disaster that is southern Spain and applied a firm hand to planning, public art, and painting. All buildings are white, with either blue or green trim (one specific shade of each, not just any blue or green) and just a few stories high. nike air max 2016 heren All. Except the Ikea, which is all standard Ikea blue, and a few yellow or stone houses. There are 5-6 inches of annual rain fall, so extraordinary efforts go to capturing moisture of any kind. new balance 1300 damskie One of the traditional foods is potatoes boiled in salt water. Viniculture technology involves elaborate stone walls with the plants having their roots deep and covered by volcanic rock with holds moisture. The phrase “sense of place” is given the most heightened definition by how the Canejeros live. I cut my hair off as a practical matter: the wind blows it in my face, it takes too much water to wash, soon it will be very hot, it sheds everywhere aboard. Since it was a practical decision, I cut it very short. We move in the company of Europeans, who all have various logical health care systems, which makes the HealthCare.gov scandal (yes, sorry IT, but it is) even sadder. Having Odd Arne aboard has been a complete delight, as he is a hard-working, knowledgeable, and ingenious guy who comes up with great solutions to things. Plus he is fun to hang out with. That is him as a young man in the motorcycle pic. We had Thanksgiving with full fixings, thanks to the British expats who sell cranberry sauce. There is time too for exploring, including the world’s best tuna fish sandwiches, a garbanzo bean dish with what is in the frig called “ropa viejo” (old clothes) and some small waves. Everyday we wrestle with the weather, but it seems to have no influence. The lows from the North Atlantic have dropped very low, cut off again. The trade winds which ought to take us across the Atlantic show a bit of filling in at times, then fade. There are huge white holes on all the weather maps where there is not a single wind barb. The boats from the ARC, a transatlantic rally, left on a schedule, because that is what rallies do, and have spent days motoring or flopping around, raising and lowering their light air sails, trying to make up for feeling bored and banged around by cooking great meals. We are still hoping to enjoy a good sail rather than cherry clafouti. We just didn’t get far enough down to the Verdes quick enough to have a better shot at it. nike roshe flyknit hombre So we wait. The logical thing is to wait until things fill in and have a nice sail. Waiting is hard because Odd Arne is here, and we had set up a timeline to meet his family in the Caribbean.