Yesterday, tiredness caught up with me. I had been doing quite well. I did not want this crossing to be like the last one, from Gibraltar to the Canary Islands. During that first long crossing I had decided to do nothing but sail and recuperate. The boat would be everything. The process of bringing the
4th Night at Sea
Nightly Observations – 28 November 2016, 4AM
Some stars are so low on the horizon that you can easily mistake them for boats. Some hardly shine bright at all so they seem to fade off while you’re looking at them, leaving you to wonder if they were ever there to begin with, and then occasionally they fade back on. Some stars are
Crossing to the Canary Islands – Sotogrande to Lanzarote, 8 – 12 October
Saturday 8 October We woke up early and left Sotogrande at 6:30 AM, a good 2 hours before the sun rises in the South of Spain. The crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar is a bit complicated and demands some preparation. In the middle of the strait there is a corridor for tankers; its northern
Sotogrande – 2-8 October 2016
We went to Sotogrande as it is the closest Spanish port to Gibraltar that has a crane that can lift our boat out of water, which we needed to do to repair the damage caused at Benalmadena. We thought we might stay on the boat during the repairs, but after a night decided to take
A Funny Week – 27 September to 4 October
“You realize that last week at this time, we were watching a flamenco show in Granada?” I asked Pierrick Tuesday night over dinner at a Belgium/Italian restaurant. We are in Sotogrande near Gibraltar and I had just returned from Paris. Sometimes, so much happens in a week that your regular concept of a week morphs
Benalmedana & Malaga – 23-25 September 2016
The last thing you would expect is culture shock while traveling to Spain. Even less so a shock set on by a mass of British travelers. And yet that is the only term I can find to describe how I feel every time we venture out in Benalmedana. We came to this port because it
Adra – 22-23 September 2016
I am currently reading “Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country’s Hidden Past”, by Giles Tremlett, a British journalist who’s made Madrid his home. I have just read the chapter on corruption. The King Juan Carlos, who was a supported of Franco, became head of state after the dictator’s death, and then he ushered in
Cartagena – 16-20 September 2016
We arrived in Cartagena at 4 AM, 5 hours later than we had planned. You can imagine that our first day there was a very lazy one. We slept, rested and napped, and later in the afternoon we went out for a walk to hunt down the tourist information center. In seaside towns these are
Alicante – 13-15 September 2016
All our French friends seem to have quite a negative opinion of Alicante. “Why do you want to go there?” they all asked. And viewed from a boat sailing along the Spanish coast, I must admit it does not look special, or at least it does not look much different than all the other coastal
Travelling Down the Spanish Coast
When we left Tarragona on 11 September, our plan was to sail all the way down to Alicante, a city I absolutely wanted to visit because I had stayed there for a month studying Spanish when I was 18. This trip would take several days. I had suggested, and Pierrick agreed, to a new shift