Merry Christmas! Sunday, 25/12/2022
Sitting out in the cockpit, under the shade of the bimini and writing this. A happy Christmas to all! Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I hope you have a relaxing festive season.
It’s certainly calm here. Being at the very outside edge of the marina, I’m surrounded my water and the sun is shining. I had a neighbour, Swiss German people on a catamaran, but they left at 10:00. The number of boats in the marina has dropped over the last few days, from 68 about a week ago to perhaps 50 now. Some of the boats are locked up, their owners likely having gone home for Christmas, but most are inhabited. No doubt in the course of the day I will see many of these people – I’ve already had a long chat with my Massachusetts neighbour…
There really is a good mix of nationalities here. I’d spoken with a young French guy a few days ago when going ashore for a shower – he looks amazingly like Johnny Depp in pirates of the Caribbean: long brown hair, a beard, and always bare chested! Well, I bumped into him outside the shop down in Porto Lindo on Friday. He was with a man in his sixties who I correctly took to be his father. The son Charlie said: my father doesn’t speak English; he’s actually half Polish, half German… So I engaged the man in Polish – which certainly surprised him! – and found myself walking back deep in conversation. Quite surreal – I certainly didn’t expect to find myself speaking Polish when I popped out to the shop! The man was clearly equally amused…
One contact I had in the past week was with Ulf, the owner of a catamaran who I spent quite a bit of time with in English Harbour, Antigua in May and June last year. He’s German, but has lived in the UK a for a good 20 years. He, his partner, and their respective sons have travelled back to the Caribbean from the Mediterranean, making landfall in Barbados. Their voyage from La Palma in the Canaries was 21 days – a relatively long time for a catamaran, which will sail faster than a monohull yacht. Similar to what I experienced, they also had several days when the trade winds failed. Their voyage had one exciting, although potentially disastrous, aspect to it: they hit a whale! Only four days out from the Canaries, one morning they heard a helluva bang. They rushed out and to the stern saw the back of a large whale in the water, surrounded by blood. And one of their keels. They were very lucky: their keels are simply attachments that are bonded to the hulls of their boat, and are not structural. Apparently their purpose is to prevent the boat “side slipping”, but the absence of one doesn’t seem to matter particularly. Obviously they had a very worried 10 minutes or so checking that there was no structural damage or evidence of water coming into the boat.
This is the sort of completely unpredictable thing that can happen sailing. Nothing can guard against hitting a whale – it is just sheer fluke. They were very fortunate that the damage was minor – with less luck, they all could have ended up in their lifeboat, watching their boat, Meerkat, go down.
So, if there’s a little moral in all this, it is: never underestimate the importance of (good) luck! And on that happy note, I simply wish you all a very happy Christmas and a successful New Year. Fair winds!
