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Wednesday, October 22nd, Rabat, Morocco
Surprise! Here we are in Morocco. We have
crossed the Prime Meridian and are back in the western
hemisphere. We sailed out of the Mediterranean Sea
two years and one month after entering it. We are
back in the Atlantic Ocean and are in serious traveling
mode.
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Our stay in Barcelona was a busy one. Regretfully,
we hardly got out into the city at all. We stayed
in Port Forum because our friends, Roland and Mar, had
moved there from Badalona, it was cheaper, and right
across the street, although still a fifteen minute walk,
from Diagonal Mar shopping center. They have a
huge Al Campo store where we were able to stock up on
groceries as well as do all of our other shopping in the
rest of the mall. The marina put us on the outside
dock with all of the super yachts. You can just
see our mast in the above photo, the fourth one from the
left. There is certainly something to be said
about the right neighborhood, and being in the right
place at the right time as well!
With four thousand miles and a little over two months to
go between Barcelona and St. Lucia, we had a long list
of chores to accomplish. So, start up the violins,
we spent most of our nine days in the city "working."
First and foremost, was the acquisition of our new sail.
The folks at Quantum Sails in Barcelona did a fabulous
job designing and building a "code zero" or "screecher"
for us. "Gennaker," I now know, is the wrong term
to use, as I had been, for the biggest of our three
headsails. We use it in winds anywhere from 60 to
180 degrees off the bow. A gennaker is not
designed to be carried that close to the wind. So,
we bagged up our old screecher for them to use as a
guide and prayed they would get our new one back to us
by the time we were ready to leave. The other
deciding factor in the equation, other than the weather,
of course, was a shipment of boxes we were expecting
from the US. With the forecast looking good for a
Friday departure to get to Gibraltar, we crossed our
fingers and started working on our lists.
One potential boat issue had been calling for attention
over the past several months. The four 200 amp
batteries that provide all the power for our day to day
lives on Zia hadn't been holding their charge as well as
they used to. Although we hadn't seen any hard
evidence of battery failure, the gauge we use to monitor
them indicated that they were staying in the 70% of
capacity range and never really charging up to 100%.
With the change of seasons we expect to see less power
because our solar panels aren't putting in as much juice
as usual. Regardless, it was a subject we clearly
needed to look into before embarking on our
trans-Atlantic crossing.
Batteries in general are a bit of a mystery, more art
than science almost. We know that our laptop
battery will last longer if we run it down to empty
periodically rather than keeping it fully charged all
the time. Boat batteries are apparently different.
Their capacity is measured in amps and their state of
charge measured in volts. As we started our
research, we realized that our voltage readings were
fine, and it was just the percentage reading that our
charge monitor calculates based on amps in and amps out
that was causing us concern. On the other hand,
these were the original batteries, six years old.
The useful life of liquid gel batteries like ours is
from four to eight years. Hmmmmm.
We
resign ourselves to buying new batteries. The only
question remaining was whether we would have to spend
€4000 on them in Barcelona, or if we could wait until we
got to St. Martin and pay $3600. Walking down our
dock, we notice that one of the super yachts, the big
blue one in the middle of the picture, has a bunch of
batteries sitting on the dock beside their boat.
Joe boldly asks one of the crew about them, hoping to
find out where they bought them. Maybe we could
get a good deal. The chief engineer, a nice
British fellow, comes out and is happy to talk to us.
They are the exact same batteries as we have and they
are replacing a total of 32 of them. They have all
been used as emergency back ups for various systems
onboard, such as radios and lights.
Misunderstanding the direction of our questions, he
tells us to hang on a sec. They have hired a local
electrician to do the swap, and he goes and asks him
what he plans to do with the old batteries. Jed
comes back in two minutes and tells us we can have them.
Pick the best four out of the lot. Hmmmmmm.
The thing is, we would be swapping six year old
batteries for six year old batteries. Does that
make any sense? Well, after talking to the local
electrician, we started getting excited. It turns
out, this type of battery can only be charged and
discharged a certain number of times before it comes to
the end of its useful life. OUR six year old
batteries have been through many of these cycles.
Keeping them fully charged on a trickle of current such
as THEIR six year old batteries had been, makes them
almost as good as new. By Friday afternoon, Joe
and I had picked out the best four of the sixteen
batteries that were sitting at the dock. Carting
four 150 pound batteries down the dock, hoisting our old
ones off the boat and the new ones on the boat was a
back breaking chore, but well worth the effort.
Being in the right place at the right time certainly
paid off for us in Port Forum. I'm still wondering
what Arab sheik I need to send a thank you note to!
Almost as important as assuring that we have reliable
power on Zia was the girls' desperate need to go
shopping. Somehow, the two H&M trips that I made
with them in Genoa and Nice hadn't sufficed. I
gave them each a €50 budget and sent them off with Mar,
our wonderful friend from White House, who somehow got
roped into the excursion. It was surprisingly much
more successful than their trips with MOM!
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We
also have two birthdays coming up in quick succession on
the 28th (Joe) and the 1st (Cassie). Have I ever
mentioned how difficult it is to buy presents for boat
people? I know our families are well aware of the
problem, but you'd think as a boat person myself, I'd
have a bit more of a clue. The girls are easier
because they want everything, but I'm still stumped
about Joe. Aside from carbon fiber dagger boards
and new turbo charged engines for Zia, he doesn't really
want anything. I'm hoping I'll be inspired by
something exotic in Morocco!
We
did get to see a few friends, but missed most of them.
Jou, Montse, Gina and Gulliem came for an afternoon and
we shared a wonderful lunch and sunny afternoon at the
park.
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Montse talked to the director at the girls' old school
and arranged for them to spend a couple of hours
visiting their old classmates. I sat in with
Cassie and we answered all sorts of questions about our
daily routines during an hour of English class. We
had kept in touch with a few of the folks from school,
including Ramon, one of the administrators who is an
avid reader of the website. Gracias por tu amistad,
Ramon!
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I
made two huge trips to the grocery store (you should
have seen how I piled it all onto my little wheeler,
mom!) and now have enough food on board to last several
months. Our boxes arrived, much to our delight, on
Friday morning (thank you, Tammi!). We frantically
unpacked goodies from home, stowed the groceries, and
everything else that had wound up laying around the
decks and prepared to head to sea.
We
downloaded updated weather forecasts right before we
left, not knowing when we would next have access to an
update. One of the list items we had accomplished
was to get our sailmail email address up and running
again. This allows us to collect emails and
weather information (if we could figure it out) using
our SSB radio while underway. We enlisted a friend
(thank you, Bruce) to keep an eye on things and email us
with updates in case we had trouble figuring it out.
There was a system brewing in the Atlantic starting late
Tuesday night which could hit earlier if we were unlucky.
We
set out for Gibraltar at five o'clock Friday afternoon.
The rough seas and 20 knots on the nose quickly died
down to nothing. Out of a total of 106 hours, we
wound up motor sailing for 70 hours. As it became
apparent that we would hit Gibraltar after dark on
Monday night, we made the decision to keep on going to
Rabat. The only reason to stop in Gibraltar was to
fuel up and we calculated that we had plenty of fuel to
make it the extra 150 miles.
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Luckily, I still had a little room in the freezer
despite the two Al Campo trips. This was the
little one. As we sailed through a large school of
dolphin jumping and surfing down the waves, both rod and
reel sing out. Joe jumped on the reel and hauled
in Mr. Big.
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We
caught one more an hour and a half later, just as I was
cleaning up from processing the other two. We let
him go.
Five night watches later, Joe and I still felt pretty
good by the time we pulled into the marina here at
midnight on the fifth night. We each do about a
five hour shift at night and take a two or three hour
nap during the day. The kids are amazing,
entertaining themselves with books, sewing projects, and
tackling school with enthusiasm. This was the
longest passage yet with just the four of us, and we
clearly are quite comfortable with it. We are 650
miles closer to our Christmas in St. Lucia date with the
Cunards. 3350 miles to go!
Next Entry
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Many thanks to our friend Craig Homenko for his assistance in setting up the website.
We also would like
to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who has been kind
enough to host the website on his server.
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