Message from Inmarsat-C Mobile

TO:alfonsoochoa311.goforaride@blogger.com
Searching the winds
It's almost four days now at sea and quite busy ones. We've had winds since we left the shelter of the Canaries and making good progress along with the other boats.
We had a good kite run on the second and third day with speeds constantly over 15 knots and maximums of 18's. After that we've been experiencing some windshifts due to a cold front that passed yesterday afternoon with some gusts up to 32 knots in the squalls.
That was the first of the two cold fronts we were expecting for these days, with the second one arriving tomorrow early morning and with winds expecting to reach above 40 knots and maybe more right when the front hits us. After that we'll have a day or two with winds up to 25 knots after which we are supposed to head towards Saint Marteen.
A bit of anxiety with the expectative of strong winds tomorrow morning. Enjoying some good sleep in the last day, but my mind is constantly circling around what will it be like and for how long those winds will last. It's been since the Fiji - New Zealand passage 3 years ago that I haven't been in serious seas and although I don't want to be there, and I will question why I do this, why am I here and who made me do this? I'm quite looking forward to it, in a masochist sort of way I know... But either we keep south and get light winds or we beat through it north bound for a while and enjoy the stronger favourable winds later on. So north we go...

Buckley's Waypoint

Down in Austrlalia, there’s cyber character who can see the wind from all around. He can tell the highs from the lows and to predict their movement thru oceans and clouds he knows. Along and across parallels he guides us through them all. He points us in the right direction and in him we trust.

SW of Tenerife, some say 100 miles of its southern tip, lays Buckley’s Waypoint. A mythical place of constant winds and higher speeds. A part of the world where boats stop swaying and rocking and they push thru the water in the search of warmer latitudes. Waters of abundant fishing where mermaids swim by blinking their eyes and octopuses come afloat and invite you play in their gardens, in the coral that lies beneath the waves...

We’re all heading to Buckley’s Waypoint, the route is long and is not clear how to get there, and something tells us that no matter how hard we try, it will always move somewhere further and brighter. We can only head our bows towards this utopia of a place, we can trim our sails and ask the older and the wiser if they have found it and how we can reach it. But something tells us, it will always keep moving... and so should we!

Faster than the Wind!

It’s really remarkable when you think about these sailing boat nowadays and the fact that they can actually sail faster than the true wind.

The thing is, that when you move at a certain speed, you actually create wind (in the opposite direction of where you’re going to) and that happens all the time, not only on a sailing boat. That’s the reason why on a bicycle you usually feel the wind coming from the front, even when you turn around and go in the opposite direction. It’s called the apparent wind, and is not more than the actual wind you’re feeling when you are moving. If the wind is coming from side at, let’s say, 20 kph and you’re riding at 20 kph, you’ll find an apparent wind of around 28 kph from 45 degrees in front of you... and when you turn around, you’re going to feel that same wind but from 45 degrees on the other side.

Anyway sorry for that engineering distraction, I guess sometimes it just wants to pop out. The same happens on a boat. But contrary than on a bike where the friction with the air is the strongest force stopping you along with gravity, on a sailing boat you’re being powered by that wind. And when you move and “create” some more apparent, you’re actually sailing with a stronger breeze than the true wind and thus you can sail faster than the wind. So simple, but yet so fascinating to understand it and to experience it.

Light winds since the start and apart from a good couple of hours with the kite, it’s all been a struggle to keep the boat moving and in the right direction... seems like we have a long race in front of us!

Searching the Wind!

Tomorrow we set off from Tenerife heading to Saint Marteen. The preaparation has been fun and now we're ready and all we can do is hope for some wind to keep us moving for the first few days before we hopefully reach the tradewinds.

We're twelve on board after the arrival of 6 delivery crew all from Germany. Good guys all of them and from the talk quite good sailors as well so should be a good fun bunch to sail with. Really looking forward to the experience.

The usual crossing in this superyachts I work for is carachterized by the fact that when the boat is sailing at anything less than 8 knots, you just turn the engine on and keep moving... so interesting to go across the Atlantic powered only by wind, like the goo all days, like Columbus did.

Not very Columbus though is this little piece of cyber gear I will show you where you can track our position as we sail along in real time.

Will do my best to keep posting....

The 2 week post...

(I started writing this like 2 weeks ago while sailing form Palma)

I usually sit down here with an idea of what I want to write you know. But that’s not the case right now... so consider this as a jamming writing session.

It goes with inspiration I could say. I’ve been wanting to write as consistently as possible, sort of create a habit out of it but sometimes there’s just not much to say. I’m non-stop wondering about everything, all the time. And when it clicks, ideas come together and feel the need to sit and write things down. It’s pretty cool to feel that way about writing, I hope I could do it more often.

When I was in Australia I worked about 8 months in this construction site as a labourer building these massive and quite ungraceful Greek guy’s house. It was very tiring, physically demanding and mentally numbing, in a way though. It used to pay the bills, but what I loved the most about that job was, apart from riding to and back from work everyday in my very old bicycle, that it allowed all the time in the world to think. I went to Australia because I wanted to have time, period. I didn’t want to look back and say I didn’t do this or that because I didn’t have time. Instead I looked for it (time I mean), and so having time to surf, party, wander, and even time to think, was fully accomplishing the purpose of my Aussie experience.

One day while shovelling some sand into the cement mixer to lay some bricks, I realized I was having a recurrent thought, and worried that I was actually wasting my thinking time, thinking different things more than once. And that’s when I first thought I had to start writing things down or keeping some sort of record.

The first try came in New Zealand over 2 years after that day, and it didn’t last long. I bought a pretty book I still carry around with me all the time and excited wrote daily notes before going to bed every night. I can still remember writing my first note sitting in the airport leaving NZ after 10 months.

Daily notes became ever more infrequent and I gave up knowing that a diary was not for me.

Then I got a few Moleskines with the intention of making notes every now and then and at some point sit down and put articles together about my different trips. It started last year when I was in the States between Florida, Colorado and the Intracoastal Water Way between Houston and New Orleans. I have to say that didn’t go that bad and writing made me good company in the lonely nights of the Bayou in Louisiana, but when I found myself in the boredom of the jobless (and money less) life in Miami, inspiration didn’t showed up for a while and my second attempt of a travel log was soon abandoned as well.

And then is this blog I’ve been keeping for almost a year now and I have to say I’m quite proud of it so far. Consistency hasn’t been its most remarkable characteristic but I’m happy with what I’ve been posting most of the time. I guess it’s not a case of me being a better or a more committed writer, but actually my life being somehow more dynamic than in recent years.

Sailing has been the priority these past two months. It’s been good fun to actually been in a boat that we have to dedicate most of our efforts into making of it a better, faster and safer sailing boat. From Tunisia we left to Palma and apart from good weather and a few hours of fun sailing, fishing was the highlight of this delivery. In the one day we decided to throw fishing lines out, we quickly got ourselves a good catch, a 12 kg Tuna. Happy we were with the prospect of some raw fish for lunch when we got called by another strike. This time a beast which actually was too kind to let ourselves catch him. The most beautiful fish I’ve caught, 30 kg it weighted and as I write this today, almost a month since that day, “the cook” is actually preparing one more piece of it to feed the grateful crew for that one fine day of fishing.

Arriving to Palma was exciting, as I had a full bunch of friends I was looking forward to see again and our time there didn’t disappoint. Nana was a superstar as always, and catching up with her along with epic Pitiou was Palma highlight. These are the guys that I sailed from Fiji to New Zealand with. 4 full days of howling winds and BIG crossed seas and one a half day of total calm, this delivery is one that I don’t talk much about, too difficult to explain or just really not worth it. This is something I can only share with these two people, and hearing sea gipsy Pitiou saying that was the most horrible seas he’s ever encounter, made me... actually, I just realized it does make me feel happy that most probably, I won’t find those conditions that too often.

A beautiful 5 and half days at sea brought us to Tenerife, and apart from passing Gibraltar with a PBO-furled Genaker in the water, it all when smooth as. We also got a nice mahi mahi to comply with cook’s request to get something other than tuna, and the day before arriving we heard through the VHF of this big depression forming in the north Atlantic next to Greenland which would create mayhem all along Europe coast... and mayhem up there, can only mean waves down here. So excited with the prospect of a few waves, I felt at peace of being back in the ocean. I got ready and by Wednesday evening I was surfing some fine waves feeling a bit out of rhythm. Wednesday morning I found a fun left with a friendly few in the water and on Monday morning, I fell back in love with surfing.

I have to finish this now... is getting too long, don't even know where I'm going with all this. Will keep posting more this week hopefully....