Showing posts with label catamaran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label catamaran. Show all posts

A Tale of Two Canary Island Winters - Part Three: Settling In



Simba lay rocking gently at anchor in Los Cristianos Bay. It was January. The sun was shining, the air was soft and warm and I was unpacking my bag and stowing away my kit in the tiny amount of cupboard space allocated to me.

Simba was by any standards a roomy boat, with a huge saloon and three cabins. Naturally, the two biggest and best cabins, each with a double bunk that was more like a double bed and its own large en suite shower, were reserved for the customers. Sometimes they were paying customers who chartered the boat from the company which owned it. Sometimes they were guests of the director, back in Scotland. A lot of the time we had the catamaran completely to ourselves. The skipper's cabin was smaller, but not uncomfortably so. And there was a toilet and shower next door, for our own use.

It was surprisingly easy to slip into the rhythm of living aboard, even for a fair weather sailor like me. Especially for a fair weather sailor like me. But I have to confess, I was still happiest sitting at anchor in Los Cristianos bay and watching the constant small procession of activities of this busy but essentially laid back port passing me by - as well as reading and writing. I did a lot of writing.

When we had visitors, we had to sail, which made my husband very happy.

It made me very sick.

I made several interesting discoveries on those voyages. One was that seasickness medication doesn't agree with me. The second discovery was that seasickness does eventually go away. It took me two weeks. (I counted every miserable day!) After two weeks spent aboard, sailing between islands, being literally prostrate with sickness, unable to even sit up without feeling dizzy and disorientated, it quite suddenly ceased. After that almost nothing would have made me sick. As anyone who has sailed will know, if you've been on a boat for a few hours, when you get off the boat, you can still feel the land moving - a very curious sensation. After the seasickness disappeared, this effect disappeared too. I was comfortable at sea and on land. But it took two weeks and the effect only lasts while you're living on board. If I were to do it all again, I'd have to go through the same uncomfortable process.

Simba was one of the biggest, flashiest and most beautiful yachts in the harbour so it wasn't surprising that she attracted a lot of attention. My husband was young and fit and - having spent most of the winter so far working aboard in the sunshine - looking particularly bronzed and attractive. I took a sort of perverse pleasure in stationing myself on the seaward side of the deck. Girls would hire pedalos in Los Cristianos and - assuming that Alan was alone on board - pedal out in the hopes of chatting up this 'rich' man with the fancy boat. They would circumnavigate Simba only to find me waving at them from the other side, whereupon they would lose interest and target another yacht and yachtsman.

We went ashore for provisions most days, in the big dinghy, leaving it tied up against the low wall of the slip. Sometimes we used an engine and sometimes we rowed, heading for the supermercado and then ferrying everything back to Simba.

When you're living on board a boat, everything takes time. When you're living on board a boat in the sun, you don't really mind. There are some things to remember though. Most of all, you have to remember not to block the sea toilets, being very careful at all times what you put down them. (Unblocking them is a hideous job for obvious reasons.) And you have to be careful never to waste water, since - even aboard a boat with big tanks - refilling them can be problematic. You become, by default, environmentally friendly.

There can be few things more irritating and alarming, incidentally, than hearing your latest charterers taking a ten or fifteen minute shower, even when they have been tactfully reminded that water is a finite resource. It doesn't happen with experienced sailors - but it sure happens with the other kind.  I got used to taking a pretty good shower using a bucket of clean water. A bucket and a half meant that I could wash my hair and do a bit of washing at the same time. Fortunately, the washing dried within a couple of hours when festooned about the boat like a curious collection of flags.


Water is at a premium in the Canaries, especially in this hot southern part of Tenerife. And it isn't very drinkable so you have to treat it or boil it. Or treat it and boil it. On the other hand, the water on the island of La Gomera is very good: fresh and sweet and clean. So we used to sail to La Gomera quite often. It proved to be one of the most magical places on earth. I knew I was going to have to write about it. And - eventually - that's what I did.


A Tale of Two Canary Island Winters - Part Two: Simba

So there I was, on a flight to the Canary island of Tenerife, joining my husband aboard a 50 foot catamaran called Simba, moored in Los Cristianos Bay. Packing had been a challenge. Simba was a big boat but as anyone who sails knows, space on board is always limited and I was going to be there for a few months. Fortunately, the weather was predictably good, so shorts, tops and pretty cotton skirts were the order of the day.

My husband Alan is a very experienced professional sailor which is more than can be said for me. He had worked as a trawler skipper for some years and then as a commercial diver off the West Coast of Scotland. Later, he ran a small business with his brother-in-law, David, diving for clams. Then, he did his RYA training and eventually became a yacht charter skipper as well as spending some time teaching sailing for the Scottish National Watersports Centre in Largs.

When we first met, he and David had also built a small sailing boat called Striker II  (The first Striker had been the clam boat) which they kept in Troon and sailed for pleasure. It was aboard this little yacht that I had my first taste of sailing.
I wasn't a natural. And it wasn't very pleasant.

The West of Scotland waters are beautiful, but the weather is uncertain. I was hideously seasick. My husband, on the other hand, has never been seasick in his life, so doesn't know how horrible it can be; not just the sickness but the general malaise, the intense depression, the awful disorientation. You begin by fearing the boat will sink, start to realize that you wouldn't care if it did and finally you really wish it would. And soon. The only way I could cope with it, when it was at its most intense and debilitating, was by lying flat on my back. As soon as we were in quiet waters, I was fine. Alan may not have been seasick, but he was quite used to people being sick on him. You can't work as a yacht charter skipper for any length of time without people being sick on your shoes and they frequently were.

There's an interesting fact about seasickness. It does go away. Eventually. Of which more in a future post.
Striker II was a yacht called a Seawitch and she was tiny. She would sleep four at a pinch, but you had to know each other very, very well. Intimately. We had a few uncomfortable but frankly hilarious trips - usually to the Isle of Arran for the weekend -  four of us together, myself, my husband, his sister Jackie and her husband David. The toilet facilities involved a plastic bucket, situated under the bunk where Alan and I slept. I still remember Jackie, wrestling with it in the middle of a very rough night in Lamlash Bay - victims of the notorious Lamlash Lop - declaring that this would be her 'last sea voyage ever!' Alan had crewed on and sailed much bigger boats, but even he, presented with the opportunity to skipper a 50 foot catamaran, had to pause for thought. Well, he paused for a few minutes anyway. And Simba was a big strong boat, for which he was mightily glad, as they battled through hurricane force winds on the way south. I was just glad I'd elected to fly instead.

I spent my first married Christmas back with my parents, but then I flew south in early January of 1986. I had never been to the Canaries before. I still remember the soft warmth of the air that hit me as I stepped off the plane into the Tenerife evening. The force of contrast with the wintry Scotland I had just left was acute and enticing. Alan, alone on the boat, had suggested that I get a taxi to the Gomera Ferry Terminal where he could pick me up on the dinghy and ferry me over to Simba which lay at anchor in the bay.That was my first problem. The last ferry of the day to the beautiful island of La Gomera had left (which was why Alan had suggested that he could pick me up from there) but the lovely, concerned Spanish taxi driver didn't want to drop a young woman off there all alone. He kept trying to take me to a hotel instead! With the help of a phrase book, and a few words of Spanish, I managed to persuade him that my husband was a sailor and I was joining a yacht. To be perfectly honest, I may have said to him that my husband was a yacht, but it did the trick. And there she was, our  home for the next few months: Simba.
She was nothing like Striker II.

A saloon big enough to hold a party in!
She was huge. Catamarans (unless they are stripped out racing catamarans) have a lot of internal space and this one was no exception. You could, and we sometimes did, hold a party in her saloon. She had two big master cabins, a captain's cabin, three showers and lavatories, a (disappointingly rather small) galley and that big, comfortable saloon. She lay at anchor in Los Cristianos Bay, amid a cluster of other, interesting yachts, big and small. She was one of the most beautiful vessels in the bay. The air was full of that fabulous Canary Isles mixture of sea air and flowers with a little hint of diesel.
I felt as though the birthday of my life had come.