Archive | Seabird RSS feed for this section

It’s been almost a year since my last blog, mostly because Seabird has been sitting at Old Port Cove in Florida waiting to be sold. Boats like ours are meant to be cruised and provide countless adventures for its owners. Seabird has done all of that and more over the 15 years that we have owned her.   On May 31, we passed the ownership papers to her new owner. Both Carol and I had mixed emotions about it. We were sad to see her go, but happy to see the excitement in the eyes of the new owners. …
Start your own blog now! Free!

Start your own blog now! Free!

Start your own blog now! Free!

The first thing I need to say is that there is a huge difference between visiting a city and living there. If we “visit” any city for, even, two weeks, we spend nearly every moment touring sites, eating at restaurants or sleeping. Don’t get me wrong.  We love doing that and we have done that quite a bit. Living there, to us, is much more enjoyable because you proceed at much less of a hurried pace and you get to know the people and surroundings in a more intimate fashion.

After our scheduled month here in Barcelona we were finishing up the last day of our reservation. All of the normal boat checks were done and all that was left to do before our next day departure was to go over to the marina office to check out and pay our bill. After paying, the marina representative asked us how we enjoyed Barcelona. We quickly responded by telling her how much we loved it in great detail. It was all true. We then both said ” I am not sure why we are leaving” to which she responded “Well, the berth is available until November”. Oh-oh.  We told her that we would let her know.

There is an old saying about boaters:  “All plans are written in sand at low tide”. This has been especially true for us over the years. One time we were preparing to leave Seattle within two weeks with Seabird, planning on cruising to the Mexican Baja. We had dinner with our friends Ken and Roberta (Sans Souci) who tried to convince us to cruise instead with them to Alaska and Japan.  They were indeed successful so we changed our plans and off we went.

Our decision to stay on for a second month was based on a few things: 

First, we had heard that the Ballearic islands anchorages were very crowded in August and marinas were outrageously expensive and difficult to get into. In September, everyone disappears and the cruising there is much more enjoyable. 

Secondly, our original plan from a year ago was to winter this year in Barcelona where we would have had months to get to know the city. That all changed when Sans Souci, Seabird and Ocean Pearl decided to instead cruise back across the Atlantic to the Virgin Islands. For one reason or another, that plan morphed into loading all three boats onto a ship and sending them that way.

So, in order to get in our “quality time” here, we booked for an additional month, leaving our cruising to the Ballearics until September.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, Barcelona is an exceptional city. Okay, now fast forward. We have been here for over a month now ( yeah, I know, my blog is SERIOUSLY behind schedule!) and we are nowhere near becoming tired of it. As far as large cities go, it is exceptionally clean and well run. They have acres of underground parking, so you don’t see the double and triple parking that you see in some other countries. It makes for a less chaotic environment.

Being young here doesn’t hurt either (not meaning us!). The evenings for most start with dinner at between 9 and 10pm. After that, there are the bars, the beach and all-around partying and hell raising. I mentioned how clean it is here. Well, it is, but sometime between 11pm and 4am, the beaches and boardwalk begin to look like they were hit by a garbage tornado!  Cans, beer bottles, papers and half eaten food strewn just everywhere.

At 7 am every morning, the cleanup starts. Huge garbage trucks and platoons of workers appear with brooms and scoops, and by 9am, everything, save a few malicious odors, is cleaned up. On the malicious odor topic, the Barcelona Clean Team is trying to help that part of it too. Their thought is: if you cannot make it to the toilet, the toilet will come to you (see below).

I imagine that you would have to have a momentary dulled sense of modesty to use these, but, when you gotta go……

Fortunately for us, we are long ago asleep while the hoards slither about in the streets at night.

We are more of the daytime slithering breed.  Barcelona has much to offer in the way of cultural activities. We have tried to visit something of interest at least every two days and being that the Metro (Barcelona’s subway system) is only a few minutes walk from our boat, everything  is easily accessible.

One of the first and most interesting sites was the Sagrada Famiglia, or Church of the Holy Family. It was designed by Antoni Gaudi, one of Spain’s most famous architects.

What makes it most interesting (other than it’s striking design) is that the construction commenced in 1882 and has been ongoing ever since. The estimated completion date is now set at the year 2026 or 100 years after Gaudi’s death. The design is unlike anything I have seen before and it takes on the appearance of partially melted wax. To me, it is incredible that someone could design something like this so long ago and without (obviously) the aid of modern computer software.  Gaudi’s influence is extensive in Barcelona and his many structures are easily identified, even to the untrained eye.

One day, we also visited the site of the 1992 Olympic Games, held here in Barcelona. In recent years, we have been fortunate enough to be  able to visit several of the Olympic Games sites in different countries. The Athens, Greece site is a dilapidated disgrace, overgrown with weeds and its buildings covered in graffiti. The Bejing, China site, while not as bad as Athens by a long shot, is still a sad place to visit, with the government using the facilities for whatever cheap commercial attraction they can find.

Barcelona is different. It is treated like a huge museum.  While visiting the pristine grounds, you get the feeling that if the Olympic Committee decided that they wanted to hold the Games next week, Barcelona would be ready.

Three photos of the ’92 Olympic site in Barcelona

In Barcelona at night, you have your choice of music in the area of our marina. One night you will see them setting up 1000 chairs and a stage next to the beach for an outdoor opera performance. On any given night you will see impromptu performances of musicians and bands on the boardwalk, with something for everyone’s taste and it goes on until the wee hours of the morning. Beach goers seem to have no special hours. We see them on the beaches staking out their spots at 7 am and their are still crowds there at midnight under the bright light of the powerful flood lights that the city provides to keep it safe for everyone. 

Safety is not too much of an issue here, as far as I can tell. Pickpockets and unarmed thieves seem to be the biggest annoyance. One morning at around 9am, Carol and I were doing our morning walk next to the beach when we saw a disturbance. Three somewhat out of shape beach goers were screaming and running toward the boardwalk. We then saw why. It looked to us like a guy pretending to be a beach jogger snatched the belongings of some poor woman as he went by them. He then immediately headed for the stairs to the road and was gone in a flash.

Did I mention that we feel kind of old in the city here because of all the young people? Well, to make matters worse, Carol and I went to the maritime museum situated near the marina. It did have quite a display of very old marine related items, but what upset Carol was that a good part of the museum was dedicated to “artifacts” like outboard motors and small boats that we used to have as CHILDREN!! 

While we spent a good deal of time in Barcelona, we did do some land traveling on Spain’s AVE high speed train system, which travels at nearly 200 mph. We traveled from Barcelona to Madrid, Seville and Valencia on separate trips, which I will get into in my next blog….

A few more pics….

“The Black Madonna” at a church in Monserrat

 Guell (pronounced Gway) was designed by Gaudi for a developer who envisioned a high priced housing community. The centerpiece of the complex was to be the public area for the designed city. It was unfortunately canceled because of cost and proximity to the city so it was turned into a park, and a stunning one at that. Only a few houses were ever built but the grounds remain as a tourist site and many times you need to make reservations in advance to get in.

I am always available to help those in distress

Carol said this woman did not appear to be in distress and therefore did not need my help

The beginning of the Barcelona Triathlon

And last but not least……..

From what I understand, this boat that was docked a few away from us had a collision with a freighter (notice the mast is missing).  I understand that part. What I can’t figure out is if the boat was named before or after the incident……

Start your own blog now! Free!

The first thing I need to say is that there is a huge difference between visiting a city and living there. If we “visit” any city for, even, two weeks, we spend nearly every moment touring sites, eating at restaurants or sleeping. Don’t get me wrong.  We love doing that and we have done that quite a bit. Living there, to us, is much more enjoyable because you proceed at much less of a hurried pace and you get to know the people and surroundings in a more intimate fashion.

After our scheduled month here in Barcelona we were finishing up the last day of our reservation. All of the normal boat checks were done and all that was left to do before our next day departure was to go over to the marina office to check out and pay our bill. After paying, the marina representative asked us how we enjoyed Barcelona. We quickly responded by telling her how much we loved it in great detail. It was all true. We then both said ” I am not sure why we are leaving” to which she responded “Well, the berth is available until November”. Oh-oh.  We told her that we would let her know.

There is an old saying about boaters:  “All plans are written in sand at low tide”. This has been especially true for us over the years. One time we were preparing to leave Seattle within two weeks with Seabird, planning on cruising to the Mexican Baja. We had dinner with our friends Ken and Roberta (Sans Souci) who tried to convince us to cruise instead with them to Alaska and Japan.  They were indeed successful so we changed our plans and off we went.

Our decision to stay on for a second month was based on a few things: 

First, we had heard that the Ballearic islands anchorages were very crowded in August and marinas were outrageously expensive and difficult to get into. In September, everyone disappears and the cruising there is much more enjoyable. 

Secondly, our original plan from a year ago was to winter this year in Barcelona where we would have had months to get to know the city. That all changed when Sans Souci, Seabird and Ocean Pearl decided to instead cruise back across the Atlantic to the Virgin Islands. For one reason or another, that plan morphed into loading all three boats onto a ship and sending them that way.

So, in order to get in our “quality time” here, we booked for an additional month, leaving our cruising to the Ballearics until September.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, Barcelona is an exceptional city. Okay, now fast forward. We have been here for over a month now ( yeah, I know, my blog is SERIOUSLY behind schedule!) and we are nowhere near becoming tired of it. As far as large cities go, it is exceptionally clean and well run. They have acres of underground parking, so you don’t see the double and triple parking that you see in some other countries. It makes for a less chaotic environment.

Being young here doesn’t hurt either (not meaning us!). The evenings for most start with dinner at between 9 and 10pm. After that, there are the bars, the beach and all-around partying and hell raising. I mentioned how clean it is here. Well, it is, but sometime between 11pm and 4am, the beaches and boardwalk begin to look like they were hit by a garbage tornado!  Cans, beer bottles, papers and half eaten food strewn just everywhere.

At 7 am every morning, the cleanup starts. Huge garbage trucks and platoons of workers appear with brooms and scoops, and by 9am, everything, save a few malicious odors, is cleaned up. On the malicious odor topic, the Barcelona Clean Team is trying to help that part of it too. Their thought is: if you cannot make it to the toilet, the toilet will come to you (see below).

I imagine that you would have to have a momentary dulled sense of modesty to use these, but, when you gotta go……

Fortunately for us, we are long ago asleep while the hoards slither about in the streets at night.

We are more of the daytime slithering breed.  Barcelona has much to offer in the way of cultural activities. We have tried to visit something of interest at least every two days and being that the Metro (Barcelona’s subway system) is only a few minutes walk from our boat, everything  is easily accessible.

One of the first and most interesting sites was the Sagrada Famiglia, or Church of the Holy Family. It was designed by Antoni Gaudi, one of Spain’s most famous architects.

What makes it most interesting (other than it’s striking design) is that the construction commenced in 1882 and has been ongoing ever since. The estimated completion date is now set at the year 2026 or 100 years after Gaudi’s death. The design is unlike anything I have seen before and it takes on the appearance of partially melted wax. To me, it is incredible that someone could design something like this so long ago and without (obviously) the aid of modern computer software.  Gaudi’s influence is extensive in Barcelona and his many structures are easily identified, even to the untrained eye.

One day, we also visited the site of the 1992 Olympic Games, held here in Barcelona. In recent years, we have been fortunate enough to be  able to visit several of the Olympic Games sites in different countries. The Athens, Greece site is a dilapidated disgrace, overgrown with weeds and its buildings covered in graffiti. The Bejing, China site, while not as bad as Athens by a long shot, is still a sad place to visit, with the government using the facilities for whatever cheap commercial attraction they can find.

Barcelona is different. It is treated like a huge museum.  While visiting the pristine grounds, you get the feeling that if the Olympic Committee decided that they wanted to hold the Games next week, Barcelona would be ready.

Three photos of the ’92 Olympic site in Barcelona

In Barcelona at night, you have your choice of music in the area of our marina. One night you will see them setting up 1000 chairs and a stage next to the beach for an outdoor opera performance. On any given night you will see impromptu performances of musicians and bands on the boardwalk, with something for everyone’s taste and it goes on until the wee hours of the morning. Beach goers seem to have no special hours. We see them on the beaches staking out their spots at 7 am and their are still crowds there at midnight under the bright light of the powerful flood lights that the city provides to keep it safe for everyone. 

Safety is not too much of an issue here, as far as I can tell. Pickpockets and unarmed thieves seem to be the biggest annoyance. One morning at around 9am, Carol and I were doing our morning walk next to the beach when we saw a disturbance. Three somewhat out of shape beach goers were screaming and running toward the boardwalk. We then saw why. It looked to us like a guy pretending to be a beach jogger snatched the belongings of some poor woman as he went by them. He then immediately headed for the stairs to the road and was gone in a flash.

Did I mention that we feel kind of old in the city here because of all the young people? Well, to make matters worse, Carol and I went to the maritime museum situated near the marina. It did have quite a display of very old marine related items, but what upset Carol was that a good part of the museum was dedicated to “artifacts” like outboard motors and small boats that we used to have as CHILDREN!! 

While we spent a good deal of time in Barcelona, we did do some land traveling on Spain’s AVE high speed train system, which travels at nearly 200 mph. We traveled from Barcelona to Madrid, Seville and Valencia on separate trips, which I will get into in my next blog….

A few more pics….

“The Black Madonna” at a church in Monserrat

 Guell (pronounced Gway) was designed by Gaudi for a developer who envisioned a high priced housing community. The centerpiece of the complex was to be the public area for the designed city. It was unfortunately canceled because of cost and proximity to the city so it was turned into a park, and a stunning one at that. Only a few houses were ever built but the grounds remain as a tourist site and many times you need to make reservations in advance to get in.

I am always available to help those in distress

Carol said this woman did not appear to be in distress and therefore did not need my help

The beginning of the Barcelona Triathlon

And last but not least……..

From what I understand, this boat that was docked a few away from us had a collision with a freighter (notice the mast is missing).  I understand that part. What I can’t figure out is if the boat was named before or after the incident……

Start your own blog now! Free!

At this point we were getting fairly excited about Barcelona.  We started planning for it months ago. It started with our search on the Internet to find a suitable a berth for the boat for two weeks. Carol and I are both pretty handy on the web, so it did not take us long to find a website of some sort of a broker for marinas in the Med. Their website had an easy form to fill out and within a few seconds, we had pricing (gulp) for our two week stay. I knew Barcelona would be expensive, but $1500 per week?  We were disappointed. ONE of our blog readers, I know, is going to say we are just being cheap, but that price is VERY steep. We then decided that instead of two weeks, we would stay just one. After all, we had our hearts set on spending SOME time in Barcelona.

Carol then had a novel idea:  ” let’s contact the marina directly and see if their prices might be lower than the broker’s”.  Sure, why not. We were pleasantly surprised to hear from them that they could accommodate us for TWO weeks for $1500!  Then, they offered that for just $200 more, we could stay for the whole month! needless to say, we were very happy. On top of that, One Ocean Club is a first class modern marina in a perfect location in the city of Barcelona with finger piers, so no Med Mooring for Seabird!

The cruise from Calle de Sant Vicenc, where we had been anchored for two days, was going to be 93 nautical miles straight or about 11 hours of cruising. The weather report was very favorable and the predicted 6 knot winds and

The “beep beep” of my iPad signaled us to get up at 4:30 am. After doing my usual checks in the engine room while Carol did her thing, I headed up to the pilot house armed with my flashlight, as it was still dark out, to flip on the numerous switches and knobs that took the sleepy Seabird into full awake mode with chart plotters, depth finders, Radars and running lights all glowing in red, green and blue. We started the main engine, wing engine, the generator and hydraulics and we were ready to go. I normally don’t like to leave in the dark, but we were in a huge anchorage all alone with a well lit beach on one end and the wide open Mediterranean Sea on the other end. Pulling the anchor in the dark takes a bit more concentration. We first turn on the large LED floodlights on the bow and Carol works the foot pedals on the anchor windlass, peering over the bow with a flashlight and telling me which way to steer the boat while we are pulling up the chain. We never have the anchor windlass pulling the boat toward the anchor. That is a good recipe for overloading the windlass and breaking something mid pull. We hauled up the anchor without incident and after a few minutes the sun started to rise and we headed out to sea. It looked just stunning out and we knew we were in for a beautiful trip.

In my last blog, I charactarized this as a sunset….oops!
This was the SUNRISE as we left Calle de Sant Vicenc

The cruising conditions were far better than forecast.  The seas were completely, glossy flat and there was no wind whatsoever. If you were on a sailboat, you would be cursing, but for us, it was liquid heaven.

After a few hours in calm seas, I started thinking about my drone again. When would I ever see conditions like this again, which were just perfect for launching it and taking videos of Seabird underway? It was fully charged this time so we prepared everything and launched it, watching it soar up to about 250 feet. Then, my worst nightmare occurred…..I lost sight of it and the boat was moving fairly fast… the drone was off in the distance somewhere now and we were moving away fast. If it got too far away from the control, it would automatically return and land where it took off from. The problem is, we were nowhere near that place any longer, so it would land in the water and sink.  I had Carol stop the boat. The camera on the drone transmits the image that it sees through my IPhone, so I peered into the screen to see if I could spot the boat.  I used the controls to spin the drone remotely and finally, I spotted a pinprick of an object far off in the distance on the screen, which turned out to be Seabird. Relieved, I jutted the lever forward, sending the drone toward us and I could finally see the boat getting larger on the screen. Soon after that I spotted the drone with the naked eye. The link below starts the video as the drone was getting closer to Seabird.

Click on the link below and then click on the arrow to start the video with music.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8a5PF6uvSYXZmtuR2tCTm82NG8

After the video was taken, amazingly, we landed it without incident. Actually, I was afraid to land it on the angled deck so I brought it close and Carol snagged it out of the air, a true hero.

With the drone secured, we headed out back on course and everything would have been find except for my tendency to not leave well enough alone. I have been trying for a few years now to get my autopilot to operate in “Nav Mode” consistently. Nav mode is when your autopilot interfaces with your chart plotter to keep it on a specific line generated on the plotter rather than simply following a compass course. In Nav mode, the autopilot will constantly correct for currents and wind, eliminating the need for any adjustments underway. It will even automatically change course when you arrive at your waypoint and steer to the next one.

Our autopilot is old and I just recently, with the help of the best autopilot guru that I know, Rich Barnes of West Coast Marine Electronics in Seattle, got the interface working. For some reason, it stopped working again and instead of just continuing on with the autopilot in compass course mode, I started fiddling around with settings, pushing buttons and proceeded to render the AP completely unusable.  worse than that, the boat started meandering left and right like it had a drunken captain. Even worse than that, these big Nordhavns, as good as they are, are not meant to be steered manually, so as unskilled as I am, I was the only electronic technician on board at the time and it had to be fixed.  After 20 minutes of reading the manual and weaving about, I figured out what I had done. I had somehow “uncalibrated ” the autopilot’s internal compass. Once I had figured that out, I fixed it and we were underway again.

We arrived at our at 5:00 pm, still in flat calm seas. Barcelona is a huge commercial port. Within a few miles of arrival, you start to see fleets of large container ships converging on the port or anchored in front, awaiting a call from the harbor master to proceed in to pick up or unload their cargo.

 This is by no means the entire port.  It is huge and
the picture does not show all the freighters waiting 
to come into port.

When arriving in a busy commercial port with a boat like ours, you need to know the rules and follow them.  Taking them seriously has always kept us out of trouble. There are two entrances to the port. One is for commercial ships and the other is for pleasure craft, the latter leading to the two major yacht marinas in Barcelona. You don’t want to take the wrong one.

Once we got close, we contacted the marina by VHF radio and after a brief discussion over a disagreement on whether or not we actually had a reservation, we were directed to our berth. Our marina, One Ocean Port Vell is beautiful and kept in top notch condition. Each berth on our dock has a finger pier for side boarding, water, a good electrical connection, and most importantly,  FIBER OPTIC INTERNET with unlimited usage!!!

 This is a picture from the internet of the marina taken by
someone who is a far better photographer than me.

 A happy Seabird in her berth with a fingerpier

I will get more into it in a subsequent blog, but Barcelona is a vibrant, clean, well oiled party town full of young people and we were docked right in the middle of it. Just steps from the dock there is a boardwalk where literally hundreds of happy people stream by every minute until the wee hours of the morning, miles of beaches and an endless supply of restaurants and shops.

 Taken from the aft deck of our boat. You can see the 
boardwalk with its many restaurants  and people streaming 
by.  At night, the crowd triples.

My next few blogs, since we will not be cruising, will be more about our stay in Barcelona and the other towns we were to visit.

A few more pics……

 Picture of Seabird from across the way

Barcelona at night from the deck of Seabird

The two major marinas in Barcelona are adjacent to one 
another. There is a third, not pictured here which is a few
Kilometers down the road which is the original marina built
for the 1992 Olympics, held in Barcelona. That marina is 
much larger than both of these combined, but nowhere 
near as nice.

And, last but not least…..

7:30 am on the boardwalk…

And my mother told me that there were no such things as Leprechauns..

Carol did not want me taking this picture as she thought it might be a 
private moment for this poor fellow. I had new shoes on so I didn’t go close enough to ask his permission.

At this point we were getting fairly excited about Barcelona.  We started planning for it months ago. It started with our search on the Internet to find a suitable a berth for the boat for two weeks. Carol and I are both pretty handy on the web, so it did not take us long to find a website of some sort of a broker for marinas in the Med. Their website had an easy form to fill out and within a few seconds, we had pricing (gulp) for our two week stay. I knew Barcelona would be expensive, but $1500 per week?  We were disappointed. ONE of our blog readers, I know, is going to say we are just being cheap, but that price is VERY steep. We then decided that instead of two weeks, we would stay just one. After all, we had our hearts set on spending SOME time in Barcelona.

Carol then had a novel idea:  ” let’s contact the marina directly and see if their prices might be lower than the broker’s”.  Sure, why not. We were pleasantly surprised to hear from them that they could accommodate us for TWO weeks for $1500!  Then, they offered that for just $200 more, we could stay for the whole month! needless to say, we were very happy. On top of that, One Ocean Club is a first class modern marina in a perfect location in the city of Barcelona with finger piers, so no Med Mooring for Seabird!

The cruise from Calle de Sant Vicenc, where we had been anchored for two days, was going to be 93 nautical miles straight or about 11 hours of cruising. The weather report was very favorable and the predicted 6 knot winds and

The “beep beep” of my iPad signaled us to get up at 4:30 am. After doing my usual checks in the engine room while Carol did her thing, I headed up to the pilot house armed with my flashlight, as it was still dark out, to flip on the numerous switches and knobs that took the sleepy Seabird into full awake mode with chart plotters, depth finders, Radars and running lights all glowing in red, green and blue. We started the main engine, wing engine, the generator and hydraulics and we were ready to go. I normally don’t like to leave in the dark, but we were in a huge anchorage all alone with a well lit beach on one end and the wide open Mediterranean Sea on the other end. Pulling the anchor in the dark takes a bit more concentration. We first turn on the large LED floodlights on the bow and Carol works the foot pedals on the anchor windlass, peering over the bow with a flashlight and telling me which way to steer the boat while we are pulling up the chain. We never have the anchor windlass pulling the boat toward the anchor. That is a good recipe for overloading the windlass and breaking something mid pull. We hauled up the anchor without incident and after a few minutes the sun started to rise and we headed out to sea. It looked just stunning out and we knew we were in for a beautiful trip.

In my last blog, I charactarized this as a sunset….oops!
This was the SUNRISE as we left Calle de Sant Vicenc

The cruising conditions were far better than forecast.  The seas were completely, glossy flat and there was no wind whatsoever. If you were on a sailboat, you would be cursing, but for us, it was liquid heaven.

After a few hours in calm seas, I started thinking about my drone again. When would I ever see conditions like this again, which were just perfect for launching it and taking videos of Seabird underway? It was fully charged this time so we prepared everything and launched it, watching it soar up to about 250 feet. Then, my worst nightmare occurred…..I lost sight of it and the boat was moving fairly fast… the drone was off in the distance somewhere now and we were moving away fast. If it got too far away from the control, it would automatically return and land where it took off from. The problem is, we were nowhere near that place any longer, so it would land in the water and sink.  I had Carol stop the boat. The camera on the drone transmits the image that it sees through my IPhone, so I peered into the screen to see if I could spot the boat.  I used the controls to spin the drone remotely and finally, I spotted a pinprick of an object far off in the distance on the screen, which turned out to be Seabird. Relieved, I jutted the lever forward, sending the drone toward us and I could finally see the boat getting larger on the screen. Soon after that I spotted the drone with the naked eye. The link below starts the video as the drone was getting closer to Seabird.

Click on the link below and then click on the arrow to start the video with music.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8a5PF6uvSYXZmtuR2tCTm82NG8

After the video was taken, amazingly, we landed it without incident. Actually, I was afraid to land it on the angled deck so I brought it close and Carol snagged it out of the air, a true hero.

With the drone secured, we headed out back on course and everything would have been find except for my tendency to not leave well enough alone. I have been trying for a few years now to get my autopilot to operate in “Nav Mode” consistently. Nav mode is when your autopilot interfaces with your chart plotter to keep it on a specific line generated on the plotter rather than simply following a compass course. In Nav mode, the autopilot will constantly correct for currents and wind, eliminating the need for any adjustments underway. It will even automatically change course when you arrive at your waypoint and steer to the next one.

Our autopilot is old and I just recently, with the help of the best autopilot guru that I know, Rich Barnes of West Coast Marine Electronics in Seattle, got the interface working. For some reason, it stopped working again and instead of just continuing on with the autopilot in compass course mode, I started fiddling around with settings, pushing buttons and proceeded to render the AP completely unusable.  worse than that, the boat started meandering left and right like it had a drunken captain. Even worse than that, these big Nordhavns, as good as they are, are not meant to be steered manually, so as unskilled as I am, I was the only electronic technician on board at the time and it had to be fixed.  After 20 minutes of reading the manual and weaving about, I figured out what I had done. I had somehow “uncalibrated ” the autopilot’s internal compass. Once I had figured that out, I fixed it and we were underway again.

We arrived at our at 5:00 pm, still in flat calm seas. Barcelona is a huge commercial port. Within a few miles of arrival, you start to see fleets of large container ships converging on the port or anchored in front, awaiting a call from the harbor master to proceed in to pick up or unload their cargo.

 This is by no means the entire port.  It is huge and
the picture does not show all the freighters waiting 
to come into port.

When arriving in a busy commercial port with a boat like ours, you need to know the rules and follow them.  Taking them seriously has always kept us out of trouble. There are two entrances to the port. One is for commercial ships and the other is for pleasure craft, the latter leading to the two major yacht marinas in Barcelona. You don’t want to take the wrong one.

Once we got close, we contacted the marina by VHF radio and after a brief discussion over a disagreement on whether or not we actually had a reservation, we were directed to our berth. Our marina, One Ocean Port Vell is beautiful and kept in top notch condition. Each berth on our dock has a finger pier for side boarding, water, a good electrical connection, and most importantly,  FIBER OPTIC INTERNET with unlimited usage!!!

 This is a picture from the internet of the marina taken by
someone who is a far better photographer than me.

 A happy Seabird in her berth with a fingerpier

I will get more into it in a subsequent blog, but Barcelona is a vibrant, clean, well oiled party town full of young people and we were docked right in the middle of it. Just steps from the dock there is a boardwalk where literally hundreds of happy people stream by every minute until the wee hours of the morning, miles of beaches and an endless supply of restaurants and shops.

 Taken from the aft deck of our boat. You can see the 
boardwalk with its many restaurants  and people streaming 
by.  At night, the crowd triples.

My next few blogs, since we will not be cruising, will be more about our stay in Barcelona and the other towns we were to visit.

A few more pics……

 Picture of Seabird from across the way

Barcelona at night from the deck of Seabird

The two major marinas in Barcelona are adjacent to one 
another. There is a third, not pictured here which is a few
Kilometers down the road which is the original marina built
for the 1992 Olympics, held in Barcelona. That marina is 
much larger than both of these combined, but nowhere 
near as nice.

And, last but not least…..

7:30 am on the boardwalk…

And my mother told me that there were no such things as Leprechauns..

Carol did not want me taking this picture as she thought it might be a 
private moment for this poor fellow. I had new shoes on so I didn’t go close enough to ask his permission.

Point number 7 is where our first stop was and we then continued
on to Calle de Sant Vicenc, point number 13.

How we hated to leave Mahon!  It is such a nice friendly place with warm, friendly people and lots of interesting places to explore in town. Here is the thing:  it may seem that because we have a 4 month or so cruising season, we should be able to spend a long time at each place we visit. The Med, however, is a very big place with hundreds of potential stops. Add to that our plans to spend at least a month in Barcelona and we start to get to the end of the season quickly!

Since we really were not in too much of a hurry, we decided to add a few stops to our cruise to Barcelona, which would both be day trips. We had not gotten much input from people regarding good stops, but between us and our friends on Airstream, we came up with a few good anchorages. We have cruised along with Bill and Janet for a few trips now and we have it down to a science. He cruises at about between 6-7 knots and we do between 8-8.5 kts. He usually leaves a bit earlier than us and arrives a little later. At some point on the trip, we give a wave as we pass them. 

The first stop, Calle Galdano, was a small, semi enclosed harbor on the south side of Menorca with a tourist town attached to it. The anchorage itself was a bit tight as by the time we got there, other boats had already nestled in to the spots closest to shore. The only spot we could find with any protection was only about 100 feet from the rocky shore that jutted out from the base of the harbor.  

Seabird in the background and Airstream in the foreground

 We anchored in about 27 feet of water just off of Morro
de Llevant.  You can see at the top of the map where the
river leads into town from the bay.

Normally, I feel safest if I put out chain at a 6:1 ratio to water depth. We have found that here in the Med, that is not always practical because of space constraints. Here, the best we could do was a 4:1 ratio and we were perfectly comfortable with that as long as the anchor was well set. Seabird is really oversized on the anchor front. Most boats our size would have a 100 lb anchor and be happy. Ours weighs in at a very hefty 300 lbs! It is quite big for the boat size but the peace of mind that it gives makes it worth it. The downside is that if the hydraulic winch breaks, getting it up by manual means is a big chore. Maxwell, the manufacturer of the windlass, supplies a skinny quarter inch thick aluminum popsicle stick tool for emergencies that would make it impossible to haul up the anchor manually. Years ago when I had a manufacturing business I had the shop make a special tool 5 times that size that makes raising it manually at least doable. I have never needed to use it, but my friends Braun and Tina on Grey Pearl lost their hydraulics while we were cruising in the Aleutians Islands with 200 feet of chain out and the same 300 lb anchor as us. Fortunately, I had made two of the tools and they had one of them. 

To get to the town, we took the dinghy into a small river at the base of the harbor. Once you got past a narrow, shallow entrance, the town was directly ahead on the left with the local small fishing and tour boats tied up. We asked permission from one of the locals to dock there and he directed us to an empty space. We were not really interested in the tourist areas, but wanted to take a hike over the hill to one of the other bays, about a 1 hour walk on the trails.

 At the end was a crowded tourist beach that we wanted nothing to do with, so we turned around and went back to the boat.  

We planned on leaving at first light for our next destination. In the meantime, the rollers started coming in at about 4 pm. It was actually getting very choppy and many of the smaller boats had to leave as they were rafted to each other and starting to hit, and so they left the anchorage. Although we had a bit of movement, it was not all that uncomfortable and after a decent nights sleep we hauled anchor and headed to Calle de Sant Vicenc, on the north side of the main island in the Balearics, Mallorca. 

We had yet another perfectly smooth trip and found the gorgeous bay with only one other boat in it, allowing us to drop anchor in 20 feet of water with nothing but deep sand to keep our anchor happy and set.  We were able to put out 170 feet of chain, well beyond my normal amount.  Carol and I dove the anchor at one point and found it completely buried in the sand.

 Calle de Sant Vicenc is a shallow bay with a hotel and beach being the key feature on the landscape. We looked forward to taking the dinghy in and having a nice dinner. It wasn’t going to happen. Normally, all of these harbors have some sort of dock where boats at anchor can bring their dinghies into. Not here. We looked everywhere and decided that we were going to have to be happy just anchoring in a gorgeous spot, swimming and eating on board. We took the opportunity to don our mask and fins to check out our underwater mechanicals and for marine growth. Everything down under looked fine. I cannot recall in any of our cruising seeing water as clear as this. The bottom is a bright, whitish sand that reflects the sunlight and makes 20 feet of water seem like 3 feet.

 The hotel and beach were to the far left of the picture. I 
included a few more at the end of the blog.

On the opposite side of the bay from us were high cliffs where the younger kids were doing jumps, flips and dives into the water. The cliffs were up to 25 or 30 feet high, but as you can see, it did not discourage them one bit.  Maybe in our younger days….

Today was a big day. Since there was no wind and it was a calm anchorage, I decided to get wild and wooly and launch my drone for some aerial footage. The drone itself is a Phantom 2 plus which Carol reluctantly gave me for Christmas. It is a fairly sophisticated one considering it is mainly for consumer use. The drone has a digital 1080p movie camera on it with a gimbaled mount with anti vibration pads and can go 900 feet high and up to a quarter of a mile away. It takes amazing photos and movies with no indication of shaking in the movies.  Up until now I have not been brave enough to launch it off of the boat for fear of losing it into the water. Supposedly, if I lose communication with it, the drone’s internal GPS will remember where it took off from and return to automatically land at that spot. Problem is, being that I launched it off of a boat, even at anchor, the boat may not be in that spot when it decides to return and land, and it is not waterproof…….nor does it float.

 Shortly after this was taken I begged Carol for her 
assistance and a few bandages!

My first attempt at launching it by myself did not go well.  When it took off, instead of going up, it went sideways toward the side of the boat. Evidently, the brain inside of the drone was trying to take off vertically from the spot where it started, but the boat was moving at anchor, therefore, so was the spot where it took off.  I grabbed it and it banged into me, the spinning blades giving me a couple of nice slices in my chest.  I then had Carol hold it for me as it spooled up. She let go and up it went. Unfortunately I had neglected to fully charge the battery so flight time was limited. Click on the link below and you will see my amateurish video. At least you can see how gorgeous the water is!  I promise my next one will be more daring!

Click on this link below and when the window comes up, click on the arrow in the center of the screen to start the video.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8a5PF6uvSYXUHBSUEJsenFoM0E

Fortunately, it landed without incident.  I will get the battery fully charged for the next trip and blog which will be our cruise from here to Barcelona, our home for the next month or so……

A few more pics…..

Another photo taken on our hike at Galdana

 The beach and hotel in back of the boat at anchor in 
Calle de Sant Vicenc

Sunset at Calle de Sant Vicenc

And last but not least…

I wonder what they will do when they wake up and find out that their room has 
disappeared….

Point number 7 is where our first stop was and we then continued
on to Calle de Sant Vicenc, point number 13.

How we hated to leave Mahon!  It is such a nice friendly place with warm, friendly people and lots of interesting places to explore in town. Here is the thing:  it may seem that because we have a 4 month or so cruising season, we should be able to spend a long time at each place we visit. The Med, however, is a very big place with hundreds of potential stops. Add to that our plans to spend at least a month in Barcelona and we start to get to the end of the season quickly!

Since we really were not in too much of a hurry, we decided to add a few stops to our cruise to Barcelona, which would both be day trips. We had not gotten much input from people regarding good stops, but between us and our friends on Airstream, we came up with a few good anchorages. We have cruised along with Bill and Janet for a few trips now and we have it down to a science. He cruises at about between 6-7 knots and we do between 8-8.5 kts. He usually leaves a bit earlier than us and arrives a little later. At some point on the trip, we give a wave as we pass them. 

The first stop, Calle Galdano, was a small, semi enclosed harbor on the south side of Menorca with a tourist town attached to it. The anchorage itself was a bit tight as by the time we got there, other boats had already nestled in to the spots closest to shore. The only spot we could find with any protection was only about 100 feet from the rocky shore that jutted out from the base of the harbor.  

Seabird in the background and Airstream in the foreground

 We anchored in about 27 feet of water just off of Morro
de Llevant.  You can see at the top of the map where the
river leads into town from the bay.

Normally, I feel safest if I put out chain at a 6:1 ratio to water depth. We have found that here in the Med, that is not always practical because of space constraints. Here, the best we could do was a 4:1 ratio and we were perfectly comfortable with that as long as the anchor was well set. Seabird is really oversized on the anchor front. Most boats our size would have a 100 lb anchor and be happy. Ours weighs in at a very hefty 300 lbs! It is quite big for the boat size but the peace of mind that it gives makes it worth it. The downside is that if the hydraulic winch breaks, getting it up by manual means is a big chore. Maxwell, the manufacturer of the windlass, supplies a skinny quarter inch thick aluminum popsicle stick tool for emergencies that would make it impossible to haul up the anchor manually. Years ago when I had a manufacturing business I had the shop make a special tool 5 times that size that makes raising it manually at least doable. I have never needed to use it, but my friends Braun and Tina on Grey Pearl lost their hydraulics while we were cruising in the Aleutians Islands with 200 feet of chain out and the same 300 lb anchor as us. Fortunately, I had made two of the tools and they had one of them. 

To get to the town, we took the dinghy into a small river at the base of the harbor. Once you got past a narrow, shallow entrance, the town was directly ahead on the left with the local small fishing and tour boats tied up. We asked permission from one of the locals to dock there and he directed us to an empty space. We were not really interested in the tourist areas, but wanted to take a hike over the hill to one of the other bays, about a 1 hour walk on the trails.

 At the end was a crowded tourist beach that we wanted nothing to do with, so we turned around and went back to the boat.  

We planned on leaving at first light for our next destination. In the meantime, the rollers started coming in at about 4 pm. It was actually getting very choppy and many of the smaller boats had to leave as they were rafted to each other and starting to hit, and so they left the anchorage. Although we had a bit of movement, it was not all that uncomfortable and after a decent nights sleep we hauled anchor and headed to Calle de Sant Vicenc, on the north side of the main island in the Balearics, Mallorca. 

We had yet another perfectly smooth trip and found the gorgeous bay with only one other boat in it, allowing us to drop anchor in 20 feet of water with nothing but deep sand to keep our anchor happy and set.  We were able to put out 170 feet of chain, well beyond my normal amount.  Carol and I dove the anchor at one point and found it completely buried in the sand.

 Calle de Sant Vicenc is a shallow bay with a hotel and beach being the key feature on the landscape. We looked forward to taking the dinghy in and having a nice dinner. It wasn’t going to happen. Normally, all of these harbors have some sort of dock where boats at anchor can bring their dinghies into. Not here. We looked everywhere and decided that we were going to have to be happy just anchoring in a gorgeous spot, swimming and eating on board. We took the opportunity to don our mask and fins to check out our underwater mechanicals and for marine growth. Everything down under looked fine. I cannot recall in any of our cruising seeing water as clear as this. The bottom is a bright, whitish sand that reflects the sunlight and makes 20 feet of water seem like 3 feet.

 The hotel and beach were to the far left of the picture. I 
included a few more at the end of the blog.

On the opposite side of the bay from us were high cliffs where the younger kids were doing jumps, flips and dives into the water. The cliffs were up to 25 or 30 feet high, but as you can see, it did not discourage them one bit.  Maybe in our younger days….

Today was a big day. Since there was no wind and it was a calm anchorage, I decided to get wild and wooly and launch my drone for some aerial footage. The drone itself is a Phantom 2 plus which Carol reluctantly gave me for Christmas. It is a fairly sophisticated one considering it is mainly for consumer use. The drone has a digital 1080p movie camera on it with a gimbaled mount with anti vibration pads and can go 900 feet high and up to a quarter of a mile away. It takes amazing photos and movies with no indication of shaking in the movies.  Up until now I have not been brave enough to launch it off of the boat for fear of losing it into the water. Supposedly, if I lose communication with it, the drone’s internal GPS will remember where it took off from and return to automatically land at that spot. Problem is, being that I launched it off of a boat, even at anchor, the boat may not be in that spot when it decides to return and land, and it is not waterproof…….nor does it float.

 Shortly after this was taken I begged Carol for her 
assistance and a few bandages!

My first attempt at launching it by myself did not go well.  When it took off, instead of going up, it went sideways toward the side of the boat. Evidently, the brain inside of the drone was trying to take off vertically from the spot where it started, but the boat was moving at anchor, therefore, so was the spot where it took off.  I grabbed it and it banged into me, the spinning blades giving me a couple of nice slices in my chest.  I then had Carol hold it for me as it spooled up. She let go and up it went. Unfortunately I had neglected to fully charge the battery so flight time was limited. Click on the link below and you will see my amateurish video. At least you can see how gorgeous the water is!  I promise my next one will be more daring!

Click on this link below and when the window comes up, click on the arrow in the center of the screen to start the video.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8a5PF6uvSYXUHBSUEJsenFoM0E

Fortunately, it landed without incident.  I will get the battery fully charged for the next trip and blog which will be our cruise from here to Barcelona, our home for the next month or so……

A few more pics…..

Another photo taken on our hike at Galdana

 The beach and hotel in back of the boat at anchor in 
Calle de Sant Vicenc

Sunset at Calle de Sant Vicenc

And last but not least…

I wonder what they will do when they wake up and find out that their room has 
disappeared….

We will really miss the food and the people of Italy. We struggled a bit with the language, but probably because we never put the effort into learning it like we did learning Spanish. I possibly know (or knew) more Japanese than Italian, which is sad, because I am half Italian! I have found, though, to get along in any country, if you can learn maybe, 20 verbs and 100 nouns, along with some common phrases, you will get along just fine. We have also found that in most countries, many people know at least a little bit of English.  Japan was the most difficult because it is not a Latin based language, so, for instance, there is no direct translation to, say, “nice to meet you”. The closest you can come is a phrase that means something like “I beg you for your kindness”. It may be difficult for us to imagine saying that, but that’s how it is. 

So although we will miss Italy, we were excited about our cruise to Menorca, which is the eastern most of the Spanish Balearic Islands. 

 
Our course from Cagliari, Sardinia to Mahon, Menorca.

The trip from Sardinia to Menorca was to be 250 miles, or about 31 hours of cruising. We decided (as we always do on a trip of this distance) to leave at first light, which would give us a theoretical arrival time in Menorca of 1 pm the following day. You might wonder why we would leave so early being that sunset was not until after 9pm on the day of our arrival. Here is why. Although we are diligent about mechanical maintenance, things can always go wrong and if it does, for some reason it never happens near shore or during the day and since there are no “real” mechanics at sea, Seabird is stuck with me and Carol to fix things.  It takes me a lot longer to fix something than it does a professional mechanic and to make matters worse, if it’s rough out, you need to hang on with one hand sometimes and wield the wrench in the other. One time we were 50 miles off the coast of Nicaragua when our stabilizers failed. At the time, we were in 8 foot beam seas and it was midnight. The problem turned out to be a failed cooling pump which was located 10 inches underneath our hot exhaust pipe in a not so accessible place. It took 3 hours to fix it in rough seas. On this trip to Menorca, if for some mechanical reason we had to slow down 2 or 3 knots it would have delayed our arrival time by many hours, possibly putting our arrival time after dark. We have arrived in plenty of strange harbors in the dark, but it can get confusing, especially if you are tired. For that reason, we like to leave as early as possible to arrive as early as possible in daylight. 

Unlike the last trip, this one was gorgeous. The first day we had 15 hours of daylight. We saw lots of Dolphins and a few Swordfish. I wish we were the fishing type. We quit that a few years ago after going 12 straight years never catching a single fish other than Carol’s “Lunch Dolphin” (a tiny fish) 10 years ago. We also saw some large Sea Turtles, which I think are unusual in the Med.  

On this trip, both of us were able to get some rest while underway. We probably got 4-5 hours of sleep each, which makes a huge difference in how alert you feel in the morning. By 8 am and a few cups of hot coffee later, we were starting to get excited about our arrival into Spain. By 9:30 am we could see the outline of Menorca on the horizon. 

I think I had mentioned before how we depend on the highly accurate digital charts we use, which are connected to our GPS. Normally, they are accurate to within a few feet and you could depend on them without reservation when entering a harbor in low visibility conditions or at night. 

Because anything electronic is subject to failure, we absolutely NEVER depend on a single source. Coming into Mahon, we discovered that, although visibly, we were in the center of the channel, our navigation system charting software showed us actually crossing over land on the left side of the harbor. Of course visually, I knew we were in safe water, but if we had limited visibility, I always have my radar on, which also has a separate GPS chart plotter on it, which in this case, was very accurate. 

I also have a third electronic chart system on my iPad, completely
independent of the boat’s two GPS systems if I needed it.
Better safe than sorry!

 Our primary chart plotter started going haywire after this was
taken and we turned on our secondary one for assurance.

Mahon, Menorca has one of the largest natural harbors in the world at 3.1 miles long and up to 3000 feet wide. The inlet itself is narrow, affording great protection for moored vessels and yachts in bad weather.  Mahon itself has a population of about 30,000 people. 

The Marina was a (ugh!) Med Moor situation but I have come to accept that. The efficient marina staff waved us over to back in between two multimillion dollar 100 foot custom racing sailboats with a minimum of 8 crew on each. WE knew we were fine but I gathered from the looks on the faces of the crew that they could see that the beast was bearing down on them and it was about to turn ugly. There was some current in there and I probably came a LITTLE closer to the boat on the starboard side than I would have liked (that’s what fenders are for).  In the end, there was little drama coming in and soon enough we were tied up and plugged in. 

Fortunately we were there early enough to climb the hill into town and find a Vodaphone store for telephone and Internet SIM cards. We use quite a bit of data and Spain does what they can to thwart that. The most you can get is 1.6 GB and that has to last you 30 days. I asked if I could buy more for the card and they said no. I then said ” can I buy more SIM cards?”. They said “Si, señor”.  So, you can buy 100 1.6 GB cards if you want. I wish they would just give me 30 GB on one and be done with it!

An hour later we were in Internet heaven. 

We really dont look squeezed in here but the looks on the faces of the crew on either 
side of us gave the impression of impending doom. Maybe it was because they saw only
two of us on board. In Europe, most boats our size would have a captain and one or two
crew  aside from the owners on board.

I haven’t really spoken Spanish in almost 7 years. When we were in Panama, Carol and I went to school for a week to learn it and we could communicate fairly well. Since then, I forgot most of it but it is amazing how fast it comes back. A word here, a phrase there.  Within a day or two, we were actually doing ok. The little translator App that we have on our smartphones really helps. One App, called “Say Hi” allows you to speak English to it and it immediately starts speaking in Spanish and vice versa. You can actually hold a conversation with someone in any number of languages. I prefer not to use it here because I need to practice the language, but it is there if I need it. 

The main town of Mahon is up on a hill above the water and marina. It is an old Spanish town very similar to what you would find in Italy, with narrow streets and a town square complete with a cathedral. We see a lot of towns raised up in Europe. I suspect it had something to do with defending the village from attack back then. 

 A beautiful picture of the town (We didn’t take it!)

Mahon does not really sound Spanish because its roots are elsewhere. During the 1700’s it was first taken over by the British, then by the French, then the British again! Finally, in the early 1800’s, the Brits gave it back to Spain, who have had claim to it ever since. 

One of the things Carol and I were very interested in doing was sampling the food here, so after Bill and Janet arrived on their boat Airstream, we headed out for Tapas and San Gria. We were hoping to find an authentic Spanish restaurant and we found it in Sa Gavina II Port. They had really great Tapas of Calamari, Chorizo Sausage, Garlic Shrimp, tomato bread and of course, freshly made Sangria. The food was so good that we just had to overlook the fact that the owner of the restaurant was actually IRISH, and a delightful person at that!  

We also seem to put a lot of miles on by foot in these places. Much more than when we are at home in Florida. We both used to have these tracking devices called Fitbit, which wraps around your wrist like a watch and tracks the number of steps you take in a day. After having 3 that stopped working, we have given up on them and simply use our smartphone to track that stuff. We are both walking between 5 and 7 miles per day, believe it or not. In other words, if you look at Carol, you will believe it, but if you look at me, you might not! 

We ended up staying 3 days in Mahon and loved it, but because we had reservations for the boat in Barcelona in less than a week, we decided it was time to move on.  

Next up:  Mahon to Cala Galdana and Cala de Sant Vicenc

A few more pics…..

 An overhead of the harbor. Our marina is on the middle right of the photo.

 Our marina from across the harbor