After leaving Sete, our first passage on the Mediterranean was to be overnight on the Gulf of Lions to Port Vendres, France, on the border with Spain. I didn't use the sextant until I reached the Atlantic Ocean, because of the shortness of each leg and the proximity of land before that. So I relied on dead reckoning, which is estimating one's position by considering boat speed, current, time, and sometimes buoys or landmarks sighted. I depended at first on Allan, who was self-assured and supposedly an experienced professional sailor. However, as we arrived in port and were about to throw our mooring ropes to the assembled townspeople, they informed us that Port Vendres was 5 miles further on. The chart showed that had a more protected harbor, so we continued there.
Two days after that we sailed to Rosas, barely in Spain and encircled by the wintry white peaks of the Pyrenees. As we tied to the dock, a policeman told us that since Rosas was not a port of entry we would have to be gone early the next morning, but that we were forbidden to leave at all. We went with the latter restriction and stayed there 5 days, during which we visited inland Figueras. Spain was still governed by the fascist dictator Franco, and the people made no secret of their contempt for the secret police. Some aging workers said they had been Communists, the party defeated by Franco 20 years earlier, but were now nihilists. Since Hitler had supported Franco by supplying arms and personnel, it was not surprising that German was a more common second language than English.
When we started to leave, we found that high atmospheric pressure and a northerly wind had lowered the sea level, so that Swalker was hard aground at the dock. Running the engine at full power while pulling the mast from vertical with a rope from the masthead to the next dock, whilst kind volunteers with a powerful boat pulled us in a seaward direction, got us unstuck.
After an overnight in Palamos, remembered as a little town with too many barbershops, we arrived in Barcelona. The yacht club provided, as most do for visiting yachts, free mooring and a courtesy dinghy. We enjoyed the city for a week. Allan left for a yachting job just as I was about to tell him to leave. His place was taken by Roger, a young American engineer who had been living in Madrid on the dollar a day he earned from teaching English. Roger wanted to go with us to Alicante, and said he never got seasick.
Maybe that was because he never had been on a boat. Although we left Barcelona for Ibiza, in the Balearic Islands, in fine sailing weather, the sun shining, a favorable breeze blowing but with very little swell on the sea, Roger soon lost his lunch, and I did not see him again until we reached Ibiza 2 days later.
I was woken during his watch that night by a frantic Peter, who had told me he was afraid of the dark. We had suddenly been hit by the fabled Mistral, also called the white wind or katabatic wind. It is fueled by gravity, which accelerates the descent of air from the nearby Pyrenees, often under a cloudless sky. I quickly brought the bow of the boat into the wind, lowered the wildly flapping sails to the tossing deck, and raised the hitherto unused storm sails. Those, the mainsail and jib, had half the area of the regular sails. The wind was going our way faster than we were, and so were the towering foaming waves. So although we were going forward through the water, we were going backwards into the waves. To avoid capsizing it was necessary to keep the stern pointed into the unrelenting succession of waves, which, overtaking us from behind, each gave the impression we would be submerged. Then swiftly we would be raised high on the windblown crest, and sink an apparent 20 feet into the next trough, where the sails were partially blanketed from the gale. This required constant vigorous use of the tiller, and it was quickly apparent that Peter could not do it. He occasionally told me of horizontal Roger being tossed onto the floor, once through the air onto the opposite bunk. I was on the tiller through that night and the next day and the next night, adrenaline substituting for Benzedrine. The sound of wind whistling in the rigging, the erratic slap of the angry waves on the hull, and the occasional moans from the cabin below, would be a fit soundtrack for Purgatory, but combined with the great spectacle of Nature at its most expressive, the beauty was overpowering.
Two days after that we sailed to Rosas, barely in Spain and encircled by the wintry white peaks of the Pyrenees. As we tied to the dock, a policeman told us that since Rosas was not a port of entry we would have to be gone early the next morning, but that we were forbidden to leave at all. We went with the latter restriction and stayed there 5 days, during which we visited inland Figueras. Spain was still governed by the fascist dictator Franco, and the people made no secret of their contempt for the secret police. Some aging workers said they had been Communists, the party defeated by Franco 20 years earlier, but were now nihilists. Since Hitler had supported Franco by supplying arms and personnel, it was not surprising that German was a more common second language than English.
When we started to leave, we found that high atmospheric pressure and a northerly wind had lowered the sea level, so that Swalker was hard aground at the dock. Running the engine at full power while pulling the mast from vertical with a rope from the masthead to the next dock, whilst kind volunteers with a powerful boat pulled us in a seaward direction, got us unstuck.
After an overnight in Palamos, remembered as a little town with too many barbershops, we arrived in Barcelona. The yacht club provided, as most do for visiting yachts, free mooring and a courtesy dinghy. We enjoyed the city for a week. Allan left for a yachting job just as I was about to tell him to leave. His place was taken by Roger, a young American engineer who had been living in Madrid on the dollar a day he earned from teaching English. Roger wanted to go with us to Alicante, and said he never got seasick.
Maybe that was because he never had been on a boat. Although we left Barcelona for Ibiza, in the Balearic Islands, in fine sailing weather, the sun shining, a favorable breeze blowing but with very little swell on the sea, Roger soon lost his lunch, and I did not see him again until we reached Ibiza 2 days later.
I was woken during his watch that night by a frantic Peter, who had told me he was afraid of the dark. We had suddenly been hit by the fabled Mistral, also called the white wind or katabatic wind. It is fueled by gravity, which accelerates the descent of air from the nearby Pyrenees, often under a cloudless sky. I quickly brought the bow of the boat into the wind, lowered the wildly flapping sails to the tossing deck, and raised the hitherto unused storm sails. Those, the mainsail and jib, had half the area of the regular sails. The wind was going our way faster than we were, and so were the towering foaming waves. So although we were going forward through the water, we were going backwards into the waves. To avoid capsizing it was necessary to keep the stern pointed into the unrelenting succession of waves, which, overtaking us from behind, each gave the impression we would be submerged. Then swiftly we would be raised high on the windblown crest, and sink an apparent 20 feet into the next trough, where the sails were partially blanketed from the gale. This required constant vigorous use of the tiller, and it was quickly apparent that Peter could not do it. He occasionally told me of horizontal Roger being tossed onto the floor, once through the air onto the opposite bunk. I was on the tiller through that night and the next day and the next night, adrenaline substituting for Benzedrine. The sound of wind whistling in the rigging, the erratic slap of the angry waves on the hull, and the occasional moans from the cabin below, would be a fit soundtrack for Purgatory, but combined with the great spectacle of Nature at its most expressive, the beauty was overpowering.
My dead reckoning was quite accurate, perhaps coincidentally, considering the difficulty of estimating speed and maintaining a straight course. In moonlight just before dawn I saw that we were about to enter an array of tall rock monoliths, apparently on the north coast of Ibiza. We reversed course to deeper water, and keeping the island in sight in the growing light, made a counterclockwise semicircle around it. I was exhausted and drenched, and the storm had abated, so Peter manned the tiller and occasionally woke me to report new landmarks sighted. We continued through the narrow strait between Ibiza and the smaller island of Fomentera, and docked in Ibiza harbor in the finally warm sunshine. Roger seemed glad and surprised to be alive, and therefore left the ship permanently.
Ibiza was a bargain paradise. Expatriates were living there modestly on 3 dollars a week. A real estate dealer unsuccessfully tried to sell me 40 acres for a pittance, but then I never bought Toyota or Apple or Amazon when they were cheap either.
I became aware of some of the wondrous creatures that live near the surface of warmer seasl
One was the jellyfish called Portuguese Man-of-war (pronounced manowar). Somehow humans have discovered that a jellyfish is not just one creature, but a committee, a collection of symbiotic creatures, each having a limited function: transporting, detecting, capturing, feeding, reproducing. Lacking wings or feet, it gets about by sailing. Lacking a skeleton, its iridescent blue-green sail is supported by enclosed nitrogen. Being a colony, is it immortal, with periodic replacement of its members ? Without the ability to seek food, it gets it, to be anthropomorphic, by playing the odds. That is, occasionally it runs into a victim. Or vice versa, as I was to do later. From the air-filled body hang dozens of sticky filaments, up to 50 meters long, each lined with myriad cells containing small amounts of a venom more potent than that of the cobra. Thrashing by the victim helps to release the venom into its body. For more, see Google.
By day a bucket of tropical water is a solution of sodium chloride and very minute traces of gold and other minerals, containing one of the Benevolent miracles: countless tiny bits of life called plankton, variegated under the microscope. What numbers are needed to count them in the oceans of the world: quintillions ? By night plankton are invisible, unlit for efficiency, but displaying light via photoluminescence when agitated, as by a breaking wave or passing ship or sweep of the hand. Coexisting with plankton is the another Benevolent miracle, dolphin. This name is used both for the long fish that was to become an important part of my diet on the Atlantic, and for the five-foot-long whale-shaped mammal that followed us across the western Mediterranean. Capable of high speeds, they slowed their forward progress to match that of the Swalker, while performing the most exquisite ballet, centered on the bow and close to it. Sometimes they would dart ahead, then fall back. Sometimes they suddenly swooped under the ship to surface on the other side. Frequently the paths of several would be swiftly intertwined. Their proximity would seem to have nothing to do with survival, but is there any less anthropormorphic explanation than Play ? What made all this visible was that each dolphin was constantly coated with a thick coat of soft white light, from the disturbed plankton. Some hydraulic engineer may explain why the light should be a uniform coat, not just a trailing wake.
It's not easy to be an agnostic, to maintain logic in the presence of these spectacles. It is easier to attribute it all to a Mind of Infinite Ability, like Atlas supporting the World.
After 6 days on Ibiza we went successively, powered mostly by engine because of light and contrary winds, to the mainland Spanish ports of Alicante, Cartegena, Garucha, Almeria, Malaga, and the British colony of Gibraltar.
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