The human being is part of the whole, called by us, the universe,
a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings,
as something separate from the rest
- A kind of delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison...
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Nobody's able to achieve this completely, but the striving
for such achievement is in itself a part a liberation
and a foundation for inner security.
- Albert Einstein -
Far away is not far enough!
When we left Helsinki earlier this year I was still shaking my head (and shaking from cold) about how far from the equator I had managed to take my boat. I had a warm feeling leaving the 60 degrees north, but as it turned out, the voyage back to a decent latitude was longer than the voyage away from it. Portugal was getting ridiculously cold - down to 7 C at night - and we were in a dire need for more degrees in temp and less in lat. Morocco was nice but cool. The beach was crying for sunbathers and I actually wore the rainbow-coloured beanie I bought from the street vendor. The Canaries were supposed to be the place of eternal sunshine and summer. Eternal sunshine my ass! Summer? Where? Not by my definition...
We've been a bit frustrated. There is no reason for us to be unhappy about anything. But maybe It's just "that time of month" for me. And when the captain is grumpy, everyone suffers. More about that later, perhaps... I almost wrote about how we had been waiting for so long to get here but then I realised that to be true for just about every place on my journey.
I CAN'T WAIT!
I couldn't wait to get to Cairns after living in England for a year in 1995-96. I couldn't wait to leave the harbour with my new/old yacht Aliisa in 1998. I couldn't wait to get back to Cairns after being cleaned up in PNG 2001. I just couldn't wait to get out again in 2004. I had achieved something really big when I reached Darwin, at the edge of my first big ocean, but...
I couldn't wait to get to Africa and when I finally got to Cape Town, I couldn't wait to get to Caribbean. The first achievement to make me overwhelmed with emotion was the arrival in my native Finland and the biggest of them all was when parking the boat in Lake Saimaa at the jetty of my friend Pertti Duncker, 61 degrees north, 24000 miles under the keel, after almost 10 years of promising to do that one day.
After a while (in about a few months...) I just could not wait to get out of Finland and since 14 June 2008 my life - now shared with my wife Annina - has been one continuous string of "I can't waits". In a way, I'm climbing the ladder and I can't wait to get to the top. Every time I reach the top, I move the ladder up to the next level and keep climbing.
You can reach a lot further than what you can see ahead of you. You can reach high, even with a short ladder. You just have to keep moving the ladder. The sky is the limit and when I reach the sky, I can't wait to put my feet back on the ground! You see, there is only so far from my home port that I can get. It seems that in my cryptic free-flowing writing I am now getting back to earth and down to the ocean. (Bloody hell! This dribbling is approaching the level of the old Pink Floyd lyrics...but does it mean anything?)
Back to business
The point furthermost from Cairns is still 1500 miles away, somewhere around 600 miles west of Cape Verde islands, in the centre of the Atlantic Ocean. I sailed well north of that point in 2006 and the "turning point" of Aliisa's circumnavigation, Finland, was 7200 nautical miles away from my hometown of Cairns. Today I'm 9580 nautical miles from Cairns and though I'm homeward bound, I'll be increasing my distance from Cairns for some time to come. Sometime in December 2008 we'll be sailing almost over the point opposite Cairns, reaching the maximum of 10 800 nautical miles (20 000km) from Cairns. After that, I'll start putting the ladder down, one spreader at a time, until I reach the starting point of this cruise.
Eventually Aliisa will have climbed up and down and back to the home port of Cairns. Like the old man with his short ladder reached the top and then ended up back on deck, back home.
Jeez, that's some heavy thinking there. And what was the point? I might have to get back to you on that. But now I think it's time to start the page and say a few words about the Islans Canarias.
The "Canine Islands" were known by ancient Romans. There was an aboriginal population related to the Berbers in Africa. (Just 80 miles away, I think the strongest men would have done the journey by swimming) The Spaniards were claiming the rocks from early on and over the centuries successfully defended attacks from the Poms, the Frogs and the Portugese. Finally, left on their own, the hot blooded Alonso's were so busy arguing with eachother, that the whole archipelago had to be divided into two provinces. (1927) The eternal rivalry between Las Palmas and Santa Cruz ended with both claiming the title of "The Capital City", each of their own province. And then back to Aliisa...
After a few days of motoring in flat calm seas west of Morocco we found the island of Lanzarote and sailed south to Marina Rubicon, Playa Blanca. It's amazing how life can be sustained on a dead volcanic rock. How is it done? By importing both the goods and the buyers of the goods. So people from northern Europe want to see the sun and they fly here. Ships bring grog and food and souvenirs for them. The tourists buy them and piss off. The planes go and fetch more people while the ships go and get more stuff for them to buy. There you have it, an economy on a dead rock with a beach.
I can resist anything, but temptation...
The lure of the marina was too much and we paid the 16 euro per night for two nights of facilities. We're not very good at roughing it up. Wifi internet was not free but we even paid for that. Two days later I got the latest Visa statement and went into shock. We moved out to anchor and started beaming our wi-fi antenna ashore for a free connection.
After a while we felt the need to move south. Ever since I crossed the tropic of cancer on my way to Finland, I have felt the need to move south. We took the eastern route around the island of Fuerteventura, another dead rock. Despite its moonscape, passenger jets kept landing and taking off every five minutes or so. The brown lifeless scenery was broken only by white villages and hotels, with the occasional well watered palm tree and some cactus. A few days rest in the Gran Tarajal was a welcome break. The village was sleepy, there were no tourists and no-one spoke english. The only problem was the one that seems to be our only problem in the entire life: there was no access to internet.
I find it totally unreasonable that the satellites are not beaming down a 100 Gb broadband covering the whole planet. One should be able to be online at all times. Everyone should be online, everywhere, all the time. It was mainly in the hope for a getting online that we moved to the island of Grand Canaria and its capital city of Las Palmas. The city may just as well have been called the Disapointment.
I had changed my mind about ARC. (The Atlantic Rally for Cruisers). I had always been very anti-ARC and anti "sailing in company". I recognise this cynical and negative streak in me and in order to fight it, I decided that we would go and have a look at the circus. There was obviously no room in the marina and we were surprised to even find a slot in the anchorage.
The eternal sunshine my ass
This does not refer to my writing which is "eternal sunshine from my ass.
The first few days were ok, sunny and such, though the anchorage was rolly from shipping and the city was dirty, noisy and congested with traffic. Let's say that we didn't really fall in love with the place. Nevertheless, we'd had a bumpy ride from Fuerteventura and needed a rest. We always need a rest. When we don't really need a rest, we could nevertheless do with one. A rest is good and I often have two just in case. Our friend Simon had given us a tip for the wi-fi and we spent the first 12 hours ajusting our frying pan. We did that in vain too, finding sporadic signals from a yacht club and a number of secure networks. No good.
Dinner at a Chinese restaurant. We had this weird experience in Lagos, Portugal. We had it again in Lanzarote: The dessert is on the house - a Yasmin flavoured wine served in small shot-glasses. Each glass has a lens-shaped base and a picture inside the glass. The picture is visible only through liquid, so when you look down, you see...
Fuerteventura. Villages and hotels appear in the dead rock. Somewhere they dream up water, power and sewage. Cargo ships plow the seas to bring in the merchandise, planes cross the skies to bring in the buyers. Money changes hands. Life on a rock.
Then the clouds moved in. Showers. Less than 20 C, yuk! I was dressed up in winter clothes, dreaming of Cairns. I've never felt this Australian before. In fact, the only real sunshine in Las Palmas came from meeting a few other Aussie yachts. Sitting down for a yarn over a cold one, I felt at home again. (As long as we're not talking sports. Rugby? Aussie rules? Cricket? I have no idea...)
The departure of Atlantic Rally for Cruisers showed clearly on the chart plotter. About 10% of yachts had a transceiver, many more would have had a receiver. Maybe in a few years time Automatic Identification System will be as common as Global Positioning. And some people still bother with a Sextant??!
It looked promising to start with. Then the sky turned dark and the wi-fi signal died. Then we were advised not to swim, the batteries went flat and ... Can't wait to get out of Las Palmas!
After ARC had gone we joined the queue to get a berth. To our disapointment, there are no actual "berths" in Las Palmas. In fact, the whole Gran Canaria seems to be using the cheapest way to fit the maximum number of boats in a harbour: Dead moorings Med-style is not my favourite. All yachts are side by side with nothing but fenders inbetween. One wants to wash his decks, the next one is trying to dry his washing. One is smoking and the other's engine is running. Entry and exit is from the stern, past the wind wane. In addition, the facilities in Las Palmas were dirty, there was no toilet paper in any of the toilets and it was about a 15 min. walk from the jetty to the amenities block. There was no wi-fi at all, not a free one and not one you could buy. Simply no signal at all in the biggest harbour in Canary Islands!!
We hired a little car and managed to fill the boat with 300 euros worth of food. Got gas in the bottles. For the first time ever, I was asked if I want Butane or Propane. So far I've just filled them with LPG gas. I picked Propane out of the two, having no idea what the difference is. Later I did my best to study the issue but I'm still not sure what the actual difference is by the time the stuff comes out of my stove and cooks my meal? The bottles on the deck may sit in temperatures ranging from little over zero to well over 40 C. They range from near empty to full. Isn't the regulator sorting out the pressure difference? I know that I can dive with 30 bar or 300 bar pressure in my tank. The breathing is still the same. Nevermind. Too much knowledge increases life's pain. I was happy before - cooking with gas - before someone raised the issue of Propane or Butane. But I'm over it now. There's a flame on the stove and that's all that matters.
The fridge stopped working. The last rusty strand of copper wire did not pass on the electrons. (The whole compressor went underwater when Aliisa sank in Lake Saimaa, 2006
For my birthday I cooked what I was craving for: Sausage in gravy and boiled potatos. Yep, It's nice to have the plain Finnish food every now and again.
The anchorage infront of Puerto Mogan turned nasty today, as I write this. We're on a lee shore and feeling sick. We're hanging off a mooring and bouncing along like hell. But it's all worth it because we've found a wi-fi signal from the shore. I had a internet-marathon until 4 AM and planning for a good afternoon kip but...
...then came the dreadful sound from outside: "Hey! It's our mooring!" A scungy looking day tripper catamaran with pale european girls trying to sunbathe on the chilly 20-degree breeze. I turned the key, dropped the line and drove off with an apologetic look on my face. Bugger! I didn't feel like anchoring in 12 meters of already uncomfortable roll. We drove off and did some sight seeing along the rugged coast of SW Gran Canaria before unfurling the genoa and having a quiet lazy-sail overnight to La Gomera.
They're everywhere! Ever since I gave Charlie to adoption, I've seen cats everywhere. I never thought I could get this attached to an animal. I miss Charlie a lot and every time I see another cat, I think of her. I'm glad that she's got the best home on the planet, though...
It's time to do the last bits and bobs. Figure out a flexible water tank for reserve. Climb up the mast and change the tricolor bulb for a LED. (I only have one LED bulb and I hardly ever use the anchor light...) Find a few fishing supplies, buy the fruit and vege, clean the fridge and bugger off to the big blue.
