Lemmer-Mazarron

It seems hard to believe, but here we are, finally. In Totana. It has been a long trip. Some 1.400 km of inland waters and 500 nautical miles of Mediterranean sailing. A couple of hours by plane. A couple of days by car. Two months by Rana Ra! We have gone through tunnels and over bridges. We have had to wait for a new water pump, for the floods to subside and for documents to arrive. We have found a hole in the cockpit that could have sunk the boat. The cooling system has done its best to sink the boat. And the French customs authorities have threatened us with taking our boat and finally fined us for just a little bit of paper. Anyway, we are finally in Totana and the Rana Ra sleeps peacefully moored in Mazarrón, our well-known sailing waters.

 

Two months and three days: an eternity. The last section of the trip, from Port Saint Luis du Rhon to Mazarrón was less than seven days sailing. The rest of the time we were just taking the boat somewhere or waiting for something. Always with the engine on. No mast, no sails. Luckily, all that is now over. Our real trip is now about to start. But let us start from the beginning.

It was late march in Friesland. The weather was miserable, as expected: late winter and the two of us on the move! Air humidity averaged 98%, temperatures ranged between 2 and 3º C. One week after we got the boat we loaded it with all of our belongings and we moved in. We were both moving down to Spain (at least we were moving our belongings) and the result was a slightly cumbersome cabin. We spent one day in Lemmer mending our navigation lights and preparing the last details (fuel, water, flags...) before we went into the IJsselmeer.

At the beginning of the trip, locks and bridges kept us a bit edgy. Our first lock was little short of traumatical. We didn't know what to expect, what to do. The lock did open and we went in. Along with us came a large merchant ship which made us feel small indeed. All the nervousness from the last weeks was then transformed into excitement, continuos and probably excessive checks of our position and the joy of having set off. On the IJsselmeer it felt almost as if we were at sea. The first few days were not very healthy for the boat, since our manoeuvring skills were not quite up to speed, but we were lucky not to damage any other boats. The few scratches that we made to ours are not to worry about. And we soon learnt the lesson from a German teacher: "Kleine Fahrte kleine Beule" (small speed small bumps) and after a while the situation improved considerably. Any day now we will be able to moor without breaking anything J Anyhow, when you cannot sail being a good cowboy can help to reach the poles.

We were full of energy in our second sailing day, driving past the mooring point of Miguel's old institute near Utrech, when a suspicious amount of smoke started coming out of the engine. The water pump of the cooling circuit was broken. Bad start. We spent almost one week (and a considerable amount of guilders) waiting in Utrech until we finally fixed it with the aid of a friend of a friend. We were lucky that it didn't happen the day before, in the middle of the IJsselmeer. Soon afterwards the pleasant driving through open waters or small canals stopped and we joined the large merchant ships along the Amsterdam-Rijn Kanaal. For those of you not familiar with the Dutch topology it will be just as surprising as it was for us that while in the Kanaal you have to take a lock going up in order to cross a passing river, on the other side of which you have to go down "back to earth". And of course, it kept raining.

The first freaking experience while on board was going onto the Waal, a branch of the Rhine, where the waves are sea high and the current almost 10km/h: comparable to the cruising speed of the Rana Ra. Merchant ships sometimes decide to take the left hand side of the channel. This makes it slightly uncomfortable for little people like us, who just want to keep away of the big guys. In order to go south we had to cross the waterway and take a side channel. It really was a one shot thing. It would have been hard to go for a second try if the current had taken us past the side channel. But we were lucky: despite the moving heavy traffic we managed to cross over and lock down to the Maas where there were almost no merchant ships to be seen.

The Maas was flooded, so we made very small progress upwards. We had to do about 500 km of it so we just kept going and going. Some of the dams where down and we had to drive over them instead of using the locks. In those points the current was so strong that we had to bring the engine up to 2.000 rpm (almost double of our cruising level). Still, progress was slow (well under 1 km/h and with little control over the boat). One of the things that we discovered in the Maas is that the water surface is anything but flat. The flooded river spills over and the water falls down the sides making clear curves. Behind the bridge pillars, there are deep troughs inside which the surrounding water (including downstream water) falls in. Amazing how easily we are amazed.

We crossed Belgium in one or two days but we got stuck at the French border, in Givet. Due to the floods the rivers were closed to the traffic. Just as we stopped the engine started making horrible noises. It was only a couple of loose screws and after two days of intensive work we managed to make them fast. This, by the way, does not say so much about our lack of mechanical skills as about the inaccessibility of some parts of the bilge! Once the engine was fixed we started to do some cleaning, and it was then that we realised that the water we poured on the cockpit was draining straight into the bilge... we had bought a boat with a hole! Great. Panic came over us and we started to doubt about the quality of the survey that we had had done on the boat. We went so far as to consider selling the boat and quitting the trip, but that would be so complicated and so against our desires, that we decided to fix the boat and go ahead. We felt really "done" by the system, but a bit of Aldi beer helped us to forget and it all seems far away now.

We moved back to Germany. But as soon as the French waterways were open (that is, two weeks later) we were struggling with the Meuse once again. She looks peaceful enough in the pictures. But never trust a serene face! After having gone through some thirty to forty locks we knew our way through. We were starting to relax and enjoy the trip when we arrived to the mountains: in three days we had to cross exactly 100 locks! "Experienced" as we were, we had little time to rest between locks, so we pushed on hour after hour and went to bed exhausted at sunset. From Givet upwards the landscape became nicer all the time. The canal was closed by trees on both sides. Here there was a narrow valley, there the flooded plains of the natural park in the Vosges region. And it was nice to go through the old manual locks where you had to help the operator if you didn't want to wait for ages in each one. Had the weather been any better, we would have taken it easier, but with the rain and the cold we just wanted to get down to the Mediterranean and the sunny South.

On the way up the canal does strange things, like going over bridges. Eventually we got to the top, at three hundred and some meters over see level. Here we had to go through the longest tunnel of the trip, Foug. Based on previous experience with comparable tunnels, we went in without spot lights and we found ourselves in almost complete darkness, four hundred meters from each end and seventy centimetres from each side wall. We kept almost calm, just enough to go through without incidents, and at the other side found the first downward lock. There were still a couple of upward locks ahead of us, but this was a good sign.

Going downstream was much faster. After the first couple of days the locks started spreading further apart along the way. In the Saône the current started pushing us ahead. By then the water level was lower and it didn't quite compensate the extra fuel which we had used upstream, but it was better than nothing. The landscape in the higher part of the Saône is also fantastic. It is actually quite full of boats that you can rent to cruise for a few days. The trees just fall into the riversides and disappear inside the water, the water is clean and had it not rained again I am sure we would have really enjoyed our stay there. Thousands of crocodiles (floating logs) constituted our main worry during this bit of the trip.

After Lyon, when we thought we were almost there, we discovered that the rear cabin was completely full of water. Filthy black water with which the exhaust system was trying to sink the boat. It was just a little hole in the water collector. We went to the local blacksmith workshop where they put some chewing gum in it in and kept on going. In Avignon the summer seemed to arrive all of a sudden. We made our first touristic stop there. The proximity of the sea, hence of setting sail, hence the imminence of the real adventure and the confronting of our fears, helped us not to be in a hurry anymore.

In the Rôhne everything was big. The locks were about two hundred meters long and the highest one went down twenty three meters, the lock at Bollene. Freaking. Although the current was not too high we could average over one hundred kilometres a day, including several locks. So we got there. Saint Louis du Rôhne, near Marseille. The last lock, the Mediterranean, the wind blowing hard, so hard that we could not set the mast for two days.

We filled the fuel and water tanks, bought provisions for three weeks, crosses the last lock and went to a yard where we set mast and rigging. Although we had never sailed with this boat we almost set sail towards Spain just then and there. The wind was blowing hard and it was raining. At the end we decided to be reasonable, try to get the auto-pilot fixed and try out the sails in the bay rather than in high sea. Aren't we terribly sensible? We went to Fos-sur-Mere, where we found out that the auto-pilot could not be fixed there. Then we started to try out the sails. After half an hour the French customs had already given us a fine for not having the appropriate papers on board. We were allowed to sail for one month while we fixed our papers, but since we wanted to avoid a similar problem with the Spanish authorities we got the documents sent to us there. A Spanish "overnight" courier took only five days to get there, that is what we call Europe.

Anyway, the documents got there and we finally set sail towards Mazarrón. While waiting in France the wind had blown fresh and steady from the North, exactly what we needed for a three to four day crossing, but as we were to set off it decided to stop blowing or do it from the South West. Nice. We left all the same. The weather forecast was good and announced a little bit more wind for the coming weekend. (It was Tuesday afternoon.) The original idea was to head directly to Murcia. But we gave it up when we realised that it would imply taking a "motorway" for large merchant ships. We headed instead towards the NE corner of Mallorca, where we could stop in Pollensa, a bay which we already knew. The first thirty miles were rather painful. Very slow progress or not at all, the ever-present fires of the oil refinery wouldn't go away in the horizon and the coast would not retreat. We actually had to start the engines to have control over the boat on the calms because the boat would not "obey" us without wind, which was somehow frustrating. The only good thing from that evening was that a couple of swallows kept us company for most of the night. They used the boat as a refuge and one of them, in the twilight, actually stopped on PJ's very head. It stayed there for a couple of minutes and PJ remained breathless in the meantime. But the calm didn't last for ever. The Rana Ra seems to sail relatively well, and on spite of the light winds we started making progress in the second day. The French coast disappeared and for the first time we were to sleep out of sight of land. Until late in the evening we had been seeing fishing boats, but as the night came and for the whole of the following day we didn't see a soul. Not human, at least. For the first time we saw dolphins approaching the boat and, believe it or not, two whales jumping out of the water, one of them around two hundred meters away. They are nice these whales, they always jump twice so you are sure you saw them, otherwise it would seem to be some sort of hallucination. We also saw moonfish, at least that is how we call them in Spanish, which are awkward round creatures which swim sideways showing one of their fins, like a threatening shark.

On the third night we saw the lights of Cap Formentor, in Mallorca. We could have sailed into Pollensa. But it was pitch black, we had no detailed nautical chart of the area and the wind was blowing directly out of the bay. The weather forecast predicted fine weather for five days, with northerly winds and a high pressure centre over mainland Spain, so we decided to make use of the good winds to get home. It might have been wiser to wait until the day and then sail into Pollensa, because having no auto-pilot we were getting tired, but we only realised that a couple of days later, when we were arriving to Mazarrón. We sailed past Mallorca, Cabrera and Formentera. The wind was very light again, and instead of trying to make painful progress we made a long break for cooking and eating. After that we tried out the spinnaker, and discovered with surprise that we could actually set it and that the boat kept on moving despite the low wind. Eventually, however, the wind fell down again. We pull down the spinnaker and tried to start the engine in order to reload the batteries for the night. The engine would not start: the batteries were flat! Luckily, the ingenious electrical system of the Rana Ra is full of surprises, and the same mistake that discharged the battery for the engine kept the other one full… So we did manage, after all, to continue with the engine.

As the wind freshened up we set again the spinnaker and made the engine shut up. What a blessing. At least for a while. We had been six nights on the move. One of us had had to be at the wheel continuously since we left Marseille. So we had been sleeping little and poorly. We were tired. The wind was "fresh" (force 3) and we could make three to four knots with the spinnaker. But keeping the sail full with the sea from the stern required concentration, and that is exactly what we didn't have anymore. We didn't want to face a change of sails in the middle of the night and against our own ideals we brought the spinnaker down and continued under engine. As the night came down we had already turned around Cabo de Palos, the last geographical milestone of our trip. At two o'clock, as we changed shifts, we could see the lights of Mazarrón, and at 4.20 a.m., six and a half days after leaving Port de Saint Gervais, we moored in the Club Náutico de Mazarrón. Where the Rana Ra now waits before we bring it on dry deck for the last maintenance work before the "real" trip.

We still have to decide, but our tentative plans are first to take a small cruise to Cabo de Gata, in mainland Spain, then go to the Balearic islands (late July), then to Sardinia and Sicily (August) and then Greece (September-October). On the way back we want to stop in Tunisia (November). We still plan to cross the Atlantic in winter (the good season for the trade winds), but that is only a plan. Time will tell. At any rate, we first have to sort out a couple of small problems with the boat and cover it up with new paint… Once this is done, we will let you know what happens next.