Cruising

Valletta to La Grande Motte

/ Doug / 5 Comments

Satellite tracking history of our passage from Malta to La Grande Motte via, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica.

We had an excellent passage from Malta to France. We left Valletta on Thursday morning at 10 am and arrived at La Grande Motte the following Tuesday at 10:30 am, so 5 days at sea without any stops on the way.

Since the forecast was showing a Mistral wind was going to arrive on Wed or Thu, we decided to go non-stop to avoid any chance of having to beat into it. After our previous experience sailing in France in 2016 where we had 55 knot winds from a Mistral, I’m pretty motivated to never do that again if I can avoid it!

The PredictWind weather models showed very light wind for most of the passage, mostly from the northeast, which would mean a lot of upwind sailing and motoring required. Definitely confirms the saying in this area that Med stands for Motoring Every Day! We did manage quite a bit of sailing without the engines though, which was really nice, and the light wind meant calm seas for the most part.

The first part of the passage was all sailing with wind 8-12 knots at 70-80 degrees true. This gave us 7 to 8 knots boat speed close hauled at 40 to 45 degrees apparent. In these conditions we had full main and staysail up and the boat tracks perfectly in this configuration. The helm is well balanced with the autopilot holding the rudder angle between 0 and 1 degrees the whole time.

Once we cleared the southwest corner of Sicily and headed for Sardinia, the wind increased to 15 to 18 knots, which pushed our apparent wind to 20 to 25 knots. There was also one of those awful Mediterranean steep wavy seas against us. These happen frequently in the Med, and when you’re headed upwind you just have to pound through it. I hate these conditions, they make you wish you were anywhere else but suffering the crashing and banging required to make headway. Not only is it uncomfortable as hell, it’s stressful to have the boat crashing down off the wave tops all night. We put in a 2nd reef to keep our speed under 8 knots so the motion was a little better, but it was still a long night.

By the morning of the third day we were closing in on the east coast of Sardinia, and the seas calmed down a lot. The rest of the passage was smooth sailing and really fun. We had light winds forward of the beam most of the way, so we had to motor pretty much all the last 2 days. Wildling is slow under engines, so I never like being forced to motor, but we had to beat the arrival of the Mistral so we couldn’t pull in somewhere and wait for better sailing conditions.

When motoring long distances I always run a single engine at a time at moderate RPM, which for us means one engine at 2,000 RPM. This gives us about 6 knots boat speed. If I run both engines at 2,000 RPM we add about 1 knot of speed, so it’s not worth the extra fuel and engine wear. What I find works best is to keep the sails up while motoring and sail an angle where we can use the apparent wind generated by the boat’s forward motion to get some drive out of the sails. In most cases we can get an extra 1 to 2 knots of speed when motoring by doing this.

About an hour out from La Grande Motte, I called the Outremer folks and Sylvain came and met us as we pulled up to the welcome dock. He then helped us maneuver into one of the catamaran berths in the marina.

My injured shoulder did OK on the passage. I was pretty worried about how we would go, particularly since we don’t have Gavin with us to help with the more physical maneuvers. My shoulder was definitely very painful and pretty much out of action, but a combination of mostly light winds, lots of help from Robin and Lindsay, and our electric winches, allowed the three of us to sail the boat with no problems. Robin and I traded watches during the night and Lindsay did a long watch each morning to give us a chance to catch up on sleep. It worked out really well!

We are in London this week so I can have my shoulder looked at. While we are away the Outremer team is doing some maintenance projects on Wildling, so we will be ready to continue on towards the Canary Islands when we get back. I’m really hoping I won’t need surgery on my shoulder, as that would put me out of action for quite a while. I’ll find out the verdict tomorrow!

Sailing to Malta

/ Doug / 4 Comments

We left Tunisia last week after almost exactly 1 year in Port Yasmine, Hammamet. A big thanks to Duncan and Kais at Yacht Services, Tunisia for taking great care of Wildling for us while we were away during the winter. It took us a few days to get the headsails re-rigged and everything ready to leave, including two trips up the mast for me, which I really hate!

Our first port of call after Tunisia was Valetta, Malta. This is a 196 NM passage which the PredictWind weather routing software said would take us 26 hours with winds starting at 8 knots, building to 20 knots during the night, then dropping to 2 knots as we approached Malta.

We cleared out of Tunisia at 10am on Tuesday, after a somewhat confusing customs process which included a detailed discussion about the size of our diesel tanks (I have no idea why), then we raised the mainsail and genoa and set our course due east towards Malta. This is the first time I’ve used the PredictWind model since we loaded WILDLING’s polar data, and the software turned out to be pretty much spot on. We began the passage with light winds, but spent most of the first 12-15 hours with 18 to 22 knots (true wind speed) on the beam. This translated to 20 to 24 knots apparent at about 60 degrees. We put the first reef in the main as soon as we saw 20 knots apparent and switched down to the staysail from the genoa, and were doing a very comfortable 10-11 knots boat speed all night, and we didn’t need to touch the sails at all. The wind died early the next morning so we had to motor the last 8 hours of the trip (typical Med sailing).

Overall the passage took us 29 hours, but we had 1 knot of current against us the entire way which the weather model didn’t account for. It turns out the Professional weather package gives you current data, but I don’t think it’s really that important for non-race boats.

On our mooring in Malta

Our main objective in Malta is to haul out to get some maintenance done. New antifouling paint on the bottom, engine and saildrive service, two through-hull fittings replaced and some minor gelcoat repairs. We were booked in at Manoel Island Yacht Yard for the haul out, and because we are too wide for their travel-lift, we had to use the slipway, which consists of a huge sled on rails that the boat sits on and gets dragged up out of the water.

Waiting at the entrance of the yacht yard for our turn to haul out

Looking down the slipway rails. The sled is ready for us to dock.

The people at Manoel Island Yacht Yard are friendly, helpful and professional. We reviewed the locations for the lifting blocks and they configured the slipway sled to fit our hulls. The process of getting the boat onto the sled was pretty smooth. They had 4 line handlers on our boat while I positioned us over to the top of the submerged sled, then they tied the boat in place, and sent scuba divers down to line everything up underneath.

Divers adjusting the position of the support blocks so they are directly under the reinforced sections of the hull

On the sled, coming up the ramp

The scariest part was dragging the boat out of the water on the sled, but it was much easier than I expected, and the whole process took less than two hours. There were a couple of surprises when we got the boat out, but I’ll talk about that in the next post.

On “the hard” and ready to get started with maintenance

We rented an apartment not far from the boat yard, so we have a place to stay and escape the incredibly hot and humid Malta weather while the guys are working on the boat.

Preparing for the ARC

/ Doug / 10 Comments

We haven’t been able to do much sailing during the winter, but we have been enjoying our time in Tunisia, and getting some projects done. I really like Tunisia, it’s a slower pace of life, and the people are friendly and helpful.

Things are starting to get exciting now as we begin our preparations for the 2018 ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) which we will be joining this year for our Atlantic Ocean crossing. A rally is a group of boats traveling together and following an organized route and itinerary. We were part of the Sail Indonesia rally a few years ago when we sailed from Darwin, Australia to Singapore, and it was a fantastic experience for us. We learned a lot, made lifelong friends, and had a great time sharing the experience with other sailors. So, given the choice of crossing the Atlantic on our own or with a rally, it was an easy decision to join the ARC.

The ARC leaves Las Palmas, Canary Islands on November 25th, and the crossing typically takes 15 – 20 days (depending on the weather) to travel the 2,680 nautical miles to Saint Lucia. Not only are we really looking forward to the passage, but we are also very happy that some friends and family will be joining us to help out. Robin’s brother Kirk is coming with us, and so are our long time friends Misti and Clive who are living in Australia. Gavin will be in University, so having some extra hands on board will be a nice help, and will give us a 6 person watch rotation!

Last week we received the ARC 2018 handbook, which is a lengthy read, and full of detailed information, instructions and tips on how to participate in, and get the most out of the ARC. The good news is that it takes a lot of the guess work out of the passage planning and safety preparations. The bad news is that although I tried to configure Wildling pretty comprehensively for ocean voyaging, we are not in compliance with many of the ARC requirements, and we would fail the inspections that are done prior to departure, so I have some work to do to get us ready!

None of the ARC requirements seem unreasonable, and some of them I knew we had to meet anyway, but still I was a bit surprised to see how many of the checks that we currently FAIL. The biggest issue is their requirement for two independent systems of navigation lights, which will require us to install a tri-color light at the top of the mast. I wish I had known that when we were building the boat!

WILDLING fails the ARC checklist 🙁

Here’s the list of checks that each boat must pass before being allowed to take part in the ARC.

[table id=1 /]

Our plans are to try and haul out in Malta in August so we can get the bottom repainted and service the saildrive legs. I should be able to get most of our failures addressed by then. We also need to get some rigging checks done, and fix an issue with our instruments before leaving for the Canary Islands.

I’ll post a lot more info about our experience with the ARC as we go along.

Back to Corsica and Instagram!

/ Doug / 5 Comments

Our new sails are rigged and final projects finished so we were finally able to leave port and do some sailing! I have been really looking forward to trying out all the new gear and modifications on a voyage with a variety of different conditions, but before I talk about sailing, I need to let you know that Robin has created a @sailwildling Instagram account where she is posting photos each day. You can see her latest photos in the sidebar of our website or subscribe to the @sailwildling feed to get her latest posts.

Robin’s brother, Kirk, and his wife Shelly and their daughter Saylor joined us for the first part of the trip, sailing with us as far as Cannes. We left Marseille and stopped off in Bandol, Porquerolles and St Tropez before arriving in Cannes. We had mostly light winds so we were using the Genoa upwind and the Code-D downwind with full mainsail. The North 3Di Genoa has become my favorite sail! It’s very easy to deploy and trim, and generates a lot of power.

It was great sailing with Kirk, as he is good sailor and loves it as much as I do, and I was really sad that they had to leave us in Cannes. We continued on, just the 4 of us, past Nice and Monaco and over to Imperia Italy. We had a lot of wind for this part of the trip, 25-28  knots on the nose, so we were close hauled and tacking back and forth the entire way with the staysail and two reefs in the mainsail. These were similar to the conditions that I had all the helm balance and steering issues with last year in Sardinia. The new staysail setup is MUCH better. No balance issues at all and the autopilot had no trouble steering us the whole way. I kept us as hard on the wind as possible but not so close that we lost too much speed. In these conditions at around 40 degrees apparent wind angle, we can keep our speed at 8 or 9 knots  and with the daggerboards down, we make very little leeway. Easy, fun sailing!

We stopped for the night in the port of Imperia Italy to get out of the still building easterly winds, and the next morning we decided that rather than trying to beat further east, we would turn south and head for Corsica a bit sooner than planned. This leg started out with wind at 25 knots and close hauled, but after a few hours the wind eased to 10-12 knots and shifted around to our port aft quarter. These are Wildling’s favorite conditions, and with full main and Genoa she pulls the apparent wind up to around 60 degrees and we skimmed along at 9-10 knots on smooth seas all the way over to the north west coast of Corsica. We covered the 100 nautical miles between Italy and Corsica in an easy day-sail, arriving just before sunset.

The weather forecast the next day was for SW winds at 25-30 knots and continuing the same for the next 5 days, so we decided to sail down the coast about 25 NM to the port of Calvi and wait there for the weather to settle down. Calvi has a mooring field which gets a bit crazy in strong winds, with many yachts having problems trying to pick up mooring buoys. There were a few near collisions as boats were blown off the mooring buoys before they could hook on. We had our fenders out more than once to try and protect ourselves from boats coming at us out of control! Pretty stressful! There are two guys in Zodiacs zooming around non-stop helping people get hooked up, and they also act as motorized fenders to keep boats from colliding.

Catamarans have a huge advantage when mooring in windy conditions like this, because you can pick up the mooring from the transom, and since the Zodiac boys were busy when we arrived, this is what we did. The way it works is to position the boat downwind of the mooring buoy with the back of the boat pointing at the buoy, next you reverse into the wind towards the buoy until it is at the transom. It’s really easy to do this and you can take your time and do it slowly. Have a crew member get a really long line ready, and as soon as the buoy is within reach thread the line through the mooring loop and pull the line until the mooring loop is in the center of the line. Now you can reverse back beside the buoy while your crew member walks the line up to the bow mooring cleat and ties both ends onto the cleat. Now you’re on the mooring, and you can take your time to thread the second mooring line through the buoy and over to the mooring cleat on the opposite bow. Use your engines to position the boat as your crew adjusts the length of the mooring lines to position the mooring buoy in the center of the bows.

After the wind died down we left Calvi and we’re now working our way south. We’ll do a series of day sails as we follow the coast down before sailing back over to Marseille.

Here’s the satellite tracker map of our trip so far

 

Return to France

/ Doug / Leave a comment

We had very light winds on our passage back to France, so we had to motor a fair bit. The sea was perfectly calm though, which made for a very relaxing passage. 

Arriving at La Ciotat earlier this morning.


We stopped in at Bandol this morning to get some diesel since we were getting pretty low, then we continued on to La Ciotat where we will stay the rest of the day today and will continue on to Marseille tomorrow. 

No wind forecast again tomorrow, so more motoring required, but we have to be back on Sunday before the Mistral arrives on Monday. We will try and stop for lunch at one of the calanques near Cassis on the way. 

Katy and Orlando missed out!

/ Doug / 1 Comment

It’s our last night in Corsica. Tomorrow morning we begin the voyage back to Marseille and soon we will return to life on land, which makes me sad.

Robin tells me that Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom were on a super yacht in Sardinia this month, and judging by the huge number of super yachts we saw while in Sardenia, it is certainly the trendy thing to do, but let me tell you, Sardinia has nothing on Corsica. Sardenia is OK, don’t get me wrong, but Corsica is WAY better. 

Here are some of the things we found in Corsica that we thought were better than Sardinia:

The huge variety of beautiful countryside, the excellent wine, the friendly people, the beer, the olives!!! (Just kidding, Sardinia has great olives too 🙂 The beautiful beaches, no mooring police! No hooligan boat drivers trying to run us over! The great food (Corsica belongs to France after all!)

We loved Corsica and will be coming back for sure!

Our anchorage last night at Sagane beach


Tonight’s anchorage at the base of the cliffs near Porto

Perfect sailing in Corsica

/ Doug / Leave a comment

We left Sardinia yesterday, and had two perfect days of sailing up the west coast of Corsica. Winds were 8-12 knots and we were close reaching a little under the true wind speed. 

Aside from the rolly sea between Sardinia and Corsica, the water was very calm. Ideal sailing conditions!

The southern coast of Corsica, the city of Bonifacio on the headland


Close reaching in 12 knots of breeze


We decided to spend our last few days in Corsica at Sargone beach, about halfway up the west coast of the island. The wind is forecast to start blowing 30+ knots in the northern part of the island this afternoon, so we will wait here until it calms down a bit before sailing back to the French mainland. 

Our anchorage in Sargone Corsica


As usual, while I was writing this post in our peaceful anchorage, some dude shows up and decides he has to anchor RIGHT NEXT to us, while there’s plenty of space all around.  This happens so often that Robin and have started placing bets on how close someone is going to get to us. 

The sand on the bottom must be much better right next to us!

Return from Tunisia

/ Doug / 6 Comments

Sheltering from the westerlies in NE Sardenia. We have plenty of company!


This photo is looking to the south of us in the anchorage


We left Tunisia on Friday morning, after making a donation to the border police’s drinking fund! We had a nice sail back to Sardenia with fair winds and smooth seas. We decided to stop for the night on Saturday after making it to the NE coast of Sardinia. Strong westerly winds 25-30 knots were forecast to arrive by midnight, and we decided we didn’t want to deal with those until morning. 

This morning was dead calm so we motored for a while until we rounded the cape and hit the westerlies. By 2pm we had gusts up to 35 knots, and since they were forecast to drop early the next morning, we decided to find shelter for the night (again) before heading across the straight between Sardinia and Corsica. 

And then the fun began!!!

We had a double reefed main and single reefed jib and we were scooting along at 10+ knots, then when I went to turn to starboard to tack, the boat would not come up into the wind. Damn! 

I tried everything I could think of to turn us, but the helm would not respond. I turned on the port engine, furled the jib and tightened the mainsheet to create some weather helm, but nothing worked. The 30 knots of pressure against us was too much. We were fast running out of room and we had to either tack or bear off before we hit the coast. 

The last thing to try was to drop the mainsail and use the engines to turn us. Since we were at 45 degrees to the wind, I had Robin put the traveler down to leeward and I rotated the mast. We could then drop the main and I was finally able to get turn us to starboard using the engines, but the steering was all messed up! I could turn just to port but not at all to starboard. 

I aimed us at the right hand side of the anchorage, which was jam packed with boats, so I could turn up to port and try and find a place to anchor. We found a spot inside the mooring field between two super yachts. As we moved into position, the mooring field police came up in their Zodiac to tell us we were not allowed to anchor here. I told them I had no choice because we have lost our rudder. I would need to anchor long enough to fix it and the we would move. 

After illegally anchoring, I worked on the rudder problem and found the rudder linkage had slipped on the rudder shaft, so full starboard helm was giving us a centered rudder! No wonder we had problems. I thing the rudder linkage was not tight enough, so I realigned everything and tightened it up REALLY well. With our steering restored we could relocate out of the super yacht moorings, which made the mooring police dudes very happy!

The winds should calm down tonight so we will be able to continue on to Corsica tomorrow. 

Africa!

/ Doug / 10 Comments

Approaching the North cost of Africa after what felt like a very long night


We arrived in Tunisia early this morning. It was a pretty uncomfortable sail across from Sardenia because we had wind at 15 knots off the port bow and we were close hauled the whole trip, punching into the now all too familiar short, steep waves of the Mediterranean Sea. I found that slowing us down to around 8.5 knots made the ride a bit more comfortable than bashing into the waves at high speed. This required a double reefed mainsail and single reefed jib. Wildling was perfect the whole trip!

There was a lot of boat traffic as we approached the African coast around midnight, and we had one scary incident where we were chased by a fishing boat during Gavin’s watch. I took the helm as the boat came alongside us and started shining his spotlight on us. I changed course multiple times and he kept turning with me. Then I jibed and bore off quickly in the opposite direction and he eventually broke off and went back to whatever he was doing. It was pretty scary and made us realize how vulnerable we are, just a family of four people on a sailboat!

Robin and I didn’t get any sleep after that, as we were dodging around fishing trawlers and tankers all night, but we had no other issues. It was a relief to see the sun rise as we entered the Gulf of Tunis with no other boats around and a short 15 mile sail over to the Gammarth Marina. 

At the dock, Port Marina Gammarth, Tunisia


The marina is essentially brand new and the people here are very friendly. It’s also a relief to be able to speak French again after all our language struggles in Italy! It’s hot and humid here, so everyone on board was happy to plug into the shore power and fire up the air conditioning. The first time we’ve needed to run it this year!

We cleared into the country of Tunisia with the help of the border police and customs officials who both have offices at the marina. The process was quick and easy, with just a small “tax” payment required to complete the affair. 

Tomorrow we have arranged for a guide and driver to take us into the capital city of Tunis.

Cala Caterina, SE Sardinia

/ Doug / 1 Comment


We are at the south eastern tip of Sardinia tonight after a perfect 55nm day sail. We motored for about an hour this morning until the winds reached 6 knots, and then we sailed the rest of the day in SE winds at 6-7 knots and calm seas. We had the main and code-0 up and were doing about half a knot under true wind speed at 38-40 AWA. A very relaxing day!

We leave tomorrow morning for Gammarth Tunisia, which is just north of the city of Tunis. It’s about 150 nautical miles and winds will be light and coming from the direction we’re headed so it might be a slow journey. We’re a bit nervous about visiting Tunisia given the recent strife, but other folks we have talked with who have been there recently say it is really nice, and they had no problems. It will be amazing to sail to the north coast of the continent of Africa!