Aboard E. GALOIS,

14°25'N, 53°59'W,

December 25, 1995

This has been another eventful year where, in contrast to last year, we covered a considerable amount of ground. As of now 6500 nautical miles, with 300 more to go to reach Barbados. And now for the details. We got back to Antalya, Turkey, from the USA at the end of March. Were painted the bottom of the boat and E GALOIS was back in the water a week later then we turned our attention to visiting some of the archaeological sites around Antalya. Termessos, Aspendos, Perge, Selge, all with fabulous roman theaters, gymnasiums, temples, hundreds of sarcophagi among the trees and bushes. A far cry from the well combed and heavily visited west European sites! In mid April we rented a car for a five days trip to Capadoccia 500 km inland with its troglodyte habitations and 10 stories deep underground cities. An unforgettable voyage to a strange world!

We left the Antalya marina on April 27th and revisited some of the very nice cruising grounds we had enjoyed before: Kekova Roads, Kastelorizo, Fethiye, etc... We left Turkey for the Greek island of Simi and found out that the new Greek policy of charging exorbitant prices for visiting cruisers was in effect. We paid the equivalent of $21 to be bow to at the quay on our own anchor,without any facility. The previous year the cost would have been the equivalent of a few dollars.We then resolved, as did many other cruisers who had previously been to Greece, to avoid harbors and to rapidly get out of Greek waters. The crossing of the Aegean Sea was uneventful, but almost every day we were given the opportunity to set foot on a different and little known island and far from the tourist beaten path. There we had our first engine problem: it stopped as we were beating with 30 to 35 knots of wind toward the little island of Iraklia. We had to tack up a narrow channel in order to reach a crowded anchorage. Some of the cruisers there thought we were doing it for fun. The reason for the engine failure was a plugged up primary fuel filter. The engine was running on the original filter installed 4 years before!!. From Milos we called Athens and the next day we had a new fuel filter flown in. The most expensive filter we will ever get. Having already gone through the Corinth Canal in 1993, we decided to round the tip of the Peloponnesus on the return trip. We went up to Kalamata and visited by bus the ruins of the medieval city of Mistra with several restored churches and monasteries, with its castle at the top of the hill. As we exited Messinia Bay a front came through and we sought refuge in the little island of Sapienza. We anchored next to a fish farm in a completely protected cove. Two Egyptians who were working the fish farm came over and gave us some fish. We spent two days there before proceeding to Methoni at the South West end of the Peloponnesus. An old strategic place defended by its impressing crusader, and later Turkish, castle. We then made an overnight sail North to Zakynthos Island from where we left Greece for Sicily on May 31st.

We arrived at Naxos at 6 AM on the 3rd of June. Friends arrived from France a few days later to spend 2 weeks with us, one in Sicily where we especially enjoyed Taormina and Castel Mola, from where we had a magnificent view of the coast and of Etna, and Syracuse, a town we would return to anytime! The second week in Malta. We were impressed by the extensive fortifications of Valetta and captivated by the tomb stones of the Knights of Malta that cover the floor of St John Cathedral. On June 27th we cleared out from Malta at the little Island of Gozo from where we sailed to Kelibia on the Eastern coast of Tunisia. It is a very interesting fishing harbor full of activity, dozens of large boats bringing the night catch to be auctioned off on the pier. After two days we sailed up to Sidi Bou Said. The old town above the harbor was interesting, but the marina was crowded and not convenient to visit Tunis. We therefore moved to the Yacht Club in La Goulette, a little dilapidated but the people were very nice. In Tunis what we enjoyed most was the Bardo Museum, it contains the most incredible collection of Mosaics, possibly the best in the world. We spent two days walking among the ruins of Carthagena. Francis almost lost his wallet to a pickpocket in the train back from Tunis. July the 7th we sailed to Bizerte on the North coast where we stayed only two days before crossing to the little island of San Piedro South West of Sardegna. We had a strong head wind and arrived the next morning in the harbor of Carlo Forte. Always such a nice feeling to come back to Italy! Kids playing on the wide tiled sidewalks,concerts in the evening and well stocked supermarkets. On the 17th we left for the Baleares, a 200miles sail, and anchored two days later in Cala Teulera, just North of the entrance to Mahon Bay on Minorca. There we found many boats that had wintered with us in Antalya or that we had met in previous years in the Med. Most of us were on our way to the Caribbean Islands. We called American Express in Las Palmas de Mallorca, on the next island, and found out that our mail had arrived. Since we wanted to spend a few days on Minorca we asked them to forward it to their Mahon office. They agreed but to make a long story short it only arrived there three weeks later as we were leaving the Baleares for mainland Spain. We told them to forward it to Gibraltar and hoped for the best. We enjoyed very much the nice anchorages in the Baleares. We stayed only on the less touristic North coasts of the Islands. We left the Baleares on August 15th. The wild touristic development on the South Coast of Spain must be seen to believe it. We stopped at Narayra, Alicante, Torrevieja, then onto Adra and Motril. From there we took a bus to visit Grenada. Absolute madness to visit the Alhambra in August !! We did not stay long in mainland Spain! Nine days after leaving the Baleares we rounded the rock of Gibraltar. What an experience to finally be in Gibraltar (and, by the way, our mail was waiting for us). We stayed most of the time at Sheppard's. We enjoyed very much Gibraltar, criss-crossing the town, and crossing the airfield to Spain, on our bicycles. Claire had her bicycle almost stolen: she went into a store and when she came out saw a man walking away with it. We did some provisioning for the crossing and some maintenance on the boat. We met many old friends and made new ones, in particular Hal and Margaret Roth, well known authors of sailing books, who were on their way to Turkey. We left for the Madeira Islands on September 11th.

After sailing 670 miles in fairly strong winds we arrived at night and anchored off the harbor of Porto Santo. We moved in the well protected harbor the next day. Then we could not leave! it was too nice and fun to explore this little island by bike and by foot. Finally we sailed to Madeira, a short hop of 35 nautical miles, on the 29th and anchored in front of the harbor in Funchal. We toured the Island by bus, visited the famous Botanical Garden and hiked on trails along the many irrigation canals (levadas) on the sides of deep valleys. For us and many cruisers these walks along the levadas was the main attraction of this clean and well managed island. We left Funchal for the small island of Graciosa in the Canaries on October 4th. The anchorage in Graciosa was superb and the little village worthy of the 'Far West'. After 10 days we left for Arrecife on Lanzarote. We had a very well protected anchorage in Porto Naos. We enjoyed the town and, as we did for every large island of the Canaries we visited, we rented a car to explore the island. Fascinating island! the Volcano National Park, the works of Cesar Manrique, in particular his house. The next island, Fuerteventura, has just one dense touristic zone in the South otherwise some nice clean villages not yet developed as tourist attractions but they are working at it. Then we crossed over to Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. After a few days at anchor we moved to the Yacht Club pontoon. This was much more convenient since two sets of friends came to visit us, one from Oak Ridge and the other from Paris, a nice interlude in our routine even though Gran Canaria is not the best of the Canaries. The ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) left on schedule on November 19th, even though it was blowing over 35 knots !! There were three collisions with considerable damage to some of the boats. At the end of November we sailed over to Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The view from the top of the Teide volcano, the highest mountain of Spain at 3718 m, was fantastic and it was freezing up there.

On December 2nd we left Santa Cruz de Tenerife for Barbados. We had quite a lot of wind at the beginning of this crossing. We averaged over 127 nautical miles per day in the first 12 days, doing 139 and 145 nautical miles the first two days. As had been the case with many other boats who left before and after us there were some failures at the beginning of the trip. The first night, three hours before daylight, our wind vane broke down. The axis of one of the pulleys that lead the steering lines to the tiller had somehow gone, that pulley had dropped into a tube and the line had chaffed through. We were very lucky to have on board a kit of spare parts for the wind vane, in which there was an extra pulley. The job of repairing the wind vane took most of the morning, with Claire at the helm and Francis hanging precariously from the stern. The second morning it was the turn of the whisker pole to break. This came as a shock since we still had 2400 nautical miles of what were supposed to be downwind sailing. It also took most of the morning to fix that and we had a two feet shorter whisker pole for the remainder of the crossing. This year the trade winds were not there. Fortunately a high pressure ridge was at around 25 degrees of latitude and by staying close to it we got some easterly winds. Southbound II Herb did the routing for us from Burlington, Ontario. His advice matched pretty closely what we were observing from the weatherfaxes. But he seemed to have had access to more long range data than we had. After 12 days of good sailing the high pressure ridge weakened and moved South. As a result we had very little wind for a week. We had daily runs of 47 and 49 nautical miles! This lack of wind allowed us to go swimming, tied to the boat with a line. We did catch some fishes. Very quickly at the beginning. At first they were all pompano dolphins (mahi mahis) but then we got a nice mackerel and some skipjack tunas. The smallest pompano dolphin was 20 inches, but we did get a 41 inches one that weighted more than 20 lbs, the limit of our scale. That big one was good for six meals. As we got closer to the Caribbean islands the fishing was not so easy, we trolled for a complete day without a catch and the next morning a big one got away before we could get him on board. We kept in touch with a lot of boats doing the crossing, and on both sides of the Atlantic on a 4417 kHz single side band radio net, mornings and evenings. We were also in daily contact with Bill O'Kain, a radio ham in Oak Ridge, as we had been during two previous Atlantic crossings on INDIAN SUMMER. Unfortunately the radio waves propagation at 15 meters was so bad that Trudy's Net from Barbados was practically closed down during our crossing.