Jill started sailing at the age of three weeks and spent her formative years messing about in racing dinghies in Chichester Harbour. She made her first blue-water passage at the age of 18 but it was to be a further ten years before she was shanghaied by the skipper and started her career as an ocean-going hobo.
Jill has written a handful of books and has many more in the pipeline, but her true vocation is as an artist.
Much as we enjoy gawping at the super-yachts and at the Big Stuff going about its daily business on the other side of the port, for us the best thing about Las Palmas is the other cruising folk. As I said at the outset of the previous article, hundreds of yachts pass through the port each year and amongst this little lot there are bound to be friends, old or new. Usually it is the boats themselves which attract our…
You meet some nice people cruising. Nice people, and interesting boats. A few months ago we happened upon a multi-national team of English, Indonesian, and South African nationals who were sailing a Phoenician ship around Africa. And then we ran into a bunch of really crazy guys who were just about to set off across the ocean on a plastic raft. One of the best places to see a wide variety of interesting boats is Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. The…
Crew available. Hi there! My name is Ninja. I’m 23 years old and I want to sail to the Caribbean. I’ve already walked across Europe! I’m a vegetarian. Expert juggler. No sailing experience yet, but I’m very enthusiastic. Willing to work my passage. So read the advert on the notice board in Las Palmas. It was one of about 30 similar ads – some nicely printed on an A4 page; some scrawled in biro on a scrap of paper –…
The sun was sinking towards the sea. The crew were scattered about the cockpit enjoying a glass of wine. The day had been gorgeous; although perhaps not quite so gorgeous as the ones which preceded it, because the anchorage had been beset by an unusually big and very annoying swell. By evening time, however, we had all grown accustomed to the rolling, and we were paying scant attention to anything except the golden light on the orange-brown cliffs and the ruby nectar…
What Can We Do To Help? (Martha Hezemans and the Sea Couriers of Las Palmas) We first met Martha at a pop concert. To be more exact, she was outside the concert, sitting on the grass. Small and skinny, the woman was hardly the sort who naturally attracts attention; but, right now, she was determined to do so. With one hand pressed against her throat she greeted us as loudly as she could – yet all we heard was a…
A window in the weather enabled the Mollymawks to pop across to La Gomera for Christmas, and here we met up with some other seafarers – or would-be seafarers – with a rather unusual vessel. The frail old man sitting on the quayside in La Gomera does not look like an adventurer. As we approach he waves a crutch in greeting, and I think to myself, “He looks just like any other aged old grand-pa. He might be on day…
If we had happened to bump into Phoenicia while she was on the high seas then I would probably have put it down to too much red wine. Not that we drink a lot of that sort of thing on passage, but the only other explanation must surely be that we had travelled through a time warp. As it is, however, we were safely tucked up in the harbour of Lajes, in the Azores, when Phoenicia rocked up. And since…
His namesake dreamt of ruling the world, but never even glimpsed the lands on the far side of the Western Ocean. Our own Caesar has travelled to countries that the old Roman despot could never have even imagined, but far from becoming a megalomaniac he just wants to do his bit to help. In the summer of 2011 he wants to spend time in Central America, working with Raleigh International. Raleigh is a charity which combines the youth-development aims of…
Just how hard is it to learn to read? By far the most frequent question that cruising families are ever asked is, “What do you do about the children’s schooling?” And then comes the inevitable second one: “How did you teach them to read?” This is a thing that we get asked both my other families planning to cast off their mooring lines, and also by land-based folks whose experience of statutory education is less than perfect. It seems that…
As his wife, Catalina would tell you, Marius Albu is a very special man. Born and bred in the mountains of Romania, his burning ambition was to escape from the oppressive regime which ruled his country and sail around the world. “We all thought that it was a great joke,” says Catalina. Besides the fact that he would never be given permission to leave the country, he had no boat. “And even supposing that he managed to build a boat,…