Welcome Aboard! •
Welkom Aan Boord! •
¡Bienvenido Abordo!
Este articulo también está disponible en español: Buenos motivos para llevar un kayak a bordo. If it weren’t for our new kayak, the skipper may have become the first man to cross the River Plate in a rubber dinghy. Not that he was aiming to make it into the record books. All he was doing was rowing from the mothership to the shore, some 50 yards away to windward. Or rather, he would have been rowing, but having leapt aboard…
Over the course of the past four years we’ve had a lot of correspondence deriving from our first article about hitching a ride across the Atlantic. Most of the would-be ocean travellers who read it accept that it was written tongue in cheek; and most also recognise that, besides taking the piss, it also offers sound advice. On the other hand, a few hitch-hikers have taken the whole thing to heart – perhaps they were so upset by the first…
One hundred and fifty miles from here, on the far side of a forest, 40,000 people are cheering and jeering at 22 others whose job it is to run after a ball. Further still to the north, much the same sort of scene is taking place in a brand new stadium which stands alongside a crowded favela; and there’s another game getting underway to the south, or so we’ve been told. No doubt the widescreen tellies in the bars in…
“Listen!” says Emmanuel. “Do you hear that?” The wind, hurrying across the marshes beneath the wide open sky, whispers gently in the reeds on either side of the road, and somewhere in the distance a buzzard is mewing. Smaller birds twitter. But Emmanuel isn’t talking about these soft sounds. We’ve spent the past half hour driving north along the dirty track which passes for a state highway, and after every half mile he’s been getting out, climbing onto the roof…
Most yotties don’t sail in the winter. If they’re the sort who have headed off over the horizon they arrive in the tropics and they stay there, travelling like plankton on the kindly winds and currents; and if they’re the kind who are content to cruise their local, European or North American coastline then, come the first frost, they hang up their oilskins and head for the pub. Indeed, most English yotties flee the water long before the first frost.…
For the past six months we’ve been hanging out on the Rio de la Plata, or River Plate, exploring the estuary and – more importantly – getting the boat ready to go south. There’s a lot of work involved in preparing to face the Southern Ocean. 18 years ago when we went south with our previous boat we were capsized in storm force winds and the vessel began to fall apart. The hatches were torn off, so that the waves…
Last December we got a message for our friend Morgan, a born-and-bred cruising yotty who currently earns his living sailing other people’s boats. Morgan told us that he and his girlfriend, Cheryl, were passing through Buenos Aires on their way south to the Falklands. He knew that we were in the area, and he wondered if I would like to join them for this voyage. Last time I visited the islands I was four years old, and we arrived by…
It’s been over a month since we posted our article about plastic in the sea and issued the plastic free challenge, and during this time nobody has got in touch to ask how it’s going – but we’re going to tell you anyway! During this plastic-free month we have had several people contact us to say that there’s no hope for humanity – or words to that effect. One friend told us that if you let such things as pollution,…
When we launched Mollymawk we had the good fortune to come across a set of second-hand sails which pretty much fitted the boat. They had never been out of the bag - they came from a home-built boat which was sold on before she was launched - and they were immaculate. But that was thirteen years ago, and sails, hard-used in the tropical sun, don’t last for more than ten years at best. When the chore of mending them on…
Everybody’s heard about the Pacific garbage patch. It’s the size of Texas and it’s so dense that you could build a house atop the debris. Last week I read an account by someone who sailed past the floating island and who claims to have faced a constant battering from all the rubbish hitting the hull. “The debris isn’t just on the surface,” he says, “it’s all the way down. And it’s all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the…