Welcome Aboard! •
Welkom Aan Boord! •
¡Bienvenido Abordo!
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…
(with a few additional remarks by the editor-in-chief) It was early afternoon and we were in Flores, just nearing the end of one of the scenic walks for which the Azores are famous. We had started that morning, leaving Mollymawk anchored in the bay behind us, and we had now been walking, at a leisurely pace, for most of the day – along a road, up a track, along a footpath, and past a lake which had eleven waterfalls pouring…
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…
“I wish I could introduce you to David Wingate,” said Gill. “He’s our local naturalist, and he’d love to answer all of these questions that you keep asking.” We were standing on the wooden platform which surrounds Gill and John’s house on their little islet in Bermuda, looking down towards a round black hole bored into the rock below. Inside that hole, I knew, was a plump, one week old tropic bird chick. But that was all I knew. I…
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…
With additional text, in italics, by Jill Once again we are in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for November. This is the island’s busiest month. WOMAD, a free four-day world-music festival, starts on November the 11th and people from all over the Canary Islands get on the ferries and come to see it. The anchorage fills up with almost 60 boats, instead the usual two or three. But most of the yachtsmen have not actually come to listen to the…
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…