„Sometimes you clean up your memories. Sweep away the unnecessary, burn the gloomy, dust off the pleasant and polish the joyful experiences of your past.“
I don´t want to write how it was for 7 years (think it isn´t interesting and I want you to read it). How was the whole preparing before sailing and leaving England. When Ota became electrician, plumber, carpenter, painter … in two words „Mr Perfect“and of course even me I tried to help…housewife, cook, baker, pastry-cook. And beware of the teak deck – that´s my job to paint the teak. My husband said I´m like taking a drugs, yes, yes I love the smell of the teak oil 😜.
And also don´t want to write about the unpleasant and for me frightening experiences (when we speak about these so I usually tell to people after Ota telling … „so you heard Ota´s version and now it´s time for me, for my telling, how it really was“ 🧐) for example about thunderstorm with very strong wind (we could nearly touch the clouds), this thunderstorm came after 5 days nonstop sailing from England to Spain. The thunderstorm lasted 9 hours and finished exactly when we anchored on the Spanish coast. We anchored almost one hour, because was dark and heavy rain. So I was whole anchored time in the front on the anchor, completely wet, including underwear. And everything stopped when I shouted „holding, we have out 50 metres of chain and the anchor is holding.“ By the way my captain and navigator was happy because we anchored only 7 nautical miles from A Coruňa which was our original target.
Or during the same voyage Ota had small seasickness and took 2 pills even though I told him only one is enough (I read it in the leafleft). So he was 12 hours „out of order“ and how else but very funny.
Another…we anchored by the Cartagena coast and coast guard came to visit us. They arrived with the small but fast boat and asked us „Can we board?“. They aimed to us with the submachine guns and we answered „of course, yeeeees, come in😬.“
We have a lot of experiences with coast guard in Greece. Of course funny, but funny only when we remember them. Because when we are there by the police, we have to be very patient. We have to use that everything will be ok but there is enough time for everything. This is not a problem for us.
All this and more, we learned a lot of these situations, we took the good out of fit.
And now few sentences about funny experiences, these all together with the bad experiences belong to our life and we remember them all equally.
„Experience is the teacher of all things.“
Because I said to myself, that my posts won´t be long, so I´ll divide the experiences to the more posts. One of them will be about the experiences that have become only ourselves and the others about those who happened to us with our friends.
Let´s go to the private ones, which we haven´t talked about them often 🤫but why not, if you have fun I´ll be more than happy.
First one for example…I do things exatly how my captain says…we anchored in the cove by Nidri town on the Lefkada island. Ota decided to change anchor light up the mast. Which is approximately 23 m from the deck. I helped him up with the winch and the rope and waited down for his signal that he wants to go down. (The way down is also my „favorite“ activity. Everytime when I do it I let him hang 0,5 m above deck because I think it´s good distance for him. But it´s a big mistake he is dancing like a ballerine on the tiptoe with the rope.) So he is up me down and suddenly I see as something small falls down into the water. The same time I heard Ota shouting to me „fast fast jump into the water for the seal, we need it“ ok why not I jumped directly from the ship to the water, even in my sunglasses 😎. I fished out the seal and swam back to the boat, but do you know what Ota forgot to say to me…give the stairs to the water to can go back to the boat. Come on…Ota was up hugged the mast me down in the water and around us very fast small motorboats sailed and everytime when they passed us Ota was swinging up from one side to the other. Happy end, when I had enough strenght I got back to the ship through the tender and everything was perfect. Lesson for Ota… „you have to tell me everything as in the manual, even small details.“ By the way the seal was broken and Ota made another one from the lid of a plastic bowl second day😁.
Another but not the last story. We were still in England, after complete boat cleaning, we wanted to clean and to paint the teak deck. We scrubbed the deck with the brush for 3 days. We didn´t even feel our hands in the evening, for me was very painfull. Ota put cold tiles on my hands whole nigt. However the deck was cleaned perfect and we could paint the deck with the teak oil. Everything was ready deck looked very nice and we were satisfied. Good dinner and one or two glasses of wine were our reward. We didn´t even mind that was heavy rain. The deck was ready, protected so why not raining. However we forgot to check outlets from the deck. These drains help to remove water out from the deck to the sea. Well, when we arrived from the dinner, with very good mood we saw the disaster. Water found the way inside the boat directly to the bedroom. So carpets were completely wet and water was in the salon too. I remember, it was very difficult moment for me. I was sitting on the sofa with my head in my hands and said to myself…“why, why I´m here, why I didn´t stay in the house with the heating.“ We turned on the diesel and electric heating, everything wet we put up in the cockpit and second day sun helped us. Again completely inside cleaning. Lesson for us…to check outlets everytime even it isn´t raining, nearly every day.
And last another memory…we sailed around the Portuguese coast. We didn´t have enough time, so it was quite stressful and in a hurry. We everytime sailed for 24 hours than sleeping and again 24 hours sailing. We sailed without wind, sea calm like a mirror, it was nearly midnight and it was cold. We dressed to the yachting clothes. Not even 5 minutes after changing clothes there was a wave, huge wall, she rolled over us with full force and after her nothing, back to the normal, sea calm like a mirror, peace. I was completely wet, again including underwear, of course Ota was also completely wet. And what happened else…the water went through the cockpit inside the boat to the salon.
Ota said by the way … „so it was drifting wave.“ I just shook my head and couldn´t believe and I quickly brought the pump handle and we started to pump and after that started to pump also automatic handle, that was really help for us. We anchored as soon as we could, we turned on the heating and dried , dried and dried. We have quite a lot of experience in this 😊
„Never regret. If it's good, it's wonderful. If it's bad, it's experience.”
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