Good morning this is how I treat my students every morning. (laughter)
I'm at the helm today, rugged up nice and warm, there's no wind. You gotta show off your gloves.
We're motor sailing, yeah showing off my new gloves, my helmsman gloves.
They're ideal, even in this hot weather.
How we doing? Are we well? We're just sailing away here from North Africa,
from Ceuta to over there, what's that called? La Duquesa.
And we hear the showers are amazing there.
Just reading, just reading good old Jack Kerouac yeah. It was a mixed bag of
weather on the final five days out on the water. There was a whole day of no
wind and then on another day we got caught out in force eight with the wind
gusting to 39 knots. That was exciting. Mother nature lets you know who's boss.
This is Monday morning and the final day of our courses here in Gibraltar, today
we're going to learn all about diesel engine maintenance and yesterday we got
the great news that we'd passed both our theory and practical day skipper courses.
So both Aannsha and I are now fully licensed day skippers by RYA standards,
which is pretty good and well known and respected around the world. This course
today should take all of the day, then we're staying one more night on the boat
thanks to the owners of Rock Sailing in Gibraltar and then we've got our seven
to eight hour drive back up to Javea where the next step in this this journey
takes place. Not quite sure what that is yet, I'm sure that somewhere along
the line it'll involve buying a boat.
Trying to find the right one is proving difficult still. I think I've seen one
online that's in France, so maybe a trip to France is due or maybe a trip to Greece,
maybe a trip to Turkey or even Croatia. We don't know, but we will be getting
a boat soon because we want to keep practicing the skills we've just learned
over the last 17 days. The last 17 days have taken us outside of our comfort
zone, it's been challenging, but fun. With the help of everyone at Rock Sailing
Gibraltar, in particular Peter, Carrie and Mareika, we now have our day skipper
licenses, our VHF radio licenses and we passed our competent crew, marine first-aid
and diesel engine maintenance courses. Now we've got to drive back to Javea in
Spain and we've got to start sniffing out a yacht to buy.
All right let's get this stuff in there.
Gibraltar has a very small land area and pretty much about, I don't know, a fifth
of it is taken up by the airport and the runway and this is how close we are to
the runway.
Next time on Sailing A B Sea we have a yacht hauled out for survey and we take it
for a test sail... Could this be the one?