Last week I hosted a mini-rendezvous at the Essex Yacht Club, one of many events that I have held over the years. This time, though, I tried something new. I used the “member maps” of both the Salty Dawg Sailing Association and the Ocean Cruising Club to identify boats and members within a reasonable distance of Essex who might be interested in joining us.
Sixteen sailors showed up, with less than two weeks’ notice.
It was a simple evening. Drinks in the bar, dinner, and lots of conversation.
Brenda and I split up so we could make sure everyone felt included, and by the time we left, it felt like we’d accomplished something by bringing like minded cruisers together in an informal and manageable way.
The ability to look at a map, see where our people/boats are and then reach out to them in real time was a new way, to me, for bringing folks together. A modern approach similar to what we used to do in an anchorage, moving from boat to boat to invite folks to get together. And it got me thinking about community.
Or, perhaps more accurately, about what happens when you move to a new neighborhood.
The New Neighborhood
In some ways, moving from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean has been like moving to a new neighborhood.
The houses and towns are older. Much older. The scenery is spectacular. Every town seems to have its own castle, fortress or church that has been standing for hundreds, often thousands, of years.
But we don’t know the neighbors yet.
That’s something I hadn’t fully appreciated when we decided to spend several years cruising in the Mediterranean.
For a decade, the Caribbean was our winter home. We didn’t have a house there, of course, but we did have a home base, Pandora, and we had our people.
When Brenda and I first started cruising, even if it was only for weekends, I can remember how disconnected we felt when we left the dock. We’d go away for a few days and suddenly we were out of touch.
Today, of course, that’s almost unimaginable.
We’re living in an always-connected world. Some people actually like the idea of disappearing for a while, of checking out and not being seen or heard from.
That’s not for everyone but I am definitely not one of those people.
I like to say, only slightly jokingly, that I don’t want to be alone except when I’m in the bathroom — and even then, that assumes it doesn’t take too long.
Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but not by much.
For the last week, Brenda has been away at a weaving workshop in Vermont. For the first few days she had little cell coverage and even less Wi-Fi. I’ll admit that I struggled with the “where’s Brenda?” thing. Being cut off from her, even for a day, wasn’t much fun.
And that got me thinking about how much our idea of being “out of touch” has changed.
I’ve covered something like 30,000 ocean miles over the years, and until fairly recently, going offshore really did mean being disconnected. Sure, with my Single Sideband and limited email capability, I was SORT OF able to stay in touch. Now, with Starlink, that’s largely a thing of the past.
Being able to pick up the phone, send a message or get in the dinghy and go see someone, so much a part of our life for more than a decade was a treat.
It’s also something I need, probably more than most.
Our People
That’s really what the Salty Dawgs gave us.
For ten years of cruising in the Caribbean, a huge part of our experience was being part of that community.
There were sundowners and shared meals as the sun dropped below the horizon.
Cruiser events that I hosted at the Essex Yacht Club over the years.
Hanging out on the docks with close friends in St Lucia, during Covid when there was nowhere to go, always being sure to be upwind from others.
We flew various club burgees so other cruisers would know that we were “one of them.”
There were rendezvous with fellow cruisers, too numerous to count, including more than one particularly memorable birthday celebration. In particular, Brenda’s on our very first run south to the Bahamas, our first year in a “real” community of sailors.
There were celebrations when we arrived in Antigua after an ocean passage. I made that round trip eight times, I think, so there was always something to celebrate — sometimes more than others.
The Tot club, yet another community, that meets daily in Antigua, to share a dram of rum and toast the King.
There were island tours with friends. Someone would say, “Hey, want to rent a car tomorrow?” and somehow, an hour later, we’d have a plan.
And, of course, family visits along the way.
None of this was particularly difficult to arrange. Well, family visits can be tough to get on the calendar, but cruisers are good at finding each other. Put a few boats in the same harbor, fly the same burgee or recognize a familiar name and before long, you’ve got a group going somewhere for dinner.
That’s what I realized while looking at those member maps for the Essex rendezvous, that it was like looking at boats in anchorage, a community that I could invite for a visit, just like the old days.
The technology has changed, but the basic idea hasn’t.
The maps simply make it easier to find our people.
Sixteen People and a Dinner
The rendezvous was almost ridiculously easy to organize.
I looked at the maps, found members who were close enough to Essex, sent out an invitation and waited to see what happened.
Sixteen sailors showed up.
We had drinks in the bar, dinner and a great evening together. At the end, we all posed for a photo.
Bruce, the guy on the left in the photo and an OCC member, took the other photo of the clubhouse as he headed back to his boat.
It’s a great shot.
Bruce took this photo of the club as he made his way back to his boat.
What particularly struck me was how quickly a group of people could come together simply because someone made the effort to ask.
And it made me think about what we’ve given up by moving to the Mediterranean.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the Med.
It’s pretty awesome to sail into a place where every town seems to have its own castle or fortress and where “old” often means a thousand years.
We’ve seen places and experienced things that would have been difficult to imagine when we were cruising the Caribbean.
But we don’t yet have a community there.
We have met some wonderful people, of course. We’ve made a few friends along the way. But we don’t have ten years of accumulated relationships, familiar boats, shared history and the simple knowledge that if we show up most anywhere, we’ll probably know someone.
We’re the new kids on the block.
And it turns out that moving to a new neighborhood is hard.
My People
Maybe that’s why I’ve found myself thinking more about this blog and how it fits into my community.
For years, writing about our cruising has been a way of sharing what we’re doing with people who aren’t necessarily sitting in the cockpit with us. It has been a way of keeping in touch.
In a sense, this has become another part of my community as I am able to have a conversation, mostly one way, I’ll admit, but I do hear back with comments regularly and it is nice to know that there is “someone out there” paying attention.
Recently, for my 71st birthday — how did I get that old? — Rob and Chris, along with Brenda, gave me a very fancy drone.
I plan to put it to use and hopefully “up my game” a bit by adding short videos to these pages.
I can’t say that I relish the additional complexity. I’m already discovering that there is a lot more to making a video than simply pushing a button and watching a drone fly around.
But I’m going to give it a try.
And, of course, I expect to call on ChatGPT to help with the editing so that this new hobby doesn’t take too much time away from the thing I actually enjoy: writing.
Because I suppose that’s really what I’m getting at here.
I don’t just write this blog to document where we’ve been.
I write it because I like sharing the experience.
And, after all these years, sharing the experience has always been a big part of what community is.
So, as part of my community, please say something so I know you’re out there.
A comment would be nice.
Better yet, write to me at bob@sailpandora.com so I know that SOMEONE is listening as moving to a new neighborhood is hard.
When I left Pandora in Almerimar last winter, I had a long list of things that needed to be addressed. I found someone who said he would handle them and, after lots of back and forth, I headed home feeling reasonably confident that things were under control.
They weren’t.
When I returned, quite a bit of the work remained undone.
I thought I had learned my lesson.
So, when it came time to decide where to leave Pandora for the summer, I spent considerably more time thinking about how I was going to manage the work from thousands of miles away. I made copious notes in a voluminous Word document, took photographs, annotated them with arrows and Post-its and tried to make everything as clear as possible.
This time, I was going to be organized.
What could possibly go wrong?
Choosing Bosa
We chose Bosa for fairly straightforward reasons. The marina was reasonably priced, no simple feat in Sardinia when I needed to leave Pandora there during high season. The location worked well for our plans, too, as Bosa is a beautiful medieval city.
And Nautical Pinna had been responsive and seemed capable, even if they were really the only game in town.
I knew going in that there was a language issue. As far as I could tell, only one person in the yard spoke English. But I figured that between WhatsApp, Google Translate and my carefully prepared instructions, we could make it work.
Once we arrived, I met the people at the yard and saw some very large yachts, upwards of 90 feet, that appeared to be receiving fairly sophisticated work. That was reassuring.
So, Pandora was hauled and I got her ready for three months of storage, and repairs…
I wrote up the long document detailing everything I wanted done, included photographs and annotations, and sent it off. They translated it into Italian.
And then…
Radio silence.
For nearly two months.
There were occasional exchanges, but very little information about what was actually happening. I followed up regularly, but as the weeks passed I became increasingly uneasy.
By late July, with only about a month remaining before I was due back in Sardinia, I finally sent a fairly direct message: I needed firm plans and at least some estimates within three days, or I was going to have to make other arrangements.
That got a response.
But not exactly the detailed work plan I had been hoping for. It was more along the lines of, “We hear you and will be in touch.” I wasn’t even sure if it was an answer or a brushoff.
So, what to do?
Plan B: Do It Yourself
The problem was that there really wasn’t another yard nearby that I could simply move Pandora to. And, besides, I was in the US and Pandora was in Italy. Bosa is a wonderful little place, but it isn’t exactly a major center for marine services.
That left me with the same solution that has served me so many times over the years:
Do it myself.
Fortunately, after more than a decade of cruising, I am reasonably handy.
Or, as I prefer to describe it, I have long understood what is not news to serious cruisers: this lifestyle is all about fixing boats, mostly yourself, in exotic places.
When I booked space in Bosa, I didn’t know what would be needed. But as we got closer to leaving for the US in June, the list of “to-dos” grew by the week.
The 70-Pound Suitcase
The biggest job is replacing Pandora’s inverter/charger, which had been giving me trouble even before I had her hauled in Spain last winter and simply wasn’t addressed.
It is a substantial piece of equipment and is buried behind a considerable amount of cabinetry. To get to it, I’ll have to take much of the cabinetry apart.
I could have tried to source one in Europe. But given the differences between American and European electrical systems, the need to configure it correctly for Pandora’s lithium batteries, and the fact that I would be relying on someone else to get all of that right, I decided that this was one job where I wanted complete control.
So I bought one here in the United States and will bring it with me, all 65 pounds of it.
Actually, by the time it was packed, it was closer to 70 pounds.
The box, when it arrived at our home, even had a label that says TEAM LIFT.
No kidding.
Airlines generally don’t want you checking a large cardboard box as luggage, even if it has a handle. Fortunately, I have a very sturdy duffle bag with strong webbing handles, so the inverter/charger is going to Sardinia as one very large, very heavy piece of checked luggage.
I’ve learned this lesson before.
A few years ago I showed up at JFK with a 50-pound 240-to-120 AC voltage converter in a sturdy box with a handle. I thought I was being clever.
The airline disagreed.
They wouldn’t accept the box, and I had to scramble around the airport trying to find a duffle bag big enough to stuff it into.
Lesson learned.
And Then There’s the Alternator
Pandora also needs a new engine alternator.
This is another substantial piece of equipment, although at about 15 pounds it qualifies as the featherweight compared with the inverter/charger.
It is a high-output alternator capable of more than 100 amps at 24 volts, and because it wasn’t something I had much confidence in being able to source quickly in Sardinia, I decided to bring that with me too.
So my excess luggage now exceeds 100 pounds, and that’s only for these two items. There is plenty more that needs to go with us.
Being a boat stuff sherpa is apparently my lot in life.
There is another reason for bringing the equipment myself. Pandora has an 850Ah lithium house bank from Blue Heron Batteries, and I want to know that the charging equipment is configured correctly for those batteries.
I contacted Hank George, the owner of Blue Heron Batteries, and he and his technicians helped make sure that the equipment would be properly configured before it was shipped to me.
That was particularly important because of my other concerns about the yard in Bosa. We’re dealing with sophisticated electronics, different voltages and battery requirements, a boat with both 240- and 120-volt AC, and a mix of 12- and 24-volt equipment.
I have known Hank for years—I took over as president of The Salty Dawg Sailing Association from him—and I trust him to get things right.
With Pandora’s combination of 24-volt and 12-volt systems, lithium batteries, European shore power and a boat that has accumulated years of modifications, this isn’t an area where I want to take chances.
The Wiring Forest
And then there is the wiring.
Pandora is a 2007 boat, and I am certainly not the first person to modify things.
There are wires everywhere.
Some go somewhere.
Some don’t.
Some presumably went somewhere once upon a time.
The photograph of the inverter installation above is a good, if most extreme, example. You may look at it and wonder, “Bob, what’s with all those wires?”
Good question.
I intend to spend some time figuring out what is still needed and removing what isn’t.
The operative word there is intend.
Removing what appears to be an abandoned wire is easy. Removing a wire that you think is abandoned and discovering later that it was actually connected to something important is considerably less entertaining.
So I’ll be proceeding carefully and probably end up still leaving some wires that I just can’t figure out what they are for.
However, one good thing about doing things yourself is that when it goes badly, at least you know where to start—or who to blame. You made the mistakes yourself.
The Real Problem
The real problem isn’t so much the work itself.
I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’m perfectly capable of taking apart cabinetry, replacing an inverter/charger and installing an alternator. Well, I’ll admit that the electrical hookups make me anxious, but Hank’s group is generally available if questions come up.
The biggest issue has been managing a boat remotely.
When Pandora was in Trinidad, this worked remarkably well. I had “Amos,” a guy who was always there when I needed him, and he kept me informed every step of the way. Communication was easy. I could make a decision from home and generally know that the person on the boat understood what I wanted and would follow through.
Sure, when I returned there were still things that needed to be attended to, but mostly things were completed and done right.
Spain was different.
Italy has been different again.
And perhaps the lesson I’m learning is that leaving a boat somewhere isn’t the same thing as leaving a boat somewhere with reliable support.
Sure, that’s obvious. But I really thought my experience in Spain was a bit of an outlier.
It wasn’t.
When you are sitting on the dock, problems are mostly manageable. You can walk over to the boat, look at something, figure out what’s needed and sometimes find someone who’s an expert and have them figure it out.
When you’re 3,500 miles away, everything becomes harder.
A simple question can take days to answer.
A misunderstanding can sit unnoticed for weeks.
A part that could be found locally becomes something that has to be ordered, shipped internationally and perhaps cleared through customs.
And if the yard isn’t communicating, you don’t really know whether anything is happening at all.
That’s the part that has been frustrating.
Less Than Two Weeks to Go
So, in less than two weeks—ten days, if not to put too fine a point on it—Brenda and I will fly from JFK to Sardinia, where we have rented a room while Pandora is still on the hard.
The place, the Madalen Guest House, is located in the historic area of Bosa, the same general area where we stayed last spring. It’s an impossibly charming location.
And then I’ll get to work. After a croissant and cappuccino at least.
The plan is to replace the inverter/charger, install the alternator and tackle the growing list of things that I have decided I can no longer confidently leave to someone else.
With the planning I’ve done, and with the technical support from Hank and the Blue Heron team, I’m reasonably confident that the major electrical work will go smoothly.
At least that’s the plan.
We’ll see.
At this point, I’m not relying on the yard for very much, so it will be interesting to see what I find when I get back.
Just to be sure that we are on the same page, earlier this week I sent them a “revised to-do list.” I hope that being “on the same page” means the same thing to both of us.
Every week, it seems, another job moves from the “yard will take care of this” column to the “I guess I’ll do it myself” column.
Such is cruising.
Or perhaps more accurately, such is cruising when your boat is thousands of miles away and you’re trying to manage it from home.
I’m beginning to think that the most important piece of equipment I am carrying back to Sardinia isn’t the inverter/charger or the alternator.
It’s confidence that I have a plan—and the flexibility to change it.
And, of course, a very large duffle bag, or two.
Meanwhile, Back in Essex…
While I’m spending my time figuring out how to get Pandora back in the water, I’ve also been thinking about what I’ll do this winter when I’m stuck here in Essex.
There are a couple of fun things taking shape.
I’m working with Salty Dawg on a two-day event at the Essex Yacht Club tentatively titled “Making the Jump from Coastal to Long-Distance Cruising.” The idea is to help cruisers who are thinking about moving beyond vacation cruising, whether that means becoming liveaboards or simply doing more extensive seasonal cruising.
I used to run a three-day event at Essex Yacht Club every June for upwards of eight years, so it feels like it’s time to bring something like that back.
And then there’s Antigua.
I’m also working on a week-long trip to Antigua in early February with a group of artists, most of them members of the American Society of Marine Artists. Planning is going very well, and we already have about 20 people signed up less than two weeks after announcing it, double the number that we had last winter when I first organized an event with them.
So, while Pandora waits patiently in Sardinia, there is plenty going on back here.
And that doesn’t even count trying to figure out how I am going to pack all that stuff and still leave room for clothes.
Such are the many details of my life as a nautical sherpa.
After months of posting about Pandora getting ready to cross to the Med, breaking stuff in the Med, waiting for new stuff to be delivered in the Med, trying to understand the weather in the Med, coming home to CT from the Med, thinking about getting back to the Med… Well, you get the drift. Med, Med, Med. Blah, blah, blah…the Med.
How about Maine?
A few days ago I drove to Portland to meet up with my friend George, who has helped move Pandora many places over the years, to help him move his trawler back to Essex. To be aboard his boat “Knot Workin” (he’s retired…Get it?)
Anyway, after motoring everywhere in the Med, being on a boat that has to motor because it is, well, a motorboat, is actually refreshing. When it’s time to go, we dropped the mooring, turned on the engine and a few hours later we picked up another mooring. Not a lot of drama, just motoring. And, call me crazy, but I do enjoy sitting in a lawn chair on the back deck as we motor along.
Here’s my home for the next few days. Not workin at all, just point and go, lawn chairs and all.
When I arrived it was raining cats and dogs and the wind was really blowing but by the next morning it had cleared out, but not before putting on a lovely show of rainbow jelly fish at dusk, no doubt, escorting the rain on their westward journey.
This is, I believe, my 14th trip to Maine and we are going to places that I have never been, as we work our way south from Portland to the Cape Cod Canal. The scenery is lovely and very different than anything I have seen on our years cruising, “Down East”. And certainly a lot different from our time down south and now in the Med.
I am seeing lighthouses. Lots of lighthouses. Portland light, the oldest lighthouse in Maine, built in 1791 by orders of George Washington. And speaking of Washington, it is widely believed that his decision not to run for office again was his greatest achievement.
One of the best-known observations about this decision came not from Washington but from King George III. When told Washington intended to resign his commission after the Revolutionary War and later retire after serving as president, the king reportedly said:
“If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
Perhaps, if he lived during a different time, and now it is surely a “different” time, he might have won the Nobel Prize. Hmm…
His legacy, and Portland light, endure.
And speaking of government, we visited Kittery, on the border of New Hampshire and Maine, home of the Portsmouth Navy Yard, the largest employer in Maine and home to thousands of workers that head over the bridge to the shipyard every day to work on refitting nuclear Subs.
The skyline is dominated by huge cranes.
This seagull seemed to be plenty used to all the commotion. A spy? He did seem pretty intent on somthing and was careful to ignore my presence.
It was a sort of “homecoming” for me, being in Maine again, we encountered a number of boats that brought back memories.
This Cornish Crabber, was a model that we almost bought way back as we were considering what small cruising boat to buy as our first “big” boat. We saw one at a boat show in Nova Scotia where we were on our very first vacation as a married couple in 1977.
Considering where Pandora is now, the Med, and the boat herself, at 47′, life is very different.
I was taken by seeing this Tartan 37, our third cruising boat and the first to take us to Maine. I was aboard “Electra” that I did my first overnight passage from the Cape Cod Canal to Camden. As I left the canal on that evening, heading out into the twilight that I thought to myself, “I have no right to be doing this.” But we arrived safely.
I was taken by ths lovely wood double ender. Over the years I flirted with buying a wooden boat and always backed off, once even after putting a deposit on an old Crosby Cape Cod Catboat. Backing out was probably the only time I actually made a good financial decision on a boat.
I still love “looking at but not buying” wooden boats.
And, speaking of close calls and bad decisions, I expect that there were many that headed down the wrong path that spent time in the Portsmouth Navy Prison.
The Portsmouth Naval Prison housed more than 86,000 Navy and Marine Corps prisoners between 1908 and 1974. Over the years, a number of famous names became associated with it including many captured U-boat captains and crew.
But perhaps the most famous connection was Humphrey Bogart who, while serving in the US Navy during WWI escorted prisoners to Portsmouth. The persistent story that he was an inmate himself is almost certainly false. Some accounts also claim he received the facial scar seen in later life during a prisoner escort, but historians disagree on that as well.
Sadly, the prison now remains vacant although it seems to be in pretty good shape but is off limits to the public given the highly secret work being done on the island.
Back to the “nostalgia” series of older boats that I saw, this boat, a Bayfield 40 Persistence is the same model as one that my father-in-law owned many years ago. The fact that his boat was named Constance makes me wonder if it is the same boat as Persistence seems so similar and the name is in exactly the same place. They only built this model from 1982 to 1988 and closed after a fire destroyed the facility. I took a photo of the hull identification number and as the boat is documented, perhaps I might be able to track her down and see if the boat is the same one. With her clipper bow, turned wooden posts (covered with canvas in this photo) and “shippy” look, she was fairly typical of the time. While she looks to be about perfect and clearly recently painted and restored, her underbody was quite foul so I expect that she isn’t getting much use.
It was good to see a lobsterman plying his craft, one of many plying the waters of Maine.
And, of course a commercial dragger, something that I associate with our many years cruising Block Island Sound. I wonder where he was heading. With the high price of diesel these days, I hope he has a good catch.
Last night we took a mooring in Situate Harbor and today we head the last leg, about 50 miles to the Cape Cod Canal. After that, Newport and home to Essex.
This run as certainly been different than anything that I’ve done aboard Pandora since 2012 when we first headed south.
Yes, different, and in a good way. I have missed Maine.
After only a few months cruising the western Mediterranean, I realized I was learning the weather, all over again. It was a bit of a shock.
By the time Pandora passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, I’d logged nearly 30,000 offshore miles. Brenda and I had cruised the U.S. East Coast, the Bahamas, Cuba, the Eastern Caribbean, and crossed the Atlantic. I thought I had a pretty good handle on weather.
The Mediterranean quickly convinced me otherwise. Every part seemed to have its own weather.
Along the U.S. East Coast, summer weather follows a familiar rhythm. Cold fronts roll down from Canada every few days, the wind clocks around, blows hard for a while, and then settles back into the prevailing southwest breeze.
The Bahamas are different. A regular series of cold fronts sends cruisers scrambling for one of the few protected anchorages. Ignore the forecast and you may find yourself in an anchorage that was perfectly safe yesterday but has become untenable today.
The eastern Caribbean is different again. The trade winds are wonderfully dependable, but wraparound swell can turn a peaceful anchorage into a rolly mess—and chasing your wine glass around the cockpit loses its charm pretty quickly. Broadly speaking, though, tomorrow usually looks a lot like today.
Even an Atlantic crossing is fairly predictable if you leave at the right time of year.
Then we arrived in the Mediterranean.
Within weeks I felt like a beginner again.
Since Brenda and I first headed south on the Intracoastal Waterway in 2012, we’ve relied on weather router Chris Parker.
Before leaving for Europe, everyone seemed to have an opinion about Mediterranean weather.
“There’s either too much wind or not enough.”
I’d become comfortable comparing the European and U.S. weather models. They didn’t always agree, but they usually painted the same general picture.
The Mediterranean was different.
Even forecasts for the same day sometimes looked like they were describing completely different places. One model predicted calm conditions while another suggested strong winds.
It made no sense to me.
Eventually I realized the forecasts weren’t the biggest challenge.
I’d been thinking of the Mediterranean as though it were one body of water, and it isn’t.
One thing Brenda and I have learned over the years is to spend time with people who’ve already sailed where we’re planning to go.
We first discovered the value of that in 2012 when we met Bill and Maureen aboard Kalunamoo. They became our mentors as we worked our way down the ICW, crossed to the Bahamas, and eventually cruised parts of the eastern Caribbean together.
More than a decade later, we’re still comparing notes and learning from each other.
Since then, talking with sailors who’ve “been there” has become part of every major cruising plan.
So, before heading to the Mediterranean, we did exactly that.
We spoke with friends who had spent years cruising there.
Their advice was helpful.
But after several months exploring Spain, the Balearics, and Sardinia, I still felt I was missing something.
I knew what we were experiencing.
I didn’t understand why.
I needed some context, so I set up a call with Chris Parker.
By then Pandora had crossed the Atlantic, entered the Mediterranean, worked her way along the Spanish coast, visited the Balearics, and continued on to Sardinia.
One of the first things Chris said now seems obvious.
The Caribbean is essentially one large body of water dotted with relatively small islands.
The Mediterranean is a collection of smaller seas surrounded by continents, mountain ranges, and islands large enough to create their own weather with many names.
That simple observation explained a great deal.
Like many first-time Mediterranean cruisers, I arrived with charts, guidebooks, weather-routing software, GRIB files, and websites.
What I didn’t have was experience.
I didn’t yet know which parts of the forecast mattered most—or just how dramatically local geography could change what we’d actually experience on the water.
That realization changed the way I began looking at Mediterranean weather.
And it was only the beginning.
The Mediterranean Isn’t One Sea
One of the biggest mistakes I made before arriving in Europe was thinking of the Mediterranean, like the Caribbean where we’d spent more than a decade, as a single cruising ground, which I now understand it is not…
We talk about “crossing the Atlantic” or “cruising the Caribbean” because, despite their differences, each has a recognizable personality. The Mediterranean is different. It’s really a collection of neighboring seas, each shaped by its own geography, prevailing winds, and seasonal weather patterns.
I didn’t really appreciate that until we started cruising in the Med. My conversations with fellow cruisers helped, but it didn’t really sink in until we began moving from one area to another.
Now that we have worked our way east from Almerimar, where Pandora had spent the winter, to Sardinia that one of Chris’s comments clicked for me. A weather discussion about the western Mediterranean might have almost nothing to do with what another sailor was experiencing in the Adriatic or the Aegean. Even within the western Mediterranean, conditions along the Spanish mainland could be completely different from those only a day’s sail away in the Balearics.
That realization meant that I didn’t have to (yet) understand the entire Mediterranean.
I only had to understand the part I was sailing.
That probably explains why experienced Mediterranean cruisers smile when newcomers ask, “What’s the weather like in the Med?”
Now I realize that’s the wrong question.
The real question is, “Where are you?”
One surprise for us was fog.
During more than a decade in the Bahamas and Caribbean, we could go months without seeing visibility reduced by anything more than a passing rain squall. As we traversed the Balearics, however, we found ourselves navigating in dense fog that reminded me much more of Maine than the Mediterranean.
On one passage visibility dropped to less than a quarter mile as we approached the fog bank in the distance.
Once we entered the bank it was like being in Maine but with warmer water.
It wasn’t something I had ever associated with Mediterranean cruising.
Later I learned it wasn’t unusual during the spring.
Like so many things we were discovering, it was another reminder that “Mediterranean weather” isn’t just one thing.
Our first season is limited to the western Mediterranean, but even there the weather kept changing character.
Southern Spain introduced us to the Levante and Poniente—the easterly and westerly winds that dominate the Strait of Gibraltar. Those winds aren’t simply created by passing weather systems. The geography of the Strait funnels and accelerates them, and they can remain strong for many miles beyond Gibraltar itself.
Farther east, another familiar Mediterranean name (familiar to me now anyway) appears—the Tramontana spilling out of the Gulf of Lion.
And then there’s the Mistral.
Long before we ever sailed there, I’d heard stories about it from other cruisers.
Chris explained that what makes the Mistral remarkable isn’t simply that it blows hard. It’s what happens when ordinary weather encounters extraordinary geography.
A cold front crossing Europe isn’t unusual.
What happens after that cold air is squeezed through mountain valleys and spills out over the sea—that’s what makes the Mistral the Mistral.
That made sense to me.
After years offshore, I’d gotten into the habit of thinking mostly about wind strength.
Twenty knots is twenty knots.
If the wind shifts ten degrees, you trim the sails, alter course a little, and keep going. When your destination is hundreds of miles away, small course or wind changes usually don’t matter very much.
The Mediterranean is very different.
Here, a ten-degree change in wind direction can be far more important than another ten knots of wind.
Most Mediterranean passages are relatively short. You don’t have distance to adjust your landfall as the wind direction is always changing. You’re trying to reach a specific harbor or anchor in a cove that’s protected from only certain wind directions.
Many anchorages are only protected from a fairly narrow range of wind directions, so even a modest wind shift can turn a comfortable anchorage into one you’d rather not be in.
That reminded me of our early sailing on Long Island Sound, moving from harbor to harbor where we had to maintain a certain course to make it to the harbor without a lot of tacking.
As the weeks passed, I noticed another change.
I spent less time studying the anchorage itself and much more time looking at everything around it—the headlands, mountain valleys, gaps between islands, and other features that have a big effect on the wind.
I’d certainly seen local effects elsewhere. In the Caribbean, for example, the trade winds often accelerate as you approach a mountainous island before dying away in its wind shadow. Or, in Deshais, Guadeloupe where the wind funnels through the mountains gusting in the harbor at alarming speeds.
But in the Mediterranean those local, Deshais-like, effects seemed to be everywhere.
Once I started looking at the coastline that way, many of the forecasts that had puzzled me suddenly made much more sense.
It wasn’t that the weather models were necessarily wrong.
They simply couldn’t tell the whole story.
The last few miles into an anchorage often depended just as much on the surrounding landscape as on the larger weather system.
In many ways, the land itself had become just as important as the wind
Planning Around Tomorrow
After years cruising the Caribbean, life aboard Pandora had settled into a comfortable routine.
We often joked that nothing happened before noon aboard Pandora with plenty of time to enjoy another cup of coffee and catch up on the news.
There was rarely any reason to rush. The trade winds were remarkably dependable and, unless we were preparing for a longer offshore passage, tomorrow usually looked a lot like today. The biggest question wasn’t whether we could sail—it was whether we’d have a close reach, a beam reach, or a broad reach and if it would be easy sailing, sort of sporty or super salty but the wind was generally from the same direction, if at different speeds.
We’d check the forecast, chat with neighboring cruisers on the morning VHF net, and decide whether today—or maybe tomorrow—felt like a good, or best, day to move.
It was a wonderfully relaxed way to cruise.
The Mediterranean isn’t like that.
Instead of asking,
“Should we leave tomorrow?”
The question is…
“When is the next good weather window…and what happens after that?”
That was a completely different way of thinking.
I remember sitting in Cartagena.
There were still museums we wanted to visit, markets we hadn’t wandered through, and restaurants we hadn’t yet tried. We certainly weren’t anxious to leave.
But the forecast suggested that three days later we’d have an excellent crossing to the Balearics, followed by several days of fresh winds from exactly the wrong direction.
Suddenly the decision wasn’t just about making the passage.
It was about what would happen after we got there.
Would our anchorage still be comfortable?
Would we be looking for another harbor?
Would we wish we’d waited another day?
And the models were not in agreement at all…
Those weren’t questions I’d spent much time asking in the Caribbean.
Chris pointed out that many Mediterranean passages are short enough that you often have several possible departure days.
The challenge isn’t finding weather that’s acceptable.
It’s choosing the weather window that leaves you in the best place for whatever comes next.
And “next” could very well be tomorrow, or not.
That idea completely changed the way I looked at forecasts.
Instead of planning tomorrow’s sail, I gradually found myself planning the coming week—which often meant not moving at all.
If the forecast suggested conditions would deteriorate before we were ready to leave again, we’d often spend a few nights in a marina instead of an anchorage.
It cost more, but it also bought peace of mind—and sometimes that’s worth every euro.
One of the unexpected pleasures of Mediterranean cruising is discovering just how easy it is to stay put.
The history has a way of slowing you down.
There always seemed to be another castle to explore, another museum, another market, or another café where we could linger over lunch before wandering back to Pandora.
But even while we were enjoying ourselves ashore, there was usually a little voice in the back of my mind asking,
“If we don’t leave tomorrow…when’s the next opportunity?”
Of course, another factor influenced our decisions.
The calendar.
Cruisers like to say,
“The most dangerous thing aboard is a calendar.”
There’s a lot of truth in that.
Maybe it’s a haul-out reservation.
Maybe it’s family flying in.
Maybe it’s a flight home that will cost a fortune to change.
For those of us on non-EU boats, there are also Schengen limits and the need to occasionally leave the European Union to avoid triggering VAT issues.
Whatever the reason, flexibility is one of the most valuable things you can carry aboard.
Another surprise was how often we used the engine.
I’d heard sailors jokingly refer to the Mediterranean as the “Motorterranean,” and now I understand why.
For years I’d unconsciously measured a successful cruising season by how many miles we’d sailed and how few hours we put on the engine.
The Caribbean makes that easy.
The Mediterranean…well…it’s different.
Some mornings the sea looked like Long Island Sound on a hot August afternoon.
By afternoon a pleasant thermal breeze might appear for a few hours before disappearing again by sunset.
Other days there was plenty of wind.
Unfortunately, it was blowing from exactly the direction we wanted to go.
So we waited.
Or we motored.
When I mentioned our unexpectedly high engine hours to Chris, he laughed.
“Have you ever wondered why the ancient Greeks had tiny sails and lots of oars?”
That one sentence probably changed my attitude more than anything else.
There was so much to explore and so much history to discover.
What was the rush?
Sure, we’d rather sail than motor, but the real goal wasn’t to maximize sailing.
It was to enjoy the places we’d come so far to see.
Brenda has always been willing to let me know when I’m making good cruising decisions…or not.
When we first started talking about spending several seasons in the Mediterranean, she looked at me one day and said,
“I’m not sure I want to sail somewhere the Greeks had dozens of words for wind.”
I laughed.
Sort of.
After a few months in the Mediterranean, I realized she may have understood the place better than I did.
Learning Never Ends
Spend an evening in almost any marina or anchorage, and sooner or later the conversation turns to weather.
Sailors have always been storytellers, but the stories they tell are rarely about perfect days reaching across a sparkling blue sea.
Instead, they’re about the gale that arrived a day early, the anchor that dragged at three in the morning, or the harbor entrance they found just before dark.
There’s an old saying that cruising is “days of wonder punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”
Like most sailing sayings, there’s enough truth in it to make every cruiser smile.
I certainly have my own collection of stories.
The seas breaking over Pandora off Portugal while I was sailing from the Azores toward Gibraltar will stay with me for a long time.
But if someone now asks me the scariest moment I’ve experienced in nearly 30,000 offshore miles, I don’t hesitate.
Orcas.
As we approached Gibraltar last summer, Pandora was attacked by a pod of orcas.
Watching—and feeling—several tons of highly intelligent animals repeatedly slam into your rudder is something I hope never to experience again.
It was terrifying.
Looking back, though, I’ve come to realize that many of the stories sailors tell aren’t really about weather.
They’re about decisions.
A crew leaves because they have a marina reservation.
Or friends waiting at the next port.
Or airline tickets that can’t easily be changed.
Or maybe they simply convince themselves that the forecast “doesn’t look too bad.”
Every skipper has made one of those decisions.
I certainly have.
My encounter with the orcas happened largely because I was trying to keep to a schedule.
With the benefit of hindsight, I would have made a different choice.
That’s one of the reasons I wanted to have Chris Parker help me understand.
I wasn’t looking for better forecasts.
I was trying to become better at making decisions.
What had I missed?
What did I know before leaving that I either ignored—or simply didn’t understand?
Those are the questions that really matter.
Before arriving in Europe I’d heard countless stories about the Mistral, the Bora, the Meltemi, and the other named Mediterranean winds.
Somehow I’d come away thinking they appeared almost without warning.
Chris surprised me.
“Most of the time, they’re quite predictable.”
That wasn’t the answer I expected.
He explained that these winds are usually associated with recognizable weather patterns.
The difficult part isn’t forecasting them.
The difficult part is understanding what those forecasts actually mean once mountains, valleys, islands, and coastlines begin reshaping the wind.
That’s the part experienced Mediterranean sailors understand almost instinctively.
They know which anchorages become uncomfortable with only a modest shift in wind direction.
They know when today’s peaceful harbor becomes tomorrow’s lee shore.
They know when to leave one day early instead of one day too late.
You won’t get that from a weather model.
It comes from experience.
Fortunately, Mediterranean cruisers are just as willing to share that experience as the sailors who helped Brenda and me when we first headed south more than a decade ago.
Guidebooks tell you where to go.
Charts tell you what’s under the keel.
Weather forecasts tell you about the wind and waves.
But conversations with sailors who’ve already been there explain how all three fit together.
I’ve really come to appreciate how valuable those conversations are.
As our first Mediterranean season came to an end and Pandora settled into her berth in Sardinia before we flew home, I realized something had changed.
I wasn’t thinking so much about the weather anymore.
I was thinking about how I thought about the weather.
That may sound like the same thing, but it isn’t.
I’d stopped trying to understand the Mediterranean as one enormous cruising ground.
Instead, I was beginning to appreciate that every region has its own personality.
The trick wasn’t understanding the entire Mediterranean.
It was understanding the place where we happened to be.
That realization made the whole thing feel a lot less intimidating.
Instead of trying to “figure out the Med,” I could just focus on the next cruising area.
That seemed a lot more manageable.
And, in the end, the weather wasn’t what impressed us most.
It was what waited for us at the end of each passage.
One week we were wandering the Roman streets of Cartagena, where three thousand years of history somehow felt perfectly ordinary.
Another day we were shopping in markets overflowing with fresh bread, seafood, fruit, and vegetables before lingering over a late-afternoon sundowner and eventually wandering back to Pandora for dinner beneath the walls of a medieval castle.
In the Balearics we found quiet anchorages and impossibly clear water.
In Sardinia we discovered hill towns and harbors whose histories stretched back centuries before the United States even existed.
The weather determines when you move.
Places like these remind you why you moved in the first place.
For Brenda and me, that’s become one of the great rewards of cruising the Mediterranean.
As Americans celebrating our nation’s 250th birthday, it was hard not to be impressed by places where history is measured in thousands of years instead of hundreds.
As I write this, we’re only a few weeks away from returning to Pandora.
Our first season has given us just enough experience to appreciate how much we still have to learn.
Oddly enough, I find that encouraging.
After nearly 30,000 offshore miles, I wasn’t looking for another place to prove what I already knew.
I was looking for somewhere that would continue teaching me—and be a place that Brenda would enjoy.
The Mediterranean has proven to be exactly that.
I’ve always believed that good seamanship isn’t measured by how much we know, but by our willingness to keep learning—from the weather, from our mistakes, and, most importantly, from those who’ve sailed these waters before us.
For me, this first season in the Mediterranean has really been about learning the weather all over again.
After more than a decade of seasonal cruising along the U.S. East Coast, the Bahamas, Cuba, and the islands stretching from the U.S. Virgins to Trinidad, we decided it was time for something entirely different. Of course, each new cruising ground had been an adventure, but taking Pandora across the Atlantic to Spain was in another league altogether. We were leaving behind not only familiar waters, but nearly everything that had become comfortable.
As I’ve noted in earlier posts, continuing our cruising life aboard Pandora, our Aerodyne 47, was far from certain. Brenda had made it clear that selling the boat and spending more time in Essex on the Connecticut River was a very appealing alternative.
After a lot of conversations with fellow cruisers who had spent time in the Mediterranean, we decided to give it a whirl.
At the time I was President and Rally Director of the Salty Dawg Sailing Association and proposed organizing a rally to the Azores. The Board embraced the idea, and I had the privilege of leading the fleet from Bermuda to Horta. As I write this, the second running of that rally has concluded, and plans are already underway for another next June.
After crossing from the Azores to Spain—and surviving our encounter with a pod of orcas—we spent several weeks exploring southern Spain before storing Pandora for the winter in Almerimar. We returned in late March intending to spend more than two months working our way toward Sardinia before hauling the boat for the busy, and expensive, Mediterranean summer.
Unfortunately, equipment failures delayed us in Almerimar for nearly a month, forcing us to shorten our time in the Balearics before making the 200-mile crossing to Sardinia. It became something of a forced march, and I worried that the constant schedule changes would sour Brenda on this whole Mediterranean experiment.
I am happy to report that I couldn’t have been more wrong. She now tells anyone who will listen how much she loved it. Whew!
Despite the delays, we covered an amazing amount of ground in that compressed time and experienced more than many can in decades of vacations. And yet we’ve barely scratched the surface.
The greatest surprise was that cruising the Mediterranean gave me an entirely different sense of time.
Brenda has always been fascinated by the history of this region, having studied in both Italy and Greece during her undergraduate years. She returned this spring with a deep appreciation for the civilizations that have shaped these shores over thousands of years. I’ve always viewed history through a much more American lens.
As America celebrated its 250th anniversary, I found myself looking at our country differently.
Back home, two hundred and fifty years feels like an important milestone. We proudly preserve buildings that are two centuries old and celebrate a nation that has endured for a quarter of a millennium.
Then I stood on the heights above Cartagena, overlooking the Roman theater and gazing across the same harbor that first attracted the Phoenicians more than 2,200 years ago, my perspective began to shift.
As a resident of Essex, Connecticut, I’ve always taken pride in the Griswold Inn, founded in 1776 and proudly claiming to be America’s oldest continually operating tavern. Then you arrive in Cartagena, where entire neighborhoods are nearly twice that age, Roman ruins are simply part of the streetscape, and two hundred years begins to feel like yesterday.
The United States has existed for only a small fraction of Cartagena’s history. Over those twenty-two centuries the city has been Phoenician, Roman, Visigothic, Muslim, Christian, and Spanish. Some civilizations ruled for generations, others for centuries, but every one of them eventually yielded to another. Looking back, it’s easy to imagine that each believed its time would last indefinitely. History had other plans.
Yet the harbor remained. And even a spot for Pandora.
Once filled with trading vessels from across the Mediterranean, today it welcomes fishing boats, cruising yachts, naval ships, and an endless procession of cruise ships. The faces have changed. The flags have changed. The purpose has evolved.
Standing there, it was difficult not to think about Lincoln’s warning that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” He was speaking about slavery, but his words remind us that the greatest threats to a republic often come from within. A nation’s strength lies not only in its economy or military, but in its shared commitment to common institutions and common purpose.
That thought stayed with me throughout our travels. While cruising the Mediterranean, I never flew our American ensign. I worried that it might be interpreted as a political statement rather than simply the flag of our home. After conversations with many people we met along the way, however, I realized my concerns were largely unfounded. Most people could distinguish between our country’s politics and its people far more readily than I had expected.
Traveling aboard Pandora has made me appreciate more fully how much our understanding of history is shaped by where we live. To many Americans, two hundred and fifty years seems like a very long time. In the Mediterranean, our history seems pretty modern. Walking Roman streets one day, exploring a medieval fortress the next, and then tying Pandora alongside modern yachts beneath eighteenth-century naval fortifications compresses history in a way that is difficult to describe.
America’s story begins to feel less “finished” and more like one that is a continuing evolution.
Rather than diminishing what our country has accomplished, that realization has deepened my appreciation for it. Two hundred and fifty years is something worth celebrating, but it is also a reminder of how young our republic really is. Cartagena has watched civilizations come and go for more than two millennia. Our hope should not be that America somehow escapes history, but that we learn from it.
As we celebrate our own 250th anniversary, I hope we remember that preserving our republic may ultimately prove every bit as important as creating it.
Cruising the Med will forever change what “history” means to me and I can’t wait for the next chapter coming this fall.
