3 Days into our crossing

We have had 3 very fast days of sailing. Too fast for our liking. We are averaging 190Nm per day with top speeds surfing down 4 m waves of up to 16.9 knots. Quite scary for us. Just now one of our spinnaker blocks ripped out of the mast. Luckily we have been flying our Parasailor for the last 50 hours on 2 halyards. Many things are just dimensioned too small for long crossings. Kazaio has diverted to the Cape Verde Islands for repairs to his broken halyard fitting.

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Latitude:25.80648
Longitude:-20.78082
GPS location Date/Time:11/29/2012 02:07:10 PST

Message:NextLife underway

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We are off

We are off to a great start to cross the Atlantic. 2850 miles are in front of us. We had a great start, right up with the lead boats. Now, at the south end of Gran Canaria we are going straight downwind in up to 30 knots of wind surfing down 3m waves at up to 15 knots of speed. We hope to get to slightly calmer conditions soon.



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ARC Online Viewer Ready for the Start

The Yellowbrick devices (mentioned earlier) have been installed. Now you can see us by moving the cursor over the colourful catamaran symbols on the ARC Viewer at
http://www.worldcruising.com/arc/viewer.aspx
Clicking on the star in front of the boat's name will add that boat to your favourites, which you can then view under "My favourites" instead of "Multihulls".

One of the multihulls must be filling up
at the gas station at the moment...

Official Start Date of ARC 2012 Postponed!!!

Due to the weather, the one thing that is in charge at all times, the official start date of ARC 2012 has been postponed. The racing devision (which we don't belong to) will still start Sunday, and thus will encounter up to 6m (18feet) waves with 25+knots of wind on the nose. The rest, like us, will sit tight until Tuesday. Official new start date for the non-racers is now November 27, 2012. This is the first time since 1989 that the ARC start date has been postponed.
The good thing about this is that we have 2 full additional days to keep preparing, which means Rolf is right now having his first afternoon nap since we arrived in Las Palmas ;-)
The bad side is that the delay screws up my provisioning planning. I received my order of veggies and fruits yesterday, which means those will be two days older already by the start of the trip. Maybe nothing to worry about, but with the warm temperatures during the day I'm a little bit concerned... Ah well, I could stock up a little more on Monday if I have to. We'll see.
On another note: the rest of the crew, Richard and JoAnne, have arrived safely last night. Welcome!

Veggies and Fruit all over the place...

...getting ready to be put away for the trip.

Pictures from today's Island Tour

More pictures will be on the ARC gallery site soon, but here already a few:

Botanical Garden

View of Las Palmas

Caldera volcano crater

Pico de Las Nieves

Street view of Arucas' old town

Beautiful buildings in Arucas' old town

ARC Opening Ceremony Parade Sun Nov 18

Check out the ARC photo gallery again for another great picture of the Canadian Team Representatives during the Parade: 

http://www.worldcruising.com/arc/GALLERY.aspx?PageNumber=1&EIValue1=

More pictures on that site mean that the page numbers I published yesterday are not correct any more as older pictures have moved back on the pages. But Chester is still there! ;-)

Getting ready for the parade -
don't you like Chester's 'doggles'?!!

Proudly representing Canada

Everybody loves Chester!

Chester was the big highlight during today's ARC 2012 Opening Ceremony and Parade. Check out page 1 and 5 of the Gallery on the ARC web site at
http://www.worldcruising.com/arc/GALLERY.aspx?PageNumber=1&EIValue1=
for his pictures.

Chester, Rolf and myself during today's Flag Parade together
with Sheryl from Distant Shores II as flag flagbearer
- more pictures coming up tomorrow -

The catamaran dock in Las Palmas

NEXT LIFE in the middle of the picture, with the little
flags hanging down the top of the mast

Aft view of NEXT LIFE
bottom left quadrant of the picture 

You want to see where we are?

Well, at this point, all you will see is our route as we have not received our 'Yellowbrick' yet. That's the device that will send our location per satellite to the ARC web site once every 24 hours. We will get that device some time next week, they start installing those on the 232 boats on Wednesday.

Anyway, you might want to already bookmark that page: http://www.worldcruising.com/arc/viewer.aspx

You will be able to find us in the Multihull division under the boat name or boat number, which is 166.

Our approximate route to St. Lucia

We are definitely not on vacation right now ;-)

Sewing a throw-line bag, among other things....

Polishing the (not-so) stainless steel, among other things...

Pre-cooking, among other things...

Nov 9-25: Las Palmas, Gran Canary Islands

We have arrived! Our last destination on this side of the Atlantic, our last destination before St. Lucia! After a slightly rough but surprisingly speedy trip from Morocco to Las Palmas, we are now "parked" on the catamaran dock until Nov 25. Oh my, there is so much to do! Not only do we need to finalize things on the boat, such as get the SSB radio going, need to do the provisioning for 5 people for 3 weeks (even though we hope to arrive around day 16 of the voyage), need to get pet documents ready for import to St. Lucia, there's also the ARC program that started yesterday. There's seminars, dinners, cocktail parties, Happy Hours, and so on and so forth. We already had our ARC safety check done yesterday, you would be proud of us. And so that you don't worry too much about us during the crossing, here are some of our safety measurements:

• Life jackets for everybody including spray hood, tether, crotch strap, light, whistle etc.; 
• Jack lines on board to use with the tethers; 
• First Aid Kit;
• Raymarine life tag for the night watch to wake everybody up in case of a man overboard (MOB) - and for Chester; 
• ResQLink and SeaLink for Rolf and me (personal locator beacons); 
• MOB Lifesling with whistle and light;
• MOB pole with ring, whistle, drogue and light; 
• Liferaft for 8 people; 
• Grab bag with emergency water, flares etc.;
• 6 normal fire extinguishers plus two automatic ones in the engine compartments plus one behind the electric panel and one in the battery compartment; 
• Fire blanket;
• Rigging cutter;
• High power search lights;
• All kinds of flares;
• Emergency tiller;
• Storm drogue;

and so on...
And don't forget, we'll have a doctor on board as well (Richard). I think we are very well equipped!

Our Atlantic Crossing will start on Nov 25 at 12:30pm Las Palmas time. We will not only have our usual SPOT on board to send you location notifications via this blog, you will also be able to follow our course on the ARC web site, details on that will follow.

Nov 1 - 4: Exploring Morocco

We spent four great days exploring a very small part of Morocco. Kazaio crew, Rolf and I rented a car with a driver, what a great way to move around! We went to Fes first, where we also hired a guide to show us around. We stayed at a traditional Moroccon home, called Riad, and had dinner at a semi-private, family-run restaurant. Great food!
The second day we continued to Meknes via Ifrane. Ifrane was weird, as the whole city looks like a town in Switzerland - well almost, I guess... the style of the buildings anyway. We couldn't find accommodation - our driver turned out to have no sense of direction (and no GPS), so we continued on to Meknes. What a lucky move! We stayed in another Riad (Riad Lahboul), run by a British-Moroccon couple. Had the best food in all of Morocco right here as they luckily served dinner. And what an outstanding building! Very traditional. And as a special treat, the couple, both musicians, gave a little private concert one night. On our last morning, we explored the Medina of Meknes - the nicest one we have been to, relatively clean, well put together and just fun to explore - from the smelly butchers' stalls where they cut a cow's head in half (yuck!) to the stalls offering spices, or olives or sweets of all kinds, to the clothes, yarn, ceramic and shoe stalls. Luckily, none of us suffered from Montezuma's revenge, something to be expected as we were told. Though very interesting, the trip was also tiring and we were all happy to get back to the boat for some well deserved rest and home cooking. Nevertheless, we felt like we had spent at lest a week, so much did we see, and it was nice to be on "vacation" away from the boat for a change.
In the end, it was too far to go to the desert and we only saw the mid-Atlas, which wasn't all that exciting, so we actually should come back for a longer visit. Maybe we will.
Today, we spent one more day at Sale/Rabat and will head out with the high tide tomorrow at 6 am, going towards Lanzarote, a three nights-trip.

Fes' Medina - between 9,000 and 12,000 little alleys - believed
to be the largest contiguous car-free urban area in the world

Those Medina alleys can get pretty narrow...

Tannery in Fes

Tannery in Fes

Meknes market - Meknes was capital of Morocco in the
17th to 18th century

Meknes Mausoleum of Moulay Ismail, who is noted as one
of the greatest figures in Moroccan history (not only because
of his alleged 888 children)

Meknes market

Private concert by Simon and Mouna
at the Meknes Riad Lahboul - check out their
web site www.riadlahboul.com to see their lovely place

Surprising Moroccan scenery - so green!!!

Volubilis, a partly excavated Roman city,
 developed from the 3rd century BC onwards

Volubilis

Volubilis

Hand made mosaic tables