Start of the Passage to Gibraltar

Yesterday was a nice day in terms of weather. It was a little bit warmer than it has been, and there was no rain or wind. As soon as we got up we started our “get ready to go to sea” routine. We planned to leave shortly before sunset. Eric worked at getting things ready to go on board while he waited for the Simrad repair guy. Christi went to pick up fresh fruit and bread for the passage. Conveniently enough, there is a supermarket directly across the street, right next to the restaurant we like. And, from the fancy awning and red carpet, it looks like a nice one.

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It wasn’t open. Odd, since it is normal business hours on a weekday. She went and peeked into the windows and realized it is a nightclub, named “Supermarket”. Oops. She set off in search of a real grocery store, which she found a few blocks away. When she got back, Eric ran to the yacht chandlery to get more oil while Christi waited and continued getting Kosmos ready to go.

At around 1330, the Simrad place called to tell us the part had come in, but that the technician was unable to come out today. Sigh. We had planned to leave pretty much as soon as he was done with the work. Now we couldn’t leave today. Grrr”¦.

On our red bus tour we had seen there is a Carrefour not too far from our marina.
We didn’t need any food for the here and now, but since we suddenly had the time, we figured we may as well start stocking up for our upcoming Atlantic passage. The Carrefour we went to in Italy had a few frozen dinners, and we were hoping to get some more so Christi wouldn’t have to cook as much. We are happy to report they had a big selection of frozen dinners, and they stock our favorite ice creams. Our freezer is once again loaded to the rim. Interestingly, they also have not frozen dinners in stock, too. We have never seen such a thing before. It is like a frozen dinner, but it doesn’t require any kind of refrigeration of freezing. It is in a plastic bowl only an inch or so deep with a foil lid, and you leave the foil on when you microwave them. We loaded up on those, too. We hope they aren’t gross.

This morning when we woke up, it was definitely warmer out. You could almost, but not quite, get away without a jacket. We were relieved when the Simrad guy arrived at 0845. 45 minutes later, the autopilot was fixed. We did a few last minute odds and ends and untied the lines at about 1130.

The wind started out light. Given the wind, we had expected the seas to be calm. They weren’t too bad, but were definitely a lot rougher than you would expect. It was the usual short, choppy waves. We suspect it is still leftover chop from the last week plus of ugly weather. When we got near Ibiza, another Balearic island to the south, the wind picked up to 10 13 real wind knots on our nose, and the waves followed suit. Sigh. Sea conditions aren’t quite to the point of uncomfortable, but they are certainly not pleasant.

We are running faster than normal, trying to make up for leaving this morning instead of last night. Had we left last night, we’d be trying to keep speeds in the high 5’s. But now we are trying to maintain a speed of 6.6. We are running at 1850 RPM, and we usually run at 1650. We rolled up 22,222 miles on the odometer today.

We are pleased to report that the stabilizers are nice and quiet. We are less happy about the autopilot. We used the newly fixed autopilot as our primary to test it out. Sadly, it is not recognizing the waypoints, so we went back to using our primary autopilot. For those that don’t know, you program the autopilot in advance with the coordinates where you want to make a direction change at, along with how many degrees to turn in which direction. The boat automatically follows a straight line, then turns at the right spot. Without the autopilot recognizing waypoints, you have to make small corrections all the time to stay on course.

And, on to a couple of blog question:

Q: Were you able to ask anyone you met in Egypt if it was just the thing to do…ask foreigners for money? There must be a reason why everyone does it, right?

A: This is an interesting cultural question. The Arabs have a strong sense of charity. In their culture it is expected that those who have more will give it to those who have less. That is just the way it is. In the minds of the Egyptians, all foreign travelers are rich, and they honestly expect you to share your wealth. They can’t understand why we don’t.

Q: It is important for tourists to visit countries where locals harass the tourists to make their economy stronger. More jobs keep the extremists away.

A: In theory, this should be a true statement. But the dynamics of tourism is rapidly changing. Tour packages are becoming increasingly popular, and for good reason. They are good deals. You get group rate hotels, meals, plane tickets”¦ you know exactly what you are going to spend, with no surprises”¦. But there is a downside to package tourism that we kind of hinted at in some commentary about the Maldives: the locals don’t see the money. Instead, the (usually foreign) tour operator, a few select (usually foreign) hotels, and a few select local merchants see a lot of money, and no one else sees anything.

Some examples: In the Maldives, you are not welcome in their country if you are not on a package tour. They hire people from impoverished countries like Bangladesh to work in the hotels, not the locals. Tourists are discouraged from leaving their hotel, thus never buy food, souvenirs or anything else from the locals.

In Egypt, we were essentially forced into a package tour in order to visit Luxor (government regulations and costs made it too difficult to go on our own). Our money went to an English owned tour company (and booked by an English employee), a French owned hotel, one restaurant (we ate lunch at the same restaurant twice and the other meals were at the hotel), and two tourist shops they took us to. If we were on our own, we would have likely gone to a local hotel, eaten at a different local restaurant for each meal, and gone to different kinds of shops. Locals would have gotten our money, not foreigners.

We have been told of countries that have successfully solved the harassment problem by making touting illegal, then putting a lot of police in place to enforcing the law. Now they are nice places to visit, with more tourists than ever. We can only hope Egypt does the same.

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