Category Archives: Cruising Life

Describes an experience regarding the boating lifestyle of our travel.

Exploring St. Tropez

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This morning we slept late and got off to a slow start. Eric went to the marina to check in and almost fell over when they told him it was $87.00 USD per night for a slip. Ouch. We certainly weren’t prepared for that. Isn’t this the off season where slips are supposed to be cheaper? We know St. Tropez is the stomping ground of the famous, but we figured that it would be less expensive than Monaco, the stomping ground of the rich. We suppose that famous must trump rich. Since we came from Monaco, there were no check in formalities.

The marina does have Continue reading →

Welcome to Monaco

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By 0300 this morning, the wind had picked up to 9 10 knots on our beam. The waves picked up, too, of course. It still was not a bad ride. Despite it being wavier, our speed increased, and we were flying along at 6.5 knots with only 1600 RPM. We had a current with us.

By 0800, we could clearly see Monaco in the distance. It is a cluster of tall and midrange buildings, which start along the shore and creep up the green mountain. But the major development only seems to go part way up the mountain — there is almost a clear line where it changes to a scattering of small buildings. That must be the northern border of France. The top of the mountain was covered by a cloud, so we couldn’t tell what was near the top.

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Off to the right, in France, it is mostly smaller buildings, both along the coast and creeping up the hill. To the left, also in France, the tall buildings creep down the coast, but above the shoreline there are a few smaller buildings and not much more.

We approached the Hercules Harbor entrance. We imagined how the call on the radio would go. “Do you Continue reading →

Welcome to Porto De Turistico in the Suburbs of Rome

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By 0100, the wind had picked up to about 7 knots real, but the seas were still smooth and nice. At 0800, we pulled into the marina. We were greeted by two crew to help us tie up. Christi found the new ropes to be heavy and unwieldy, and the initial tie up was especially clumsy. This marina only has a single mooring line, and we found getting the mooring line situated properly to be quite tricky. The workers needed to come and help us. Tomorrow there is supposed to be high winds, so after the workers left, Eric re-did all the lines to make sure that Kosmos was perfectly situated for the wind. All in all, it took well over an hour between initially pulling into the spot and Eric finally deciding we were situated well enough.

Eric put out the passarelle. The passarelle has been nice to have in all the other places we have been, but it certainly wasn’t a necessity. We could have managed with jumping on and off, which would have been inconvenient, but doable. But not here. The concrete quay is Continue reading →

Passage from Lipari to Rome

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Yesterday we woke up to mostly blue skies with some scattered clouds. We had checked the weather the night before and knew yesterday was the only good day to leave Lipari. We wish we could have stayed one more day. Not everything was 100% dry and there were still a couple more loads of laundry to do. But another storm was coming, and if we didn’t leave yesterday, we would have been stuck in Lipari for several more days before another weather window opened.

We went through our normal get ready to go routine, which took longer than usual because Continue reading →

More Cleaning Up the Mess in Lipari

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Yesterday, we woke up to dark gray skies and heavy rain. The combination of the ugly day and the inability to open the doors and windows made for yet another depressing day. It was also really cold out, meaning we needed long pants, sweaters and jackets. Louis had asked us for a statement for his insurance, so Christi spent the majority of the day doing laundry and writing the blog post for the volcano/emergency rescue and gave the post to Louis as our official statement of events. That was one long story and took pretty much all day to write.

Eric spent the day cleaning the engine room and flushing it with fresh water. He cleaned out the manual bilge pump and the high water bilge pump. Both were clogged with pieces of a small cardboard box that had gotten wet and disintegrated into the bilge. We normally keep cardboard out of the engine room. This was a relatively small box of rubber gloves Eric uses for changing oil and fuel filters. It had just gone empty. So it was tucked between two oil buckets waiting to be thrown in the trash. Instead that small box clogged two bilge pumps and caused no end of trouble. The third bilge pump turned out to be clogged with sawdust. We have purposely flooded our bilge to clean out sawdust, but never quite got the water as high as it got this time. We view the saw dust removal as another silver lining. While we were terrified, it turned out the situation wasn’t dangerous once the portholes were shut. Now the bilge is more cleared out so hopefully the bilge pumps won’t get clogged should a genuine leak develop.

Eric also set up the emergency bilge pump in Continue reading →