Sailing Kujira

As soon as we hit the Bonifacio Strait, Kujira becomes a complete different beast. He is finally unleashing his power, cutting through the sea like a knife, smashing every little wavelet on his path, flying at a steady 7 knots. To be honest, the conditions are absolutely perfect and far from the predicted lame 5-7 knots. The wind is finally blowing on our side at a comfortable 70ish degrees and a solid 15 knots. In these conditions we can release the secret weapon: the mizzen sail. We are still newbies in the art of sailing a ketch, that is a boat with 2 masts, and while we had a successful downwind sail with Dave using only the genoa and the mizzen, we haven’t been able to find any other situations where that extra tiny sail was any good to us. Things have now changed. It is now obvious that we should make the most of this perfect day to sail as far as we want. The scenery is beautiful, blue sea, blue sky, dozens if not hundreds of little rocky islands and just as many boats.  Th...

Now that we are in Corsica, what should we do, where should we go? Some people spend entire seasons sailing around this island. We sadly don’t have that much time, moreover now that Dave has announced that he needs to be in Ajaccio by the next day to catch a cheap flight back to Nice. It is physically not possible unless we decide to motor all night. Moreover, there are a couple places along the way we really want to visit. So Dave adjusts his plan and we decide to carry on along the coast for a couple more days.  The first bay, Ficajola is a failure.  As we are sailing by the entrance to the cove,  the western swell is still bashing this side of the island and we would not be able to safely anchor the boat there or in most of the scenic coves.   We have no choice but to look for a safe anchorage for the night, out of the swell rather than a picturesque one. We manage to get a nice downwind sail with just the genoa and the mizzen. The anchorage is nothing special but...

It’s Friday evening, I am working in the cave, aka the engine compartment, while waiting for Kim to come back from Perpignan.   At 9pm or so, I discover that one of the fresh water hose is dangerously sliced. We definitely should not undertake the crossing with the risk of flooding the engine compartment. Hopefully I’ll find a store nearby which has the part I need. We wake up early as there is a lot to do this morning before we leave the port and go for our test sail with Dave. But after checking with him, we conclude to stay one more night in Antibes and postpone the test sail until Sunday. Dave has terrible hay fever and we still have so much to do on the boat. First we need to go to the port office to pay for our stay and get a connector for the water hose. It seems to be a bit of a mission for the person in charge. When I tell them that I am about to put 900 litres of water in the boat they tell me it is negligible and won’t charge me for it .. I guess compared to one of the ...