Author: angie

Passage notes, Sunday, 11th June 2023

Today, we are approaching the realms of Middle Earth: Isengard on our port quarter, Gondor on the port bow, Lorien on our starboard beam, and headed for Ronan. No sightings of Dwarfs, Hobbits nor Ents just yet, but neither of Orcs or Goblins, so that’s good news. The eyes of several lows, on the other hand – rimmed with amber and red on our weather charts – are lurking about, patrolling the area to the south west of us. We pick our way gingerly towards north west, harnessing their wind while avoiding drawing their attention to us, with their big seas and gusts that swirl in lower latitudes.

Meanwhile, the last remains of Île Brehat Boulanger’s bread started resembling dwarf bread, so you could say we are rightly provisioned for the journey ahead over the mid-Atlantic ridge and its hilly underwater landscape named after Tolkien’s world. Although the bread is great for croutons roasted in browned salted rosemary butter, Alex decided it’s time for fresh fare. He kneaded silky, soft and moist wheat dough for proper handmade Kaisersemmeln that makes up our lunch with plenty of salted Bretagne butter and some fresh greenery.

Our time in the Bretagne working on the boat and preparing for the voyage was a succession of gourmet feasts long to be remembered. Butter, galettes, crêpes, biscuits, croissants, cheese, noix de Saint Jacques, some of which we dove up ourselves, the wonderful fresh produce, like French strawberries and apricots at the same time!

Having just savoured the most buttery and flaky croissants imaginable our friends Jean-Luc and Marie treated us to in Troyes on our road trip from Switzerland to the boat, we were spoiled and nothing quite compared since. Hence, we had been on a hunt for the most buttery croissants we could possibly find. At each Boulanger, we sampled the fare, with the most perfect Troyoise delight in mind.

But butter isn’t just for croissants, and we quickly learned that it has the main stage in Breton cuisine. More than delighted to take up local habits, we made sure to take plenty on board for the voyage ahead!

The local market in St Servan, close to St Malo, near the marina where we stayed to finish the last preparations, became our treasure chest of delicacies of all sorts. We chose our favourite fromagier and sampled his produce. Soft goats cheese with fenugreek seeds, for example, or Basque sheep cheese, ‘¡pa chuparse los dedos!’, as one would say if in Spain. Having tasted his butter, we ordered 10kg, two big blocks of deliciousness. One salé, one doux, just to be sure.

Picking up the mots on the next market day, we started having doubts. Quick calculations of the required daily butter intake of each crew member for the next three months resulted in 30 g per person per day. 30 g doesn’t sound like that much, until contemplating that it means eating it every single day. Thankfully, we all love fresh bread and butter!

How does one store 10 kg of butter on a boat for 3 months without a fridge? The fridge was going to be full of cheese, fresh yoghurt made on demand, and delicatessen such as pâté and smoked salmon trout. Picking up the butter, finding the right storage containers and filling them with delicious soft butter, turned the quest of nearly a day. Chopping and massaging the butter into the glass jars, we had time and leisure to take in and physically understand just what amount 10 kg of butter is. Topped with brine, the jars now reside in the bilge, awaiting their turn to be opened and savoured. After about a week at sea, are nearly through the first beurre salé and making good progress through the first jar of doux.

We’re nearing half way on our passage to Greenland, and have left behind the last of the fishing boats before approaching Middle Earth. Each night, an eerie fog descends on us, so damp and saturated with water droplets that it feels alive. As we sail west-northwest, the temperature steadily decreases, and we expect a precipitous drop in some days’ time when entering the first eddies of the arctic currents.

Angie

Passage notes, 10 June 2023, 1015UTC

Today is probably the sixth day at sea. Probably? Who could say, exactly. The succession of days and nights pass like the wave tops and troughs under our boat. Time ceased to be of importance, distances lost their meaning, only direction counts, and keeping the boat sailing, ever in motion, ever towards the destination beyond the horizon. We are in flow. The rhythm of the passage has embraced us.

The engine is humming today. With its 6 cylinders, a reassuring constant murmuring has been with us for the past night and this morning. The wind has ceased yesterday evening, with the low south to us, which had powered the airflow, slowly filling and diminishing. It left us with a reminder of damp air thick as yoghurt.

We are enveloped in fog, so dense you can touch it. Materialising in the finest of droplets settling on the skin as one steps outside from the near tropical warmth of the cabin. The heating coupled to the engine coolant circuit brought the inside temperature up over night and the moisture down while outside a thick blanket of vapour surrounds us. We move our own disk of visibility, which is ever so slowly increasing since last night, when we could barely see much farther than our bow and a few meters past our stern. Truly in our own little world. A bit like the white ‘room’ in the film The Matrix, only not quite so bright.

Near the boat, the water has a dark-greenish tinge, petrol called at times. A blue-green not saturated as it were if the sun would penetrate, but carrying rather a hint of colour. As we look towards the edges of our horizon, we see the long swell slowly peeling away from the mist. The wave tops at times disappearing once more in the fog, returning into the white for a brief moment before peeling for real and rolling ahead.

Between the boundary of our vision and the boat, the undulating hills of water seem to become ever more transparent the farther they are from the boat, a gradient of white overlaying the scene and fading it out around the edges. The water mirrors the white dome above and around us, but it is not devoid of colour. If we look closely, we see the hints of blueish-green in each of the wavelets’ faces. A landscape far from monotone if repetitive in its varying patterns.

The slowly rolling long hills of water put me in mind of the Champagne, which we drove through on our road trip to the boat in St Malo from Switzerland. On the way, we stopped in the medieval town of Troyes to meet our lovely friends Jean-Luc and Marie for a short and sweet reunion and being treated to their incredible hospitality and culinary delights. They bought an old stone house full of character that they have been rebuilding for over a year. We had seen the house at Easter last year, helping with carrying out 200kg heaters, as we were there in an opportune moment, and feasting on the most buttery croissants and cheese. The transformation the house has gone through since is remarkable, a true gem they turned it into, their attention to detail and care showing in each corner.

Today is Saturday, 10th June, 10:15UTC, the tablet says. We are all up now, some having had breakfast earlier, some now. A by now customary bowl of boat-made yoghurt with oats, apples, toasted nuts and seeds, dried fruit and granola makes the lion share of our brekkies. Alex and I have been making our yoghurt for years, since we first were given a culture by sailing friends in Portugal in October 2019. This culture we lost just as we arrived in Tobago end of February 2020.

As luck wanted it, we met a friendly boat that gifted us another culture within a few days which has been with us ever since. A Turkish strand that Tali and Werner of SY Umadum picked up on their journey in South Africa, and took across the southern Atlantic to Brazil and all the way up to to Tobago, where we met. Since, the yoghurt has become our pet of kinds, and we have taken it everywhere we went ever since. Weather on passage, in high waves, in the tropics, in the Swiss mountains, on holiday in the Canaries, it always works!

When we had left for France, we forgot our yoghurt prepared and ready to take. On our stop-over in Bern with Linda and Thom, they helped mitigate the shock and find a wonderful solution. As it happens, Thom did his PhD on gene-sequencing of yoghurt cultures. Is not world a funny place, full of interesting coincidences? Thom suggested sending a letter with dried and wet yoghurt samples to France per express post. And that’s just what we did.

Rafael, our new friend who is looking after our flat while we are away, carefully dried two samples of our yoghurt, and send off a package. We eagerly awaited it, expecting to have it in our hands any day. We waited and waited, and it didn’t arrive. Cryptic updates in the tracking service didn’t reveal its destiny. But arrive it did, eventually. The day before sailing day!

Meanwhile, being without yoghurt, we had found a tasty one at the goat farm neighbouring the boat yard where we worked long hours to get Atlas ready for the sea. This farm yoghurt turned out successful too, so now we are blessed with two yoghurt cultures, and having grown attached to both, we keep both of them going. And not a bad thing, given the rate at which we are eating it!

Arnaud, our captain, always wonderfully gracious with praise, says that being able to make our own fresh yoghurt as we go along is one of the major upgrades of the season. 😉

Passage notes, morning watch, 8 June 2023, 0700UTC

It’s the fourth day on passage and I’m standing in the Atlas’ pilot house gazing out of the large glass windows we meticulously resealed before setting off. As the waves pass from under our starboard quarter towards the west, I’m contemplating their fractal intricacies and modulations.

The preparation weeks in the boat yard of Minihic-sur-Rance and the marina of Bas Sablons already seem a long while away as we have fallen into the rhythm of passage making: sailing, eating, sleeping, contemplating, living in motion, meandering in and out of being together and being apart as each takes their watch.

Our route takes us north of west as we sail from France towards the shores of SW Greenland. The wind direction is unexpectedly out of NE to ENE. Earlier this year we had talked about beating upwind all the way: we’re bang in the zone of Westerly winds after all, ushering the weather systems and lows across the Atlantic from the American to the European shores. This year is different.

Atlas rolls to the waves that are reminiscent of Twoflower’s first Atlantic crossing in the trade winds. Heaving up and down with the waves passing underneath, rolling – gently most times, violently at others – with the sea boarding the leeward scuppers, washing along the bulwarks before gushing out of the fairleads frothing our wake.

The giant bronze propeller polished mirror-like before going into the water, spins in sync with Atlas’ motion through the water. An undulating background humming accompanying us at all times. It evokes in my mind memories of riding the open nostalgic cable cars in the precipitous canton of Uri in Switzerland. Often older than any of us, meticulously maintained, they take four people up the mountain in an open basket suspended over the cliffs. As they ascend and descend the mountain, they hum akin to Atlas’ prop.

Whenever near a stanchion, the cable car’s speed drops and with it the mechanical humming transmitted through the cables in unison with the carriage’s wheels turning on the guide rail just above. As we slow down just before the stanchion, the cabin riding up to it from its suspended ride in the cable, the hum drops an octave. A short breath hold — a pause in a musical piece, preceding the next crescendo — before both the cable car and the humming gain momentum in unison having passed the stanchion and continuing its journey up, ever up.

Atlas sings to a variant of the melody. A joint piece of the natural and the mechanical. We lift up from astern. Atlas gathers her skirts, surfing forward on the wave’s face. As if sat on a wooden swing slung over the branch of a stately oak tree, she’s given an inviting push by an invisible hand, surging forward joyfully before gently slowing down after the crest passed. Smiling to herself, awaiting the next wave, she is ready to swing again. Each wave, each motion a modulation of the preceding.

The wind and sea have calmed down since my last watch in the night. The Genoa I partially furled is out at its fullest once more, pulling along Atlas steadily towards our destination. The crew is asleep.

Angie