The Juggler

When dreams come true the truth is not always what we dreamt. In fact it seldom is.

If we dream too much or far, the dream always catches us by surprise when we least expect it, revealing our worst defects, and the water pounds against the stone so hard, that it hurts. 

Nobody wants to get rid of that old dream, to be modest, to recognize it isn't necessary. Tell me, who wants this?

Who doesn't want to be the prince enchanted, the lucky bloke who wins the lottery, the happy mom with a perfect son, or someone special themselves, who drives a Maseratti and is always in company of beautiful people... what if you have to look into the mirror and see you ate too much at Christmas, and drank too much the whole year round, and now you've got a huge stomach and are boring, and getting old? Ouch...

Life demands from us that we drive our army against ourselves once in a while.

It is essential to balance things. Modesty is essential. Alike humor.

So we're lucky if we dream little - cause mystery always brings us abundance, which guarantees gratitude.

And that's what happened to Paul, and he really deserved it. He's a real juggler.

Morning Glory sailed all over the Tirrenium Sea. I even had the courage - or the madness - to sail it alone with an inexperient crew, no nautical chart at all, to Liguria. It was Paul's ultimate jealousy test - for the boat and for myself. He obviously failed. That is, I failed.

But I was sincere indeed - this kind of courage is my nature. And although the crew was a young and desirable Italian, all I wanted was to fall into his arms. That was all.

To HAVE

So what's the use of HAVING something? That's my question, as usual - and this time, we're talking about a boat! Question is: after the purchase - what do we DO to what we have? Huge responsibility, I thought. 
I wasn't wrong.

A sailing boat's maintenance is something costly. The idea was chartering. That meant we were supposed to do what we did to others, for ourselves. I wasn't keen on the idea, and I was sincere. But that was the fulfillment of a dream... participating was WELL WORTH IT.
But having to cope with futile people who live off reality and go on charters wearing high heels and can't take salty water sprinkled on their fashion clothes is simply a drag. 

We were in La Maddalena when Paul first saw Morning Glory, a 43 foot-Sparkman Stevens, with its typical wide cheeks - excellent for going against the wind - simply beautiful, but apparently abandoned. Someone told us it was left there after its German owners divorced. 
After some contacts, there we go on my good old Renault, towards the Alps of Germany, until we got to Garmisch-Partenkirshen. There, we met the boat owner, this really scared lady, with two children, who promptly took the offer, and was extremely generous in offering us a place to stay and the staple German diet: potato salad with sausage.
That is how we bought a yacht in a mountain area, with snow up to our knees, in just 30 minutes  - no bureaucracy.
This fact made us face what it is TO HAVE. It is certainly a verb that's been used forever to socially define all human condition. And I wonder - what is it to have a home? Or a family? What is it to have a love? What about having cancer - what is it? What is it to have a child? 

Is this all about having, meaning = owning, valuing, and consequently, judging? Shouldn't we instead use a better expression for it, such as "BEING GIFTED BY LIFE"? 

Limbo

Tell me if you agree - aren't we humans quite greedy? Why do we need more and more all the time? What's this talk about evolution and stuff???
The moment we realize the dream is fulfilled is crucial. The seed of continuity is there. I call this moment limbo. The first feeling is satisfaction. Then, other feelings come along: we feel desperate, desolate, sad, as if love had ended. But beware... love does not equal passion. If we accept all this nihilism, we might end up believing nothing was worth the try. But that is not so.
The limbo is permanently pregnant.
Even before the new dream comes into mind we have already planted the seed. That is the exact magical moment when the embryo breaks the shell. The secret of sustainability is therefore revealed: adaptability, love, the will to live, cooperation, a healthy mind and devotion.
That was what happened after Alzavola.
We used to say 'we've done so much, and yet there's so much to do. But not like this. It has to be some other way'.
That's when we met Lucca, a dentist from Bologna, who collects old motorbikes. He pulled my wisdom teeth out with such precision that only half an hour later, I was already having pizza. He did it with a tool hat looked like a corkscrew. My biting was so wrong, he took me to a bunch of specialists who stood there and examined me as a rare case, since it had affected my mouth muscles. Curious thing is, Paul and I had never noticed it before.
Lucca became a good friend of Paul's and invited us to work at the beach to sell ice cream and pannini, and also offered a place to stay in La Madallena, a tiny little island right on the north of Sardinia. Look at the picture and guess what our answer was.
Sardinia is this island with magnificent stones and diamond-clear sea water, with very simple inhabitants who speak Sardo - which sounds nothing like Italian - loads of wild boars, highly expensive resorts, and no trees left, besides cork.
Our neighbors would call us once in a while to have diner. The guy simply said “ayow” and op, we're invited. He would serve us this terrible homemade wine and the lady served delicious and unforgettable pasta, such as the large raviolli filled with  sheep's milk ricotta and lemon, served with a roast meat sauce. There was also the fettuccine with bird's heads sauce. Obviously the dining room was so dark I only discovered I had been eating bird's heads sometime after eating them.
So we gathered money to fulfill our new dream: our own boat. Better said, that was Paul's dream. We got it.
However, it wasn't my dream. At that time I was already thinking about returning to Brazil. Shame I was so young and didn't know how to appreciate that moment as much as I should. But it was worth it. And how.

That's me at the gelatti stand

Alzavola

And then we left Europe in Alzavola. She is what you can call a "Cozy Classic": 77 feet of 4 cm thick Burmese teak, well kept by her meticulous owner, the highly respected Enrico Zaccagni, a Florentine architect, and meteorology freak - or just Chicco, simple as that. And simple he is. A real pirate at soul.
Note: a pirate, and yet, a ham radio. This pirate wasn't into letting his hair fly in the wind. He disseminated words - in Italian - through the seven seas.

It is well worth knowing this Philip & Son ketch was originally built in 1924 for Sir Walter Ramsey Kay in Dartmouth, and Zaccagni embraced her 36 years ago as Gracie III.

I have not much left to say. It is sailing with people like Chicco, a real poet of the sea, and Nicole, a great Italian cook, aboard boats like Alzavola, which is a dream come true and well kept, that make sailing worth it for anything in the world.
Better remind ourselves, though, that we're also worth something.  

Cheers and Thanks Life, for what you give.

Chicco and his crew aboard the Alzavola

Less is More

In Antibes we worked aboard Speedy Go for a while. She was this beautiful Maxi racer transformed into a luxury yacht, with interior all built in pear wood, lined with a white carpet. Fancy stuff. Owned by some Italian politician we never met. Needless to say I worked my ass off. A couple - Italians - came aboard - Cinzia and Piero. She used to make the most delicious sandwiches in the whole wide world. At the end we were offered to join them taking the boat to the Pacific, but we kindly refused, which proved to be good. Later we heard Cinzia left Piero behind and ran away with the Australian bloke they hired instead.

As if that wasn't enough I also worked aboard other sailboats. Aboard Arayan I improved my cooking skills and learned to enjoy the admirable cave full of Chablis...

Arayan also took us to a race in St. Tropez where I had the joy of sailing alongside Eric Tabarly in his Pen Duick. He was such a beautiful man - smiling, simple, positive, just a privilege to be around. A bit later (1998) he disappeared in the middle of the sea.

It's difficult to accept endings mentally, but it's something we have to learn. It helps thinking less is more.

Tabarly aboard his Pen Duick

Freedom

Saved by the gong. And there we go embarked aboard the Maxi Speedy Go, with very playful people, and Phillipe Barbé, the sweet smart French captain. All we had to do was never say the word lapin - since the guy ripped off all rabbit recipes from the book aboard - and also never do anything important on a Friday. Seafarer superstitions taken to an extreme. The route was Faial - Gibraltar - Malaga (excellent sherry) and finally Antibes. And what a yacht! With a nice aft wind we could surf and reach up to 20 knots.

And how awesome Côte D'Azur is! 
At Port Vauban, in Antibes (check it out), you can see snow on top of the Alps when the  Mistral blows. With the castle in the background it looks astonishing. We ended up renting an apartment cause we got a permanent job working in Speedy Go... after delivery.
We had something magical happening to us there. 
One day we went to the beach and out of the blue we started climbing up the remparts - that is, the stone wall that surrounds the city. When we reached the top we saw closely a sea petrel crashed onto the wall, looking very scared. We immediately decided to fetch him and saw he must have lost the ability to fly due to a thick pine resin covering part of his feet and wings - southern France is full of pine trees.  

We then took the bird to the boat and started to try and clean it. He was really stressed. We tried soap and water, alcohol and finally, we managed to remove almost all with  triclor-ethylene, and finished the operation with Brazilian talc powder called polvilho antisséptico Granado. The annoyed animal was biting Paul's hands the whole time but he withstood it with courage. We took the bird to the deck, where there was a parking place, and put the petrel on top of a car. I remember it as if it were yesterday: the squeaking sounded like a tantrum and indeed, it looked pretty pissed off. All of a sudden the bird flew low on the water. At first it looked like it was going to drown. But then it started to rise, and rise, and rise... until it disappeared onto the sky.
It was such a rewarding scene - so good to free such a creature - that this feeling became imprinted on my soul. Good to share it with you.

Towards the Unknown

Note In the previous post I fast-forwarded two years. This post is beginning of 1991, when we left Saint Marteen.

The bridge led us to the unknown, towards the Island of Faial, in the Azores. 
Aboard Malaika - and I rightfully and obviously forgot the skipper's name - we went through the Bermuda Triangle, and through the Sargassum Sea, which is an immensity of water covered by brown algae, suicidal flying fish, and a bizarre magnetism that drives instruments crazy. So our German skipper wasn't very happy facing that place's fame, and the slow improvement caused by the seaweed. 
After this part there's another one where you see thousands of jellyfish - highly toxic  creatures with an external sail-like bright pink to purple colored part. They're called Portuguese Men of War - and they're indeed aggressive to touch. 
So eventually the Captain received a weatherfax that flashed the approach of a strong depression, with 980 millibars in the core, and we all saw the barometer dropping fast, so he decided to change course towards the east. The move proved to be useless at that point and the storm caught us fully.
The sea had middle size breaking waves; the horizon was swallowed by some grey-brown color that tinged both the sea and the sky. We tied the tiller, went under cover and found some stability placing the storm sail and a very reduced main. 
Since there was nothing to do in that weather, I thought: let's make some biscuits.
The crew loved it and devoured many. The skipper thought it quite inappropriate and threw the remaining bikies in the trash bin. 
People change at sea. Defects have nowhere else to go: they're there and they're obvious. Those who are afraid of nature shouldn't go sailing. At sea you see how small and fragile we are. And yet, we crew could see the positive in it,  and felt we deserved to be alive.
You need a humble character to live at sea.
Bad weather ended after three biscuitless days. We arrived at the Island of Faial astonished at those awesome islands standing in the middle of the North Atlantic and also at the bad moods of that furiously uncontrolled man. Poor him - he didn't know Portuguese-speaking people are strongly bound. 
Customs was readily advised of the situation. International law establishes that at sea, the captain is responsible for his crew. That means he can't dump them anywhere he wishes, unless he pays for repatriation costs. So, that man found himself a pub where he drowned while we stayed there.
The Archipelago of the Azores is a 9 island composition located at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The islands have varied landscapes, but the majority is covered with green fields that resemble Scotland in summer, covered in hills and mountains where sheep and cattle graze, and a very gentle people live peacefully, in small but picturesque villages. People also tell many sea tales and history is abundant. I wouldn't be able to handle it all in a blog.

It is a great, pure and familiar Nature worth getting acquainted to, which I will certainly do before I leave this place for good.

Physalia physalis

Bad Weather at Sea

Sargassus Sea Map

East Coast of  the Island of  Saint George, in the Azores