Feliz Navidad a Todos!

Wishing you a very happy Christmas and a colourful New Year, we hope to see at least some of you in 2010 and perhaps even aboard the good ship Impulse - ?!

With much love from us x K8 n Casper eeeeeeeee,eeeeee

La Graciosa in pictures

Downtown Graciosa

Lagoon at low tide

Playa Francesa

Footloose

Rainbow at Montana Amarilla

We have arrived!

Dear all, just so you know and can sleep tightly (!) we had a safe and even enjoyable passage back to La Graciosa, that oh so gentle island. The winds were kind and the seas even more so. All is well. More later x c n k

ps...

On passage now to Lanzarote (where we fly back from), not a brilliant prospect given that it is NE from here and that the prevailing winds are also NE. The good thing is that the forecast is for light airs so we can head up more than we could with stiffer winds. No offence Mum but we are glad ur not with us so we might have an sail "mas tranquillito"! Besos para todos xxx

Back to La Gomera

Beating into it, El Teide of Tenerife in the distance

Well this is a nasty little sail on a wicked little sea! Stiff wee waves are frothing at the mouth with knuckle white crests clawing back their heads, hanging on for dear life. If only they could decide where they were going but some are going this way and others tother making a merry confusion and slapping our nacelle rather hard!

Nanas of La Palma

We were unimpressed with La Palma – even in the knowledge of its annual 132 million kilo banana turnover – and in the end the prospect of beating into a mucky sea with a headwind was better than staying at the “marina” on the pontoon that ate through our lines and prevented us from walking in a straight line.

Moon rising over the toblerone cliffs of La Gomera

We are back in San Sebastian de La Gomera (since with the current wind direction we couldn’t make it anywhere else we liked). This town really is becoming a favourite. Early this morning I wandered the back streets, mostly up and down flights of crooked steps adorned with tubs of hearty geraniums. There’s a surprising number of stray cats and tumbley down cottages. The few main streets empty out into a big square that is completely dead between noon and five but electric with life thereon. I sat there this morning and sketched the huge trees that give shade to the East side of the square. The waitress served me a “branquito” (without the “liquor”, I insisted, given it was not quite 9 o’clock). Out came this drink (I had never had it before). It looks like any other “café con leche” served in a small glass but my god what a concoction. When I enquired, all starry eyed, the waitress assured me there was no alcohol in it – just coffee, condensed milk, lemon peel and cinnamon. The strangest thing was that it tasted good.

El Capitan in La Gomera

The rest of the day was spent jobbing. Washing, fixing, sewing, sawing etc etc etc. A night-time excursion to dunk long thin doughnut-like “churros” in thick hot chocolate followed by some serious people watching whilst clasping our bellies vowing never to eat anything deep fried ever again. Day off tomorrow as the Christmas market has come to town!

Webbed Feet in the Banana Republic

Santa Cruz de la Palma, bananas and rain.

All I can think is that we are being broken in for our return to Devon. We are in (the currently very wet) La Palma at the North Western end of the Canaries cluster. From our (currently very bumpy) berth at the (currently under construction) marina at Santa Cruz I am watching the blankets of rain roll in, from the North East (from Devon in fact). Out to sea the muddy sky is breaking open and puddles of blue are appearing, tantalisingly promising some hope of better weather. But when I look back at the island, it’s hard to believe that it holds a beautiful mountainous core rising to over 2500 metres – all I see is an uninteresting hill standing in front of a bank of fog (I could be in Plymouth).

Sheltering from the rain in a banana grove.

We have spent several days attempting to dodge (mostly unsuccessfully) the bulbous clouds botoxed with rain. I’m sure it’s all very beautiful here – if only you could see it. I’m whingeing, sorry – inexcusable really given the amounts of sunshine I’ve been blessed with just recently - and I should mention that we did see something quite spectacular yesterday on the Southern end of the national park. At the col of La Cumbrecita we watched banks of clouds whir in from the sea, skate across the mountain top and tumble into the valley where they lay, thick like whipped cream and strangely suspended above the villages beneath.

Cloudscape at La Cumbrecita.

With all this rain La Palma is, needless to say, very lush. Flowers abound (and it’s winter). There’s a curious mixture of pines, brooms, bracken with succulents, bougainvillea, drifts of bright orange climbers with trumpet-like flowers. Driving up the foggy mountain, with copper coloured leaves falling all around, the road rusty at its edges with plants losing their summer green, we realised that we’d missed autumn. It’s a strange thing to be constantly travelling South. When you’re in one place you witness the seasons changing and therefore can make sense of time passing. But we have cheated this process and the result is disorientating. It’s hard to explain.


There are other aspects of this life at sea that are also bewildering, leading to some soul searching. We build nothing, we plant nothing, we are not part of any community. Our lives on the ocean are transient, we touch everything lightly, taking little but also we give little back. There is a pointlessness to cruising (note the meaning of the word itself) which I find disconcerting. But then, I suppose, life itself is rather pointless when you look at it with logic, and perhaps all the things we achieve (building, planting, knitting booties for the next generation) all give us a sense of purpose, which helps us survive the strange enigma of our lives (we are given life and at some point it is taken away). In this sense then, our voyage is enlightening although not necessarily in a comforting way.

Balconies in Santa Cruz
(apparently where the loo was in olden days, nice)

Church in Santa Cruz.

Impulse is like our very own time-travel machine, moving us through different seasons, climates, geographical zones and cultures. We have seen places that have long been devastated by the greed and opulence of mass tourism. Others are at the very beginning of this process. Yesterday we drove through a strikingly beautiful lava field. Peppered with bright yellow diggers, it is about to be carved up for a housing development, undoubtedly to attract foreign investors. But who am I to deny a small island its chance of achieving greater wealth? It is just sad to witness irreversible changes being inflicted on yet another landscape.

Poinsettia and cobbles in San Andres

Two Reefs Ruddle the Stugeron Queen

Two Reefs Ruddle at the helm

Taking a break...

I swear that everytime we went on passage with my mother (a history of seasickness, feels ill in the bath) we were down to two reefs in the main on a stinky sea. The important thing is though that she survived it and seems quite happy to join us again… Thankfully in between the two uncomfortable day passages we made (Tenerife to La Gomera then La Gomera to La Palma) Old Man Sea granted us a stint of hot almost windless days allowing us to drop the hook in some lovely bays.

Home for one night.

There is nothing quite like wild anchoring, especially when you are the only boat in the cove. Days become timeless as you busy yourself with the important things in life: catching fish, preparing food, swimming, exploring, gazing at the stars, sitting still, thinking…
We had one especially good day anchored off an abandoned fish factory now inhabited by a Belgium revolutionary. I went spear fishing and caught three parrot fish which Val cleaned up and Casper cooked over the barbeque.

Parrot fish - almost too beautiful to eat.

The night, not dulled by artificial lights, revealed a moon that was just off full and a parallel world of tiny stars. Magic…

Moon rising above the cliff

Our grinning Stugeron Queen Val