When is an anchorage not an anchorage?

Well, thank you, and thank you for asking! So far, the sail maker has taken it upon himself to try and speak with the harbourmaster but he doesn't seem to have been in his office a great deal lately...

The sailmaker says that he has heard lots of tales of laws suddenly being created on an impromptu basis round here, has begged us not to worry too much and said that he will continue to try and see the harbourmaster to explain why it would not be in the interests of anyone to send us away with a flea in the ear just yet.

He told me to call him right away if anything else happens and so, here we sit, with me feverishly trying to complete all my webmastering commitments, in case we have to leave, although I am beginning to think we may not end up spending Christmas on a storm-tossed sea after all...

One of the other yachts that left has anchored in the Mar Menor, about half a day's sail away and has kindly depth-sounded for us (we draw 3 metres, which can be a problem) and told us he can tow us in and put us in a safe spot if we do have to leave here.

We'd love to go there - it sounds delightfully quiet and peaceful - but my problem is that I am reliant on wireless Internet access to do my work at the moment and there isn't any available at the depths we are obliged to stay in as far as we can gather. Our Internet provider is looking into it for us - they run a network of antennae right along this coast - and, if it turns out that we can get near enough to an antenna, we will very likely go there anyway but we need to have the sail fittings done first if it is possible.

If anything else interesting happens, I promise I will come back and report on it - there's nothing worse than a story with no ending except, perhaps, a story with a bad ending!

Happy New Year!

Hi Dave! We're doing fine and thank you for asking. We have heard nothing more from the harbour master or the local Guardia Civil and I have a feeling some of the local traders we confided our concerns to may have spoken up in favour of letting us stay and spend our money here!

Well, when we under sail I don't get to use the Internet, although we know people who use Iridium to do so. I have to wait for us to get within range of a WiFi antenna and be stationary. At the moment, I am a member of a WiFi provider that covers the Eastern Spanish coast from about Cartagena to somewhere south of Barcelona. The fees get cheaper the longer the period of membership you choose and you can suspend your account when you plan to be away from the network for several weeks.

You can be about 800 metres away from an antenna and pick up the signal quite well with the ordinary little USB antenna that you can buy almost anywhere for around €40 (or direct from the WiFi provider in many cases) but I have a big box-type waterproof antenna with a 220v booster in it, to allow me to be at a greater distance and get greater bandwidth. I pay roughly 40% more per month for the bandwidth (almost double T1, so very fast) and the antenna was made up for me at a cost of about €375 but most people do not need this bandwidth or to be at such a distance from the nearest access.

If you turn up in many places, these days, and have a WiFi antenna attached to your computer (they build them in to most modern laptops) you can use the scanning software that came from your WiFi antenna provider (or elsewhere) to locate all the WiFi 'hotspots' within reach.

In some cases, access is free and in others a page will come up with instructions on how to pay for the amount of time you wish to have access to the Internet through that hotspot. It can pay to shop around if there are several available in the place you are anchored. New hotspots are being created by the minute, all around the world, and it is said that one will be able to access some of them from as far away as 30 miles offshore sometime soon!

Before WiFi, I used to do all my work on board and save it to a USB memory stick and then plug the stick in at the nearest Internet cafe to wherever we stopped off. That worked fine. If you have a laptop with a WiFi antenna (whether internal or external) you will also find that many Internet cafes now offer WiFi by the half hour or hour, so you can enjoy the convenience of using your own machine and the economy of only paying for the exact amount of time you need online.

Hope this helps. All the best,

Linnet

Happy New Year Arnie!

Well, you know what they say - no news is good news! Robbie managed to break a rib at the top of his ribcage in a fall against the cockpit coaming with a very heavy capstan in his arms (he didn't like to let go of it in case it broke something!) so he is a bit tender at the moment but getting better every day - it happened about two weeks ago - and I am fine. Thank you for asking. How are you doing?

Hope you have had a great holiday time. I am about due for a holiday myself as I have been working on my latest project, a vast US shopping mall (on my own website - having wasted months building a site for a client who has not paid most of what he owed and never will by the looks of it), since the 4th of December and putting in roughly 20 hours per day with the exception of the 25th of December (I still worked a few hours!) and the 1st (I did a few hours that day too!) so I have missed out on coming to this forum, as you can imagine.

I just hope my shopping mall idea will take off as we need the commissions it will generate, if successful, to keep us afloat. Literally! The idea is to make enough out of an accumulation of very small commissions to equal a reasonable income, which need not be all that much, given that our needs are few - though wish I could say the same of the boat! Who was it who said that a boat is a black hole into which all your money disappears? He/she was so right!

My next task is to try and find out where all the free classified advertising sites are and get on them. I think I will also have to invest a little money in proper advertising but I haven't a clue where would be the best place(s) to do that, so any advice on that front would be really helpful, if you happen to know where large numbers of US residents are gathered and the advertising rates are not too scary...

I wish you, and everyone else here at this illustrious forum, a wonderful 2006.

Thank you!

You sound as though you've seen the mall! I'm fascinated as to how you knew where to look?!

Wouldn't I love that?! Still, I imagine that there's a lot of money involved in doing that- a commodity I lack in all but the most meagre quantities! When I launched a free online nautical magazine, a few years ago, I had to rely on word of mouth and it seemed to work -although slowly to begin with.

In fact, it worked so well that, within a year or so, a commercial publication threatened to sue us for using the word 'sea' in the title we had chosen and, although I still disagree that there was a case, we were in the middle of our troubles in the Azores when the e-mail arrived from their lawyer, so I withdrew it from the Internet and although I eventually put it back online as a subweb of my site, it never really recovered. One day soon I plan to re-vamp it and put it out there again. I have registered the domain name I should have had more confidence in at the time, for 10 years, so maybe this will be my year for seeing all my efforts rewarded.

Today I took over a website, domain and hosting package from a client who kept me working hard and short of cash for 6 months and then couldn't pay the balance anyway in the end, so now I have to juggle between trying to make something of that, all these malls and the magazine! Aaaargh!

Thank you for your good wishes and I wish you the gifts of health and happiness for 2006 (plus wealth if you need it, of course!) but those two things are the most important, I think (I guess us paupers always say that, huh?!).

All the best,

Linnet

As promised...

Hi there! Hope everyone is well and having as good a time as possible... Here is a link to my blog, where I have just published the rest of the story about anchoring in Torrevieja harbour as it would have taken up too much space here.

All the best,

Linnet

Hi Roy! Terribly sorry to have taken so long to respond to your question - I was ofline for a couple of years, running a restaurant/bar in a resort that didn't have any WiFi (the apartments had ADSL lines) and the telephone people said they couldn't supply us with one because they had reached saturation in our area (Illetas, Calvia, Mallorca)!
I got back online a few weeks ago but I'v only just found your post...

Our vessel is British flagged and we are both British citizens. The British consul asked what crime we had been charged with and, when I told him "none" he said "Oh well, in that case, I'm afraid I can't help you." Oh how I would have laughed if I had not been in shock...
We were told that, on Sao Miguel, the main island of the Azores, the British consul is always invited to attend searches aboard British flagged yachts. The local honorary consul on Faial did not get invited and was totally disinterested in what had happened to us - perhaps also because we were not criminals and, therefore, there was no procedure in place...

We're still fixing the boat, even now! In the evenings I'm working on a campaign to lobby the European Parliament over the increasing tendency to put down, and charge for, mooring buoys around Europe, limiting stays to less than 5 days which is causing havoc amongst some local working live-aboard sailors... so far so interesting - we have called it the Free Sea Pass campaign, the idea being to exempt live-aboard saiors from paying ridiculously high fees and being moved on within a week. I don't know if we will get anywhere with it but it is proving very interesting to do...

The boat has a new mascot, Sweetie Pie, a ginger and white cat... the perfect companion and a darned good sailor (well, he doesn't get sick and he stays out of the way during sail changes - it's a start!)
Cheers! Linnet
P.S. Sorry! I forgot to say, hi Arniev and thanks for your greeting - sorry I missed it at the time!

Thanks Arnie! Lovely to hear from you, too. Hope you are well and having a lovely summer (of course, that goes for everyone else here too, naturally!