The Voyage of the Mighty Tenho: June 2013

“There’s something in the water!” Those words have always meant some exciting new discovery, something new to learn. This time, however, was a bit different. We were just past Gibraltar and three miles off the coast of Spain, when my dad’s 74 year old eagle eyes spotted something in the water. “There’s something in the water! It look like a stick?” Ten seconds closer and Hugo exclaimed “it looks like a lost dinghy!” Seconds later, through the binoculars, I could see a person in a red life jacket. Instantly, we did a quick turn to take down the sails and went alongside and John yelled down “do you need help?” Ummm….man in 65°F (18°C) water clinging to kayak with no paddle three miles from land drifting into the Atlantic Ocean? Ya think maybe he needs help? The rescue was easy…Hugo helped prep a line and get the swim ladder into the water while John put the kayak on the lee side of the boat so the man could grab the rope. Luckily he’d been able to pull his upper body out of the water and up onto the kayak so he wasn’t completely hypothermic, and minutes later we’d pulled him (and his kayak) up onto the boat. We wrapped him in a sleeping bag and warm hat, and Hugo practiced his Spanish asking him questions. Turns out he’d lost his paddle in 3 to 4 meter seas and spent 2 hours hanging onto his kayak in the water. Somewhere in the story was also a paddling friend and family, one of whom alerted the Spanish Coast Guard when Mr. Kayaker was overdue (we never did get his name). The Coast Guard had been looking for him a couple of miles away along the shore, but instantly came over when we called them. We met up with them near the shore in calmer seas and transferred man and boat. The whole episode was less than 45 minutes long, and before we knew it, we had the sails back up and had resumed our trip to the Azores.

Two hundred miles off the Azores came the next “there’s something in the water!” It looked like a Chinese cargo ship had lost a load of wontons or frozen shrimp overboard. Maybe from the “Great Happy” cargo ship we’d passed in the night? (Who comes up with a name like that for a cargo ship anyway?) We fished one out and saw it was a small snail, surrounded by a huge mass of eggs and air bubbles. Where did the snails come from and where could those tiny snail larvae possibly hope to end up?

My favorite “there’s something in the water” moment was in Marina de Ragusa in Sicily. Maggie was on the pier next to the boat when she suddenly yelled “There’s something in the water…it looks like an UNDERWATER FLYING DRAGON!” It was about 6 inches long and I’ll be darned if the dark blackish thing didn’t have a squarish head, two horns, and moved through the water by flapping rounded wings on either side of its body. Just like an flying dragon. A Google search later, we discovered it was a sea hare, although we decided someone obviously wasn’t very imaginative if they thought the things on its head looked more like rabbit ears than dragon horns.

But now, we’ve come to the last of our water discoveries on this trip. Here we are, finally, in the Azores, exactly eight days and 1200 miles after leaving Cartagena, Spain. What a long trip. The first few days we clawed our way against wind and currents, then a few days of glorious ocean sailing, followed by motoring into the wind. But here we are, and just one short week in Ponta Delgada, and then I’ll be on a plane with my kids and the cat back to the US, leaving John and my two brothers-in-law to bring Tenho back to the Chesapeake.