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These are the voyages of the sailing vessel Pétillant. Her original eight-month mission: to sail from Baltimore to France via Florida and the Bahamas, to successfully navigate the shoals of the French douane, to boldly go where few Maine Coon cats have gone before was completed in 2008. Now she is berthed in Port Medoc and sails costal Spain, France, and the UK during the summer months.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Where Are My Ruby Slippers?


We are back home after our travels to Spain. We had a wonderful trip sailing and tasting tapas and local wines along the northern coast of Spain as far as the city of Gijon. For the most part the weather was very nice although we had cloudy weather once we got to the area around Gijon.

We took our time and did not get nearly as far as we thought we would get, Portgual. We had to be back at Les Raymonds for repair of a wall on our barn so after a month away, we headed back from the Spanish town of Hondaribia to Port Medoc, a sail that was about 33 hours. Wind and waves were not good and we slogged our way north to be able to be home by June 16th. Calypso, shown here in her perennial state of drooling, really suffered on the way back.

When we got home, we found our telephone pole had been struck by lightning and we had no phone or internet. It took France Telecom 11 days and 3 trips to repair it. We had service for 2 days when the pumper truck delivering cement for our barn repair cut the line so once again no service for 4 more days. All but our TV antenna is operational now, so I will be able to post highlights from our trip until we leave for the US next week.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Alone, Alone, All Alone




We have had not internet access during our trip to be able to answer email or post anything on the blog. We are currently in Gijon, Spain and have paid 10 euros to get connected for 24 hours. The trip has been wonderful. The weather excellent for the first leg and cloudy when we hit the mountainous areas as expected. We decided to stay at a marina in Gijon and rent to car for 3 days to go inland. We went to Leon, Santiago de Compostella, and Picos de Europa. We have learned how to take moorings, tie up to a wall for the night and put out enough but not too much line to accommodate 10 foot tides. Until Thursday, we have been the only boat in any port we have pulled into. Tomorrow we head back to Port Medoc as we need to be home by June 19th. Some images of our trip go uploaded today at our flickr site.