Our journey inland takes us further from the boat as we leave Spain and enter a new country on our journey East as temperatures continue to drop in Europe.
Madrid and Bilbao in Spain
Madrid is one of the most famous cities in Spain and is full of wonderful museums. Naturally, Madrid was on our list of places we need to visit! After Madrid, we drove to the city of Bilbao, a place that people seldom talk about. Honestly, Bilbao was so much more amazing than Madrid! I don’t understand why so many people talk about Madrid? Oh yeah, they haven’t see Bilbao yet!
Repairing a Rolex 5513 Original Watchband
Rivets are a wonderful fastener. Threadless and incredibly resilient. They act as both a fastener and a hinge pin, granting incredible strength and flexibility to the structures they hold together.
Rolex has used rivets in their watchbands for decades, and they hold up well to the test of time! My 5513 ran into a slight issue as time seems to have caught up with the watch.
The heads of the rivets have worn off over the decades and no longer function to fasten the watchband securely. The links simply slip off the headless rivet and risk slipping off!
In an effort to prevent the use of authentic Rolex watchbands on counterfeit watches, a watchband is a rather hard item to procure these days. I inquired about such a purchase and was told that I would have to surrender my original watchband before Rolex would sell me a replacement, that way Rolex would be assured that their new watchband made its way onto an original Rolex and not some cheap knockoff!
Listening to the advice of my watch collecting friends, I refused this offer as the original watchband is a great part of the value of the watch itself. It would be the equivalent of a classic car without the original motor block, the serial numbers of the body and motor would be different and the car is worth significantly less; this is where the term “matching numbers” comes from.
I was faced with a dilemma! If I exchanged the watchbands, I would have a sturdy replacement for my watch that I wear daily, but it would kill its value. If I keep the watch “original”, it will also be unusable, and therefore worthless for my purposes of being my watch that tells me what time it is.
The watch smith was not able to repair the watch either, as Rolex would not authorize them to do such a repair. It seemed I was left with one clear option: repair the watchband myself.
Rivets are not a novel concept to me. I worked with them extensively when I was building a wooden dinghy. I was very familiar and well practiced at the art of making a rivet, and I had all the tools at hand! In the video, I show how a rivet works and some techniques that are useful to successfully create a new rivet head on this original 5513 Rolex Submariner.
Med Mooring
The thought of squeezing in between two boats with nothing but your fenders to protect the topsides of all boats involved is rather painful. What makes it worse is the thought that you are backing up to a stone wall that will destroy your boat if you get too close!
No finger piers, no leeway, and no help from anyone until you are securely in your slip.
Sounds wonderful! No wonder they haven’t changed how they tie up in marinas in the Mediterranean for thousands of years!
Thankfully, this is the only place I have encountered this method of docking and just outside the Mediterranean, they don’t do it this way.
My first encounter with the procedure was in a marina in Spain, just inside the Mediterranean. I was given a slip that was 8cm (3.1 inches) wider than my boat (literally 8cm of leeway). Maddie, my wife, wanted us to tie up stern too so it would be easier to get on and off the boat, but this meant I had to reverse in a straight line with a full keel boat that has impressive prop walk; oh, and no bow thruster!
Our electric motor had the power to safely maneuver us into the slip but it was tricky! This is how I did it.
First: I accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to do this. There is no way I can back up in a straight line, so I made preparations for docking in a different way.
Second: I waited for the wind to be completely calm (thankfully this marina is in a place with no tide and no current).
As we approached, I jumped off our boat and climbed onto our neighbor with the spring line. Maddie stood on the stern and as soon as we were close enough she tossed the stern line to someone on shore. They pulled us in while I fended off and pulled us in at the same time to the boat next to us. Once in position, we then attached the bow mooring line which runs into the water ahead of the slip to tie us up and keep us from sliding back into the wall.
When we go to leave, we will simply untie and motor out of there with our little electric motor, but until then we are safely tucked away Med Moor Style!
When you encounter this type of docking, just remember to wait for calm conditions and take it slow. Know which way you walk and plan ahead for that so that you don’t end up walking your boat into someone else’s topsides!
Compass Light
A compass is a wonderful tool that revolutionized travel across water. Out at sea in the middle of the ocean, there are no landmarks to guide you. Steering a straight line is remarkably difficult to do, and maintaining a course is practically impossible! A compass works on the simple principle that the Earth has a magnetosphere and the compass is merely a magnet suspended in an oil bath and allowed to orient itself with the magnetic field of the Earth itself. The pretty card that tells you North, South, East, and West is just a cheap card stuck to the magnet to make it look more impressive! The truth relies on the fact that magnetism guides us across the oceans of the world!
While we are talking about magnetism, I find it important to say that we do not have a light in our compass for use at night and this was a conscious decision that we made before we left to go cruising.
Magnetism is a phenomenon that can be created with permanent magnets and also by electromagnets. The mere act of running an electrical current down a wire will produce a, albeit very small, electromagnetic field. Why would you wan’t to put a magnet next to your compass?
Yes, compasses that have lights are shielded to protect them from this influence, making it safe to have a light in your compass so that you can read it while on watch at night.
By day, we can see the compass clearly and we look at it from time to time. The sun illuminates everything and we are sailing along without any issues. This doesn’t mean that we are glued to the compass. When the sun is shining and we can see the compass, we only look at it every few hours to make sure we are still on course.
Being a sailboat, the sails are powering the boat at all times. This means that our direction of travel is not our ideal course but instead the angle to the wind that our sails are set to. We rarely steer the boat by hand as our wind steering does all of this for us. If the wind shifts, the wind steering will alter course to keep the sails to the prescribed wind angle and this means that the sails are always perfectly trimmed, even if the wind shifts.
Wind shifts are why we check the compass. If the wind shifts, we are going to start sailing on a new course and therefore need to adjust our angle to the wind to sail to the desired course. This doesn’t happen every few minutes, instead it happens every few hours, and that is when we look at the compass.
By night, the compass is dark and hard to see (but if there is a full moon, you can see the compass with ease), but this doesn’t matter because the few times on night watch that we need to check the compass, we simply turn on a flashlight and take a look! Once that is over, we turn off the flashlight and let our eyes adjust back so we can continue to enjoy the stars.
Why is the compass of little importance while on night watch? Because the stars are out. On night watch, we simply look up at the sky and locate the North Star. If the boat is maintaining its course, all night long the North Star will stay in the same area of the sky relative to the boat. For example, if the North Star is on the port side just forward of the bimini (when viewed from the helm) then all night it should stay there since the North Star doesn’t move in the night sky. If you look up and notice that it has moved to a different part of the sky (relative to the boat) then you need had a wind shift and need to adjust the sails and windvane accordingly to bring the yacht back on course.
When setting a course, the compass is necessary. I can look into the sky and see where the North Star is but I can’t set a course by it. The compass lets you set a precise course that will get you towards your desired waypoint. Since we are at the mercy of the winds, our acceptable course is +/-20 degrees of our desired course. This means that if our desired course is 80, but the winds only allow us to sail at 74, then 74 is great! If the winds shift a bit and suddenly we find ourselves down to 65, this is still fine and we keep sailing along content with our heading. If we start veering even further and start sailing along at 58, we would consider tacking to bring us somewhere between 80 and 100. We find that we sail with the best VMG (Velocity Made Good) when we are about 70* off the wind. This means that pinching just isn’t worth it for us when we are crossing an ocean. We will sail on an undesirable course for days if it sets us up for a more favorable and more comfortable tack in the future.
All the while, we rarely look at the compass and therefore do not have a light in our compass as the very slight risk that the light might throw off the compass isn’t worthwhile for an instrument that we infrequently use!
