kateandjohnsail.boats

We have again had the pleasure of sharing our Quintessa adventures with fellow sailors. Joe and Heather have crewed regularly with us on Iris, racing on the Columbia River on Sunday afternoons. They joined us in Malta and we journeyed together to Cagliari, in southern Sardinia. Finding each other to be quite compatible as travel…

Hello blog readers, I’m beginning to wonder about you. That APRIL 1st post about A.N.C.H.O.R. preservation was supposed to be satire, but apparently the silliness was not sufficiently applied. Seriously, I was certain the word salad regarding “technodiversity” and reference to propagation would be called out by someone (gtberne, where were you?). The true part…

We have returned to Sicily, land of, among other things, lemons, volcanoes, and ceramics. When we were here last year, I noticed, in every shop window and on every balcony, pairs of ceramic planters in the shape of heads, lavishly decorated with crowns, jewelry, or fruit. What on earth? Sit down and listen to the…

Traveling along the south coast of Italy, it came time to stop for the day in a place where there was no harbor or even a little bay. This particular day, while we were sad to be motoring due to the absence of wind, we also had the most serene water ever—we kept commenting it…

Did you know St. Barbara is the patron saint of artillery? And of miners and anyone who works with explosives? Also armourers, military engineers, bomb disposal experts, tunners, geologists, firefighters, and first responders. I did not know any of this either! Barbara is also a protector against lightning, thunder, and fire, and some gunners call…

Here’s an item for the “better late than never” department. Because there is only so much storage space on Quintessa, we had been keeping my folding bike assembled and lashed to the rail, even when we sailed. In hindsight I can tell you this is not a nice thing to do to a bike you…

Now and again we will come across a bitty little island like this one, and on that bitty little island will be a stout and venerable lighthouse steadfastly keeping seafarers safe. Which begs many questions: How often does a human have to service that outpost, and how do they get up there? (There is no…

Well, that just happened. We are on our way from Sicily to Valetta, to explore Malta, get a few boat things, and eventually pick up our next visitors. We are motoring (sigh) because although there is enough wind to sail, it is directly on the nose and we don’t have time to tack back and…

This new change to Quintessa is not glamourous, but falls under the category of making a safer boat. Pictured here is our life raft, in its new location. If we should need to deploy it in an emergency, the procedure would be to pull a pin in the top rail so that the container falls…

If you read the last post, about our family’s visit with us in Crete, you know that we braved through nearly two weeks of daily rain and wind. After the family left, we saw even worse stormed predicted, and we caught a break in the weather to shoot out of Chania. In an overnight sail,…