Chapter Five: In Which We Spectacularly Break Down

After a week of working like loons to get our boat ready for our intended mid-July departure, we careened into the July 4th weekend at about 100 miles per hour. 

Theoretically, the weekend devoted to America’s independence day should not really matter in our new European life, but because Ángel was still working for an American company, this meant a couple of extra days without the late night work calls. Also, the current garbage-fire of American political life was making this a particularly painful and poignant Fourth for me. What once was my second-favorite holiday after Christmas now felt completely wrong. I thought back to prior July Fourths spent joyfully barbecuing, watching fireworks, and eating angel food cake smothered in white whipped cream and red and blue berries. It felt like another universe. This year, I felt like just sticking a bag over my head and hanging in there until November. 

We decided to use the long weekend to drive from our marina in Eastern Crete to Rethymno and Chania, two of the historic cities in the west of the island. Rethymno is about 2 hours west of Agios Nikolaos and Chania is another hour further east. 

It was on this trip that I think we really hit our rock bottom (thank God not literally- maybe that’s a phrase I should purge from my vocabulary while sailing…).

I blame the heat. 

I blame the fact that Ángel got a really bad haircut. 

But most of all, I blame the ridiculous expectations and pressure we were putting on ourselves. 

We weren’t listening to the rhythm of the island and we were forcing ourselves to cram far too much into each day. We weren’t listening to our own tired bodies and we weren’t giving ourselves the time to adjust to our new life on a boat. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I share the lessons we learned from our meltdown, I should share the meltdown itself. 

I present to you: “A Break Down in Three Parts.” 

Part I: Ángel and Kate Break Down

It all began when we left on Friday for Rethymno. It. Was. Hot. Like the type of hot that makes you do a quick cost-benefit analysis before undertaking any sort of movement.  My phone registered 33 degrees Celsius with a “RealFeel” temperature of 38. I  intended to look up what that meant in Fahrenheit…. but it was too hot to muster the energy. (I later learned that was about 91 Fahrenheit with a RealFeel of more like 100.) Now before you scoff that this isn’t THAT bad (I know many of you in the Central Valley are toasting with 100+ temps right now), I want you to remember that we have no air conditioning on the boat. But even more than the heat, it’s also just the pure strength of the sun. The UV index registers at 11 (“Extreme”) almost every single day. Being in direct sunlight for more than about 10 minutes makes you feel like your skin is literally crisping up in front of your eyes. 

We arrived in Rethymno hot and cranky, but our mood brightened considerably when we walked into the courtyard of our charming hotel, Casa dei Delfini, a beautiful refurbished Ottoman mansion in the old town of Rethymno. They had upgraded our room since the COVID situation still meant there were hardly any tourists, and we blasted the A/C and began unpacking, delighted to find that our room included a bathroom converted from a Turkish hammam. 

You’d think that all this would have been enough to make us happy, but only twenty minutes after arriving, we began quarreling. I honestly don’t entirely remember what the fight was about. I think we just couldn’t agree on a plan and both of us were tired, hungry, cranky and hot. I wanted to go swimming; I think Ángel wanted to film the streets in the Old Town. He was sulky from a (truly horrible) haircut. I was tired from weeks of not sleeping well on our (hard as a rock) mattress.

For some reason in Greece, the typical haircut is like a reverse mullet: party on the top; short and serious in the back. It was… not a good look.

“Well, then let’s just each do our own thing. It’s not like we have to do everything together.”

“Sure. Fine. I’ll see you later.”

“Fine.”

We grouchily parted, both making sure to show how very “fine” we were. 

I walked down to the spot I’d seen when we drove in: a rocky entrance to a cove where people were swimming in the ocean across from the Venetian fortress walls that surround the city.   

I did not have a peaceful swim. I stewed. I composed long arguments about how right I was/am/always will be and how wrong Ángel was/is/always will be. I anger-swam around, only partly taking in the incredible surroundings, crystal clear water, and great good fortune that allowed me to even be in Greece at all. 

When I emerged from the water, my anger had subsided slightly, beginning to be replaced with sheepish acknowledgement that we were both acting completely childish. I walked through the streets, sticky with salt and growing more remorseful by the minute. I chastised myself for taking for granted the incredible opportunity to be LIVING ON A BOAT IN GREECE. This was my dream, right? So why was I feeling so discombobulated all the time? Why were we picking fights when usually we truly cherish each others’ company?

As the evening cooled, our tempers cooled as well and we reconciled. We talked about how much change we had been dealing with, and how little time we had spent processing these changes. 

In March, our world had shrunk down to our one bedroom apartment where we spent months with just the two of us. For many, lockdown posed incredible challenges, but we had been quite fortunate. Without children, with jobs that easily converted to remote working, and thankfully with no friends and family affected by the virus, we spent the quarantine in a tranquil cocoon with little changing from one day to the next. Then when we arrived in Crete, we had been greeted by such a barrage of immediately necessary tasks that we had little time to see or think about the huge shift in every aspect of our life. 

So finally, over a long dinner, we talked about what we liked about Crete, what we liked about the boat, what was working, what felt too hard, what wasn’t working, what we missed about San Francisco (easy: family, friends, and Mexican food), and how to make a little more space for us to acknowledge our feelings instead of just putting our heads down and working harder. 

I admitted how much trouble I’d been having sleeping. I told Ángel that it was hard for me to be out of my comfort zone and to feel like I was failing all the time because I didn’t know as much as him about the boat systems or about sailing. He told me that I was learning, not failing (a very hard distinction for me). He told me that the heat was very hard for him, and that he was still learning how to deal with having a never-ending to-do list and how to feel like he was spending his time in the right way.

We’d been bottling up so many emotions and resisting acknowledging so much change. When we let go of some of this pressure and acknowledged that even though living on a boat in Greece was our dream, some things were still damn hard, I could finally breathe. That night, I slept well for the first time in many nights. 

The next day, we picked up our still-fragile fledgling feelings and drove to Chania. The difference between exploring Crete on holiday and exploring Crete while living aboard a sailboat is that the vacationer would likely come to Chania to see the Venetian harbor, the Mosque of the Janissaries, the lighthouse and the beautiful Old Town. We had come to buy a life raft. 

Clockwise from top left: (1) Rooftops of the old town; (2) Getting water from the Mosque of the Janissaries; (3) Chania lighthouse; (4) Chania Venetian-style harbor; (5) Mosque of the Janissaries (no longer a mosque, this is now an art exhibit space)

When we were in Heraklion the previous weekend, we had met with Demitrius, proprietor of Safety First!, a marine life raft company based in Chania. He had given our our 30+ year life raft one look and told us it was toast. He offered to sell us one that he had in his shop that was one year old for a substantial discount (if we pay in cash of course), so we arranged to meet him the following weekend in Chania. 

We arrived at the designated time and place for what we thought was going to be a quick side-of-the-road transaction only to realize that the place was a coffee shop and the plan was to have a coffee and chat with Demitrius.

Doing business in crete

We talked about Crete, about our plans, about his time as a merchant marine. When he learned I was American, he told me he had fond memories of the jazz clubs in New Orleans in the 1970s. He told us about traveling all over the world but then changing his lifestyle completely when he had a family. He now stays firmly planted in Crete, operating a small business servicing life rafts for cruise ships, the Greek naval base at Souda, and for cruising boats like us. 

After an hour or so, he told us to follow him to his shop. Here, he was far more interested in having us taste the tomatoes growing outside his warehouse than in talking business. When Angel tried to tell him that he should have a website so more people could find him, he completely ignored the suggestion, acting as if he hadn’t heard it. 

demetrius’ tomatoes – I can report that they were very delicious

We have since come to understand that this is the Cretan lifestyle. Demitrius has more than enough business through authentic connections and word of mouth to provide for his family and to run a reliable, profitable small business. He saw no need to expand and no value in our Silicon Valley way of thinking. This very clearly was not a man interested in websites or search engine optimization. 

We began to realize that, in addition to all the changes in our lifestyle, we also needed to recognize the changes in the cultural context in which we now live. I’ll leave for another blog post a more fleshed out assessment of the trade-offs between cultures as different as Silicon Valley and Crete, but suffice it to say here, Demitrius and his tomatoes have stayed with us in our minds, a bellwether of the kind of “work-to-live, not live-to-work” mentality that we would come to see more of in Crete. 

Part II: The Car Breaks Down

Life raft successfully acquired, we spent the following morning exploring some of the ancient sites in the Chania area, including the ancient Greek city state of Aptera and the abandoned Ottoman Koules fortress. 

But after several hours in the brutal heat, we decided to drive south to a rural mountain restaurant that specialized in farm-to-table Cretan cookery. Think stewed goat in rich tomato sauce, fresh crunchy cucumber and tomato salads, smoky charred eggplant smothered in olive oil and feta. Or at least, that is what I assume we would have eaten had we ever made it to the restaurant…

One of the problems with using Google Maps in Crete is that, if you’re out in the countryside, the most direct way from Place A to Place B will often involve rocky dirt paths that wind through the olive groves and are really more of a road in theory than in practice. I think even a 4-wheel drive truck would have struggled on some of the suggested roads, and our toy-like little Hyundai didn’t stand a chance. We re-routed ourselves off the dirt paths and began climbing the steep mountain roads to cross the range that separated us from the restaurant. At this point, I glanced down at the gauge and saw two worrying things: (1) after all the back-tracking and re-routing, we were now out of gas and driving in reserve and (2) the engine heat was registering off the gauge. Trying to remain calm, I asked Ángel to navigate us to the nearest gas station, and we set off toward more of the rocky mountain paths. 

And this is when we learned one of the other problems with using Google Maps in rural Crete: when we arrived at what was listed on Maps as a gas station, we were greeted with a dirt path going off into the bush. 

“You’re sure this doesn’t lead to a gas station?” I said hopefully. 

Ángel just looked at me. 

No, I agreed. That road lead into to a bunch of trees and an abandoned shack and definitely not to a gas station. 

At this point, I was getting a bit panicked. We had driven further on reserve to get to this gas-station-that-isn’t-a-gas-station and now I was skeptical of all the other options. 

Very helpful map we found while trying to find a gas station. IN some ways, it conveyed our situation perfectly

We decided we’d have to drive back to the outskirts of Chania, retracing our steps 17 kilometers in the opposite direction of the restaurant. We resigned ourselves that we likely would not be eating roasted goat anytime soon and started driving back. 

But at this point the engine began making weird shuddering noises and I became convinced we were going to overheat and explode the engine. I have no idea if that is even possible, but that didn’t stop my hyperactive imagination from spinning up scenarios involving exploding shards of overheated metal flying through the bright blue Cretan sky.

We kept driving, searching for shade, but with the midday sun directly overhead, there simply was none. We drove for almost ten nerve-wracked minutes before we finally found a small patch of shade by the side of the road. We pulled the car over, opened up the hood, opened the engine coolant, peered inside… and it was 100% empty. 

(I have since learned by the way that this is a major no-no. Apparently, if the engine is overheating, the coolant can bubble up and spray into your face, possibly scalding you so you should never open the coolant, much less stick your face in front of it. Which is good to know, given that we both literally stuck our eyeballs right up into the container to peer down to the bottom. What can I say? We’re not car people.)

I apologized to our poor little Hyundai. No wonder he was hot! 100 degrees outside and driving up steep mountain roads with no coolant. We let him rest for 30 minutes while we wandered around, trying to see if there was somewhere we could buy gas or coolant in a jerry can. There wasn’t, so in the ultimate gesture of resignation, we pooled our change, bought a can of Alpha beer from a roadside cafe, and accepted our fate. 

I will never forget coasting down the mountainside, eyes flicking between the gas and engine gauges, counting each completed kilometer and praying that we make it to Shell. When we finally pulled into the station, my relief was overwhelming and I felt like hugging the gas station attendant. 

Coasting down the hill with no gas and an over-heated engine.

We never made it to that farm-to-table restaurant. But we did end up going to a local spot near the gas station that turned out to be one of our best meals in Crete. The restaurant proprietor insisted that we come with him to examine the cuts of meat in the kitchen and pick our steak (which proved to be excellent), and we enjoyed a leisurely three-hour lunch, escaping the heat under the canopy of mulberry trees as cicadas intoned loudly around us. 

Everything, from our peevish bickering to Demitrius and his tomatoes to our little blue Hyundai, was telling us to slow down, to stop racing around and cramming in too much and pushing too hard, but we still weren’t listening. In the end, it took a stern warning from Gradisca for us to understand that we simply weren’t ready yet to leave Crete. 

Part III: The Boat Breaks Down

With our eyes still glued on a Tuesday departure, we had scheduled Friday for the engine specialists to clean out our diesel tank and to fuel up for our upcoming departure. But from the start, things were not lining up. Even in the early morning, Friday was already very windy with gusts of 25- 30 knots that made maneuvering in the marina extra tricky. 

It was our first time taking the boat out of her slip, our first time using the engine, and our first experience with stern-to Mediterranean mooring. Our departure was a little rocky, filled with some amateur mistakes and lots of opportunities to learn.  But after this rather inelegant performance, we shook off our jitters and talked through how to cleanly bring our boat up to the diesel fueling pontoon. The strong gusts pushing us were not helping, but things went sideways (literally) when we tossed our middle line to the marinero (the name for marina employees in Greece) who, rather than securing the line around the cleat on the dock and pulling us in, just stood there holding the line as our boat drifted further from the dock. 

We were definitely not expecting this. We paused for a moment, waiting for him to loop the line and begin pulling us in. 

He continued to stand there with the line sliding through his hands. He gave it an ineffectual tug and suddenly Ángel and I both realized that this guy had no clue what he was doing. We both began to flail about, calling out “AROUND THE CLEAT! AROUND THE CLEAT!” while miming looping the line around the cleat. 

In response, he dropped the line into the water. 

Ángel was practically apoplectic at this point. I was completely terrified. Luckily, we were able to throw a bowline and sternline to our neighbor from SV Ronja who had come down to help and to another boat owner who came out to help secure us. We tied off, shaken and a bit embarrassed, and thanked the other sailors for their help. 

But then the engine specialist began to suction out the buildup in our diesel tank, and his brow furrowed further and further. 

“Is it bad?” Ángel asked. 

With a pensive look, Giannis replied.

“Yes. It is like… bubblegum.’

Ah. Great. 

After further consultation, Giannis decided that our tank needed to be fully cleaned, which was not possible through the one small entry hole. Soon, five men were crowded around our boat discussing the various merits of either cutting new holes in the tank to serve as entry points or of fully hacking apart the tank, removing it piece by piece, and replacing it with two or three smaller tanks. Still shaken from our earlier fiasco, I was now flooded with images of our diesel tank being dismembered and carried out in pieces, dripping diesel through our bedroom and kitchen, and leaving a dirty diesel-soaked plastic carcass under our bed.  

our diesel tank- with its one small opening

We determined there was no way to solve this issue that day, and so with our Tuesday departure plans up in smoke, we prepared to take the boat back to the slip to figure out our next steps. This time, we told ourselves, we’d get it right. We had the dock lines and fenders ready. We started motoring through the marina and Ángel decided to try reversing to check which direction our prop walk pushed the boat. 

He pulled the gearshifter back into reverse, but nothing happened. He started jamming hard on the gear shifter. 

“I can’t reverse!” 

He pushed it forward. Nothing. The engine wouldn’t engage and we were drifting in neutral. 

“KATE, I HAVE NO POWER” 

At this point, it was pure chaos. We didn’t know at the time what was causing the loss of power, but we later found that one of the pieces that connects the throttle cable to the controls in the cockpit had snapped, and the driver could no longer engage the engine. 

Two things saved us from literally being rammed into other boats by the sharp gusts of wind: (1) the engine specialist was still on board with us and he was able run down to the engine room and manually change gears while Ángel bellowed “FORWARD” and “REVERSE” from above; and (2) when we rounded the pontoon toward our slip, we were greeted by a crowd of six fellow sailors who all understood from my frantic cries “WE HAVE NO POWER” and from our crazy zig-zagging course what had happened. They were all there, prepared to grab lines and help haul our boat manually into place. 

We were almost thwarted again by another marinero, who tried to tell our neighbors that they weren’t needed and that he alone would help us. Luckily, our fierce fellow sailors were not so easily dissauded. They stood their ground, telling him that this was an all-hands-on-deck type of situation. As I tossed lines to the dock, yelling that we wanted all the help we could get, the marinero continued to argue that only he could help because the marina was responsible and that if our boat struck our neighbor’s boat, “the insurance would take care of it.” 

All hell broke loose. 

Try telling sailors they have no right to protect their boats because “insurance will take care of it” and see how they respond.  Hint: not well.

As the marinero continued to be absorbed in argument, pointlessly holding a line but failing to do anything to secure our boat, one of the other sailors grabbed the laid mooring line and brought it aboard SV Ronja where he then passed it to our bow and we were able to secure our boat.

With the immediate danger past and the marinero gone in a huff, our friends rallied to cheer us up. Christian and Elsbeth, our Swiss neighbors from SV Ronja, told us about the time their engine had died in a marina and they’d been towed in by fishermen. Petra and Ota, Czech sailors from SV New Dawn reassured us that they had also had issues in the past with marineros who were more harmful than helpful. And Stephen and Anne from SV Wandering Dragon brought us a bottle of wine and words of encouragement that everyone has bad days. I have no words (and from the length of this post, you can see that this is rare for me) to express what this kindness meant to me. As someone who looks always for perfection and who struggles with anything that even approximates failure, that day’s unmitigated fiasco was deeply frightening and upsetting. The encouragement and generosity of our new friends and their care in reassuring us that difficult situations happen to everyone buoyed me in a moment when all I wanted to do was just give up and say that this whole dream was too hard and too scary.

We had been invited to a party that night, but I asked Ángel if I could just stay home; I was in no mood to socialize. I had to sit and process what had happened. I had lost a lot of confidence– in myself, in the boat, in our plan. Everywhere I looked, I began to second-guess “What if that breaks? Or that?” 

And so I did what I always do: I poured out all my fears into my journal and then made lists of all the things I needed to learn or ways we could improve. And that night when Ángel came back from the party, we looked at each other and we both knew.

“Tomorrow I’ll go to the marina office and pay Despina for another month. We’re staying here until mid-August.”

“And if we need to stay after that, we extend further.”

“Yes. We have all the time in the world.”

We weren’t pushing anymore. 

8 comments
  1. Hola de nuevo. He disfrutado mucho de este drama en tres partes. ver cómo el estilo de vida de la isla y los elementos se imponen ante sus planes.
    Me gustaría leer otro post con más detalles sobre la ideosincracia del pueblo de Creta, me parece que tenemos mucho que aprender de ellos.
    Espero que lleven mejeor el ritmo del viaje, y te tomes las cosas con más calma, a través de tu relato he visto tu perfeccionismo y cuan frustrante para ti han sido estas situaciones.
    Un saludote!

    1. Gracias Consuelo!! Espero que hayas leido y difrutado del siguente capitulo con mis buenos recuerdos de vuestra visita. Estoy tan agredecida de teneros como fans del blog y tambien como amigos en el barco 🙂 Un abrazo y espero que nos veamos pronto en Tenerife

  2. Tense reading, must have been vEry tough for you two. Makes sense to take a beat and get more familar with Gradisca.

    1. Sorry for not replying- still getting the hang of the comments on the blog since sometimes I miss the notifications! Yes, we had a few struggles in the beginning but happy to report things are going better now! Hope you and Winnie and Bailey are safe and well. And thanks for reading!!

  3. Wow! your adventures are really taking on a literary quality. The marinero, Demetrius, the giant map with the hole in it–this is some seriously vivid and compelling writing, with rich, well rounded characters and imagery. I feel like I’m right there with you, and could easily see this turning into the next bestseller or Netflix series (Eat, Pray, Sweat? Zen and The Art of Diesel Engine Maintenance?)

    Anyway, don’t mean to make light of what sounds like a really infuriating and exhausting set of escapades. I’m enjoying the hell out of these posts for their highs and lows. Thanks for keeping us up to date! I miss y’all so much reading these!

    1. This is now much belated, but as I said below, I missed these comments for some reason! Thank you so much for the encouragement, Brendan. Given that you’re one of the most avid readers I know, this means so much. Sending much love and thanks!

  4. great reading!! and great lessons to learn : life in a boat is always special in terms of social interaction, it is about lack of vital space and needed isolation, deprivation of usual comfort…and also in terms of timing: if you apply your ´former life expectations, you are bound to be severely frustrated…!!!!nothing not to be expected!!!I envy you so much!! Enjoy and keep on writing!

    1. Thanks Alvaro! I’m so glad you’re enjoying the posts and re-living some of your past Greek sailing adventures through us! Someday we’ll have to meet up and swap stories 🙂 And thank you so much for reading and commenting. I really appreciate hearing from people that they’re enjoying them!

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