Monastir (Terry)

Common Sense has arrived in her winter port of Monastir on the east coast of Tunisia.  It is 28^th October, 2012 and is exactly one year from the day we set out from Mears Point Marina to begin our journey.  We left the marina at 7:40am for the Patuxent River, our first stop.  We arrived off Monastir at around 7:38am today according to the Route map on the chartplotter.  Two minutes short of a year!  Not planned.  We are in the land of Star Wars, near Tatooine (and we did visit the site of  Naboo in Seville) so perhaps Obi-wan Kenobi is using The Force on Common Sense?

Shortly after posting the challenge to Neptune that things were going swimmingly well, last night past Cap Bon, we encountered a severe electrical storm.  Admittedly the brunt of it passed a little behind us but at the time it approached us from the WSW, over the city of Hammamet we could not be sure of the relative speed of it to us.

It was dangerous enough for us to begin immediate preparations for abandoning ship.  We pulled the liferaft out to the main cabin, then the 25 kilo “grab bag” that goes with it.  We gathered the passports and wallets, main computers, iPad, spare credit card and cameras and put them in a dry sack.  Finally we got the lifejackets out and sat and waited to be hit.  It all passed without further incident.  A heavy rain fell but nothing more, just a spectacular light show put on by nature.

From then on we had zero wind, not even an assist.  We motored steadily through the night without seeing a soul.  Not surprising as no one in their right mind would go out fishing with the weather on the way.  We could see violent storms flashing behind us some 60 miles back and were glad we were in the Bay.

Firts sight of Tunisia - Cap Bon

We arrived off Monastir at around 8am and entered the marina looking for somewhere to tie up.  The place is quite full, masts jammed in tight together.   After a couple of unsuccessful forays in and around pontoons, a young man with a motorbike called us over to a berth we hadn’t seen in behind a tourist boat, a replica pirate ship.  We nosed in without incident but I’m not sure I can see how to get out again.  It’s a little on the tight side.

Entering Monastir

Unfortunately for us, our entry has been complicated by two factors.  One is that it is Sunday.  We hadn’t consulted our Day Clock so we were not aware of this, having left Formentera last Monday and losing track of time out on the anchor.  The second factor is that it is the third day of a 3-day Muslim feast and between the two there is zero chance of anything happening.

I wandered over to the Police station on the other side of the quay to check in to Tunisia.  We need visas for here (the policeman apologized for this) where the majority of Westerners don’t.  There is an old quirk that Australians and New Zealanders require them but no one knows why.  It just “is”. I filled in the police forms but we can’t get visa stamps until an office opens.  The police sent a man over to say we should go to the airport to get them as that was open 24/7.  I arranged with a young man in the marina to go on the back of his motorbike in 10 minutes’ time but after 40 minutes and no-show I wandered back over to the Policeman to tell him why I hadn’t returned.  Apparently, everyone had decided that they wouldn’t require us to go all the way to the airport to get the stamps and that we could wait until tomorrow when the office here would be open.  Unfortunately they all forgot to tell me.  No problem.  The young copper hit the nail on the head when he said, “No matter, we have your passports”.  Certainly do, so were not likely to run off.  He had a final question as I left “there’s nothing on board that shouldn’t be there?”   No, no firearms or anything like that, only flares.  There is a certain amount of trust placed in honest exchanges between people and if they had to inspect every boat (as in Cuba!) nothing productive would ever be done.  It’s not something to be dismissed lightly, though, or abused, as I think if you ever did you’d come up on alert flags for ever and a day and that would not be good.

However, we are morally bound to hang around the marina until this gets concluded.  We still have our “Q” flag up and haven’t presumed to run up our Tunisian courtesy flag yet.  I did find the young guy and we snuck off on the bike to a bank in the city to get some money.  An Australian Dollar costs about 1.48 Tunisian Dinar.

The marina is full of cruising boats here for the winter.  There is a group of French cruisers down a little from us on our pier, 4 boats in all, who’ve been cruising in company through the eastern Med.  They have about 6 kids between them all flying around the marina on their bikes letting off steam.  Many boats are at the bottom of the scale in the pretty stakes but even a casual glance says that they are at the top of the scale for being set up for cruising.  There’s a lot of thought gone into what’s being carried in terms of add-ons, in solar panel arrangements, stern anchor reels, cockpit hardware etc.

We beat the weather system by about 4 hours.  It’s closed in behind us now and there is a very strong Westerly wind blowing.  We are glad we are not out there trying to get here, and not back in Sardinia in what was supposed to be 60 knot winds (Beaufort Force 9/10 and even 11 predicted for short periods).

The landscape here is dominated by a castle which is in quite good condition externally – it’s been here for hundreds of years to ward off attacks from Christians in Sicily and elsewhere in Europe.  The coast here has been settled since at least 1,800 years BC and it’s probably been fought over for that long, too.  If we use the Star Wars history timeline, it’s been way, way longer than that, as this is the location of  Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s birthplace.  It’s quite famous and is much visited.

Restaurant prices are cheap – Chicken Tagine is about TD10 or AU$6.70.  Breakfast today of coffee, croissant, fresh apple and strawberry juice (with chocolate?) plus slices of baguette with butter (you get a whole new pack of butter!) and jam cost about $7 between us.

It looks to be a delightful place so far and we will be allocated a longer term berth in the next couple of days.  It’s such a squeeze here that there is little prospect of wandering out for a day-sail as getting back in would be a nightmare.