Faro, Algarve, south Portugal
When the crane lifted the boat out of the water earlier in November, it then rolled slowly on its giant wheels and placed Bat Ami in her new habitat, a dry one.
Later on I discovered that this section of the yard has many longtime liveaboards.
They somehow got stuck here, for many years.
Could be the amount of work they needed to do, which they had no means to complete. Or maybe they just like it here.
Was the yard owner counting on me getting stuck here too?
Is that why he placed me in the got-stuck-people section of the yard?
Living and working on a boat in a shipyard.
The yard is nested between the tidal flats and the edge of Faro.
Amazing characters live here on their boats, some for over a decade.
Some boats rest here after sailing around the planet.
There's also a boat graveyard section, abandoned boats, drug trafficking boats. Good boats, but no owner.
Here's a sample of life at this special shipyard.
How I got here, to this yard in Portugal, well that's a completely different story...
I returned to the shipyard after 3 months of absence. It was midnight. Dark with a cold drizzle. No one is around at this time. I place the ladder at the stern and climb the three meters up to the deck. Turn my key in the lock and lift the companionway boards. It's dry and cozy inside. All looks well. I'm full of joy to be back here on the boat.
Wind
Complete silence. No motion anywhere. It begins with a single word, then a whisper, then the wires on the mizzenmast start to sing. it has two songs: a happy one and an angrier one. Both are somewhat eerie tones. It is a song about the wind and the unknown voyage ahead. Is the boat trying to tell me something? Is it a warning? A blessing? Is it all in my head? I'm listening
For 3 weeks it was blowing nearly non stop and strong, shaking the boat on her eight steel supports, then vibrating her in a constant mechanical rhythm as if it's a luna park ride. Incredible noise, everything is clancking and beating and rattling and howling.
Work
I love working on the boat. The boat loves it too.
Sometimes a young guy or a girl would stop by the shipyard and help. Some stuff cannot be done with just one pair of hands. We would work 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week.
We peeled the hull, taking off some 25 years of thick, hard and flakey antifouling paint manually using large scrapers.
We took out the ceiling boards from the master cabin and re-glued their sagging headliner fabric after cleaning the fabric and sanding the boards.
(
)I had to saw four 12 mm rusted bolts from the old engine mounts, using a small mirror so I can see what i'm doing. It took hours. Took apart toilet pumps and de-scaled them, treated the winches. We dried, sealed and repainted the hull.
Wine
You can get a nice bottle of wine here for less than 2EU. Sometimes red, other times white. It feels great to seat in the evenings in the cozy saloon, drinking wine.
One day, Manuel, the old Portuguese fisherman living in a small wooden shack at the yard's edge, gave me a bunch of fresh oysters he collected in the mud when the tide was out. With just a drop of lemon juice on the fresh flesh, I swallow them with passion.
Exhaustion, and satisfaction. The dry air makes the skin feel so smooth after a hot shower. There's a long list of tasks to complete, and new ones reveal themselves as the old ones get done. We will complete them all. Then we set sail. West.
Stayed tuned
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