with 'souvenirs' from our visits. Five years from now we'll still be nursing the port we bought after touring the warehouses of Porto. The distilleries nonetheless provided good science lessons for the kids in filtration, condensation and fermentation. Any sacrifice to educate them. Making moonshine remains a job skill in some places in the States, doesn't it? After stops in Wales and the Isle of Man, we crossed the English Channel to Brest, France. From there we put the boat in a marina and enjoyed a 'no carb left behind' tour of inland France. My oldest son Zander rates stops on their culinary contributions, and he absolutely loved France! Three weeks and five pounds later, we prepped the boat for a crossing to Galicia, Spain. Although we had consistent 25-35-knot winds during our crossing of the Bay of Biscay, it was uneventful. So we home-schooled and cooked meals, and the kids bickered. It was business as usual aboard Pelagic. From Galicia, we spent time in Porto, Seville, Gibraltar and a few weeks in Morocco. Although Gibraltar is part of the United Kingdom and thus technically not part of the Schengen Zone, the Spanish government doesn’t recognize it as such, so we continue to dance around whether we are here legally. We are taking the 'beg for forgiveness rather than ask permission' approach to cruising within the Schengen Zone. We will let you know how successful it was when we try to clear out. We are currently anchored off Sanlucar de Guadiana in the Guadiana River between Portugal and Spain, and we’ve just enrolled all three kids in the local Spanish school. In an age of helicopter parenting, we are really throwing our kids to the wolves because they speak very little Spanish. We are hoping to rem-
SANLUCAR TOURISM
The Bradford kids are getting immersed in Spanish at Sanlucar de Guadiana. One side of the river is Spain, the other side is Portugal.
edy that with some intense immersion. We expect to hang out here for a few months, then point toward home, via Morocco, the Canaries and the Caribbean. Ours will be a late-season Atlantic crossing, but we are looking forward to seeing the less-frequented spots in the Caribbean — and maybe French Guiana and Surinam. Somehow we seem to continually take a different path from other American cruisers. In fact, we haven’t seen another American boat since we left Canada back in July. But we look forward to meeting up with some of our compatriots soon. — amy 02/15/2016 ex-Lilahoc — Outremer 49 The Horangic Family Venice By Private Yacht (Menlo Park) It's been almost a year since we — my wife Caroline, daughters Theodora and Helen, Little Basil, and I — sent an update, so here goes. After sailing back to the Med from the Caribbean on our rented Outremer 49 catamaran, we spent most of the summer and fall sailing around Italy. Then, with the 18-month rental of the Outremer 49 over, we returned her to France. We are now in Myanmar on our second rental cat, this one a freaky custom combo of a Wharram and a Shuttleworth. We are cruising the 800-island Mergui Archipelago along with a few Moken sea gypsies in dugout canoes. More about this at a later date. Our pressing urge is to tell Latitude readers about the fantastic eight weeks we spent docked in Venice last summer. You might remember that during our first summer in the Med we'd planned on one week for Istanbul, but were so impressed that we anchored there for a month. Well, last summer we planned on one week for Venice, but it captured us for eight! And the only reason we left when we did was that our 18-month boat rental was over. Venice attracts very few cruisers. I would say we saw fewer than 20 boats come in all summer. That contrasts with 50,000 short-trip visitors per day coming off cruise ships, planes and other forms of transportation. Surprisingly, there were loads of marina slips available. St. Elena was 80% empty the whole summer,
BASIL HORANGIC
CHANGES
and must have lost a ton of money. They quoted us 45 euro per night for our 49-ft cat. Vento di Venezia, our favorite marina, had an average of a dozen spots available all summer. We stayed there for 36 euro per night. The municipal spots right on the city front were 75% empty all summer, although in that case it was clearly because of the outrageous prices. They quoted us 320 euro per night — after a 1,400 euro mooring fee. The municipality seemed happy to let potential revenue blow out the window every day while waiting for the odd superyacht to show up. The empty marina slips were hard for us to understand because we found Venice to be a fantastic place for visiting by boat. If Latitude readers ever get the chance to visit Venice by boat, we urge you to do it. Most importantly, when you visit Venice by boat you experience it as the Venetians have for 1,500 years. When ap-
