Come on board Crusoe Treasure’s boat

One of the tools that facilitate our work in the underwater winery is our ship, “Crusoe Treasure”.

We were born as a research project

Our winery started as a research project to discover if it was true that wine and other alcoholic beverages evolve differently under the sea. In the beginning, we worked with small boats and semi-rigid boats. It was not easy and it was dangerous for professional divers.

Complex production process

When we created Crusoe Treasure Winery, we needed to have our own boat with some characteristics that would facilitate our particular production process. For this reason, we started looking for a boat that had the capacity to extract the wine cages and reduce the decompression time necessary to recover the wine and therefore also provide greater safety for divers.

Our own boat

We were looking for boats and even we looked at the option of building one, but we decided that it was better to have a boat with history and we opted to take a traditional mussel boat. So, in 2013 we went to Galicia to choose a good boat. We had the help of a retired Galician chief engineer, who worked on a fishing boat in Lekeitio. He helped us to review the boats, finally finding what we were looking for in Vilagarcía de Arousa. It was a Galván family boat, family which has been in the mussel world for many years. We ended up buying one of their boats, the Galván sixth.

Once purchased, a series of reforms were carried out in Galicia and at the time of departure the Galván family came to say goodbye, to this day we still maintain contact with them. We transfer the boat by road with a special transport to Plentzia.

Crusoe Treasure boat

When we arrived, we placed the boat with a crane in the sea. We renamed it to Crusoe Treasure.

It is a boat built with oak wood in 1984, with almost 15 meters of length, 4.10 m of beam and that it has a crane that can lift without any problems the load that we need to support when we submerge or extract wine from the sea .

Javier Ortega is our skipper, the captain, who takes care and manages the boat. Javi knows very well the boat and is the one who advises us on the best times to carry out the tasks and warns us when we can or cannot go out sailing.

Some years have passed since its acquisition, it’s a boat that requires a lot of maintenance throughout the year to comply with all the regulations and for its good conservation, but we are very satisfied with its operation and we fond of it, as usually happens to the seamen with their boats.

The experiences on board, the landscape, the difficult times, the people who have visited us … all those things make of Crusoe Treasure boat, one more “travel companion” in our winery.

If you walk through Plentzia, you can see it anchored in the estuary and if you want to board and discover more about our underwater winery, just contact us, it will be a pleasure to take you on board.