Off to the Canary Islands

It is dark, we are north-east of Lanzarote and we are tired. We have slowed down Yuma to try and arrive at the Marine Lanzarote, in Arrecife, when their office opens, at 0800. We forgot to book a berth and are not sure whether they will have a space for us. When 0800 comes around, David calls the office on channel 9. To his surprise, not the office but the security guard answers. Damn – we forgot about the time difference between Spain and the Canaries! Here, it is only 0700 o’clock…

Luckily, the security guard finds us a temporary berth, we dock Yuma and, before tumbling into bed, we promise him that we’ll go and see the office before 1100. This means we can catch a few hours sleep – heaven, after a five-day crossing!

Circumventing the orca hotspot

We left Cádiz for Lanzarote, on a Saturday morning, about one hour (or so we thought) after the Polish yacht, SY Gandalf, left for the same destination. Both boats were keen to cut out the Gulf of Cádiz to the 1,000m depth contour as quickly as possible during daylight, given that at certain times of the year this is a hotspot for Iberian orcas.

In the last month or so, most orca activity (a euphemism for orcas nibbling on the rudders of sailing yachts) has been to the north of Lisbon. So, we were quietly confident that we would be fine, but every now and then these orcas pop up in unexpected locations – there is no zero risk. Reason enough to roll out both sails to catch the easterly winds, increase the revs of the iron sail, and travel through fast.

Later, while enjoying a ‘welcome to Lanzarote’ gathering on SY Gandalf we heard about their orca trauma inducing trip down from A Coruña along the Portuguese and Spanish coasts. For months on end they had been close to the orca interactions, sometimes a day ahead of them, sometimes a day behind! Luckily they were never attacked, but with boats being sunk ahead and behind them the skipper now reckons he has orca-induced PTSD.

On this day, however, the wind was slowly building up to 20-25kn. With an unfortunate beam swell coming out the Strait of Gibraltar this made for rather uncomfortable but fast sailing, even with a triple-reefed main and a double-reefed jib. No complaints though, we wanted to get to deep water fast and this was doing the trick. By 2000, we were at the 1,000m depth contour and turned Yuma SW to the Canary Islands. On the AIS, we could see SY Gandalf, a couple of miles to the N, doing the same.

Rotating 4 hr watches

We settled into our 4 hr watches (4 hr on, 4 hr off) with David taking the first one from 1800 to 2200. I would then take over from 2200 to 0200, then it was David’s turn again from 0200 to 0600, and so on until Lanzarote. It helped that this time around (having just done a 4-day passage from Majorca to Gibraltar), I already had my sea legs and David didn’t need to cover watches for me while I was feeling miserable.

Also, this time we tried 15 min powernaps while on watch, something we had not dared trying before in the busy shipping lanes of Europe. Every 15 min, the person on watch would check the surroundings, the boat, and the chart plotter (position, course, AIS, etc), and then, if and when everything was deemed safe, have a quick 15-min sleep until the next check. Surprisingly, it works! We both felt much-much better and rested after having done this a couple of times during our respective watches.

The pleasure of buddy-boats

On this trip we had agreed with SY Gandalf to keep an eye on each other along the way using the AIS – a distant but comforting presence even if the other boat is out of sight. Now, in Australia the saying goes that no one is competitive but if there is more than one boat on the water, it is a race. It turns out that in Poland this is very much the case too. We did not consider the passage with SY Gandalf a race (little did we realise that they did, right from the start!), but we did keep an eye on them, and they on us.

The first night, SY Gandalf called SY Yuma on the VHF to ask if all was well, given that we had disappeared from their AIS. All was good on SY Yuma, I switched the VHF off and back on, and our AIS appeared again. A few days later, SY Gandalf disappeared from our AIS and we tried to call them – no answer. After a few radio attempts, we looked them up on the ‘over-the-horizon’ AIS – also a no-show. Oh-oh!

It being daytime in Australia, I texted Matt (David’s brother) to see if he could find SY Gandalf on Marine Traffic. Sure enough, there they were sailing along, phew!

We later learnt from SY Gandalf that our AIS signal was not very strong, and our VHF transmission wasn’t either – certainly something to check and correct before we take on the longer passages.

Exciting night watches

David’s first night watch proved to be an exciting one during which he saw lots of falling stars across the clear night sky. Lucky him, he even saw a meteor, and heard it hissing as it streaked across the sky before burning out just above the sea.

A bit more distressing was that there were repeated, American-accented ‘Securité-Securité-Securité’ warnings on the VHF, stating that ‘Warship 117 is conducting live firing’ and ‘all ships need to stay a safe distance’. Problem being, Warship 117 did not broadcast its lat/long coordinates during this warning, nor did they show up on the AIS. Not knowing what a safe distance would be, David kept sailing along with their regular calls getting clearer and then eventually less clear, all the while watching for more (natural and/or man-made) fireworks.

Spectacular sailing

The next two days the wind dropped to around 10k, or lower, and were spent sailing along with full sails on a gentle swell. Every now and then we’d see a few seabirds, even a few large dolphins/small whales (we disagree on the species), and the odd flying fish.

The nights were absolutely gorgeous with completely clear skies, and without a moon or light pollution from land, showing millions and millions of bright stars everywhere. The disturbance of the boat would make the water phosphorescence green in its wake.

Before sunrise, Venus and a waxing moon would pop up over the horizon before the sun would take over to start a new day. Absolutely spectacular!

The winds pick up

Of course, all good things must pass and sure enough, around midnight on our fourth day, the forecasted winds started to pick up to 20-22k, with gusts up to 24. In anticipation, we had taken down our headsail pole and already triple-reefed both sails to keep Yuma as comfortable as possible overnight for watches and sleeping.

Unfortunately, we had a cross-swell, with one set coming in from the Atlantic and another wind-generated swell coming from the north, and another one coming from somewhere else altogether, all coming in at very short intervals. This combination of waves produced very steep wave fronts and an uncomfortable (and sometimes very uncomfortable) ride with one wave washing across the sugar-scoop. With winds maxing out to 28kn, it was very tiring indeed.

This misery lasted for about 24 hrs after which the wind dropped, but the swell decided to stay around for a bit longer just to make sure we wouldn’t forget that it is Neptune who rules the world out here.

Land in sight!

It being cloudy and dark, we didn’t actually sight the land, but rather the lights of the coastal towns of Lanzarote, about twelve hours before we entered the marina. By then, the conditions had calmed down, we had slowed down Yuma to arrive at what we thought would be the opening time of the marina.

SY Gandalf were delighted by this strange racing tactic of ours and used the opportunity to grab the lead – having already secured a berth they had not slowed down, and sailed full steam ahead past us into the marina in the dark. By the time we motored in, they were tied up and welcomed us at the end of their pontoon – a nice welcome to a new place!

Catching up with SY Gandalf

The next day, having secured our own berth for the next five days, we joined the Polish crew of SY Gandalf for celebratory drink and nibblies on their boat. Little did we realise that they were five persons, and we received a standing ovation for having completed the passage with just the two of us!

They showed us an impressive video of SY Gandalf being pooped by a big wave on the last day, that unfortunately entered their cabin, and, even more unfortunately, the aft sleeping berth, rudely waking up the poor bugger having a quiet slumber.

We also learned that SY Gandalf considered they had won the passage, keeping a detailed log of having left Cadiz 41 minutes ahead of us and having arrived in Lanzarote 60 min before us. We did not realise we had been timed, even less so that we were being watched, so after countering that on handicaps of crew (2 vs 5) and boat (~12 vs 14 m) we were faster, we raised our combined glasses and celebrated our safe, orca-free arrivals in Lanzarote.

P.S.

We are well behind with our blogs, for various reasons. Rather than trying to catch up with three months of blogs to current, we decided to start with current and slowly backfill the missing stories from the Mediterranean summer as we go. So the blogs may be a bit out of time sequence as they pop up in the ‘new blog’ notifications.