La Graciosa to Gran Canaria

From Graciosa we continued via Lanzarote to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with an overnight stay at an anchorage close to Playa Blanca. In Las Palmas we stayed at the Marina in Puerto de la Luz and did some repairs and maintenance. We celebrated Christmas Eve together with friends in Las Palmas and fulfilled other social commitments. And we bought a pair of foldable bikes! Today, New Year’s Eve, we are leaving bound for Los Christianos, Tenerife, or San Sebastian, Gomera, depending on weather and crew conditions. Happy New Year!

Canary Islands / La Graciosa

We left Barbate in Andalucia on 10 December, heading for Morocco.

Unfortunately we got into very heavy weather, actually worse than what weather reports had foreseen, with waves of 5m and wind, which I felt to be around at least 8 bft at times. That, and the experience we already had with river estuarys with bars and sandbanks just outside Sancti Petri, made that we changed our minds and stayed at sea, well, until 570 miles and 5 days later.

This morning we arrived on La Graciosa, one of the minor islands of the Canary Islands. We had nice sailing conditions after the storm and swell decreased day by day.

Now we are at ancor off the southern coast of that lovely island (the little white spot on the foto), where there are no cars except Land Rovers and no asphaltroads.

Andalucía

We are still in Andalusia, south Spain. We had some trouble, kind of an accident, when we wanted to leave Sancti Petri, where we had spent some nice days together with Ika and Fred.

Actually we were very close to loosing the ship on a somewhat stony sandbank in the heavily breaking swell just outside the beach. We had left the harbour a bit upstream in low winds and obviously still too much current, which carried us on the sandbank south of the mouth of the river.

But we were lucky! After 1,5 hours of ancious holding fast to the boat beeing casted around, waiting and working we got out on deep water with comparatively small damages. Yesterday we bougth a new understay in Gibraltar and now we are ready to continue south towards Morocco with a boat totally restored, checked from the tip of the mast to the toe of the keel.

It is getting cold here, especially at night, so we are heading south with a good weatherforecast.

The journey continues

Now, in December, both Rainer and me are back on the boat. It has been launched again, we sailed the short trip to Cadiz and 2 days later to Sancti Petri.

Here we are lying at a mooring in the mouth of a river and sleeping in real beds in the house of some friends of ours, Ika and Fred.

We are preparing for the trip to Africa.