La Graciosa

Well, we have a double reason for celebration this morning, I have just had a phone call from our solicitor to say that we have completed on our house!! This also means that I will be handing in my notice today too.


View from our bunk this morning

We are settling in nicely to Graciosa, we are moored up alongside a number of very large obviously long distance cruising boats, though few seem to be occupied. Though we are very early in the season for the usual cruising boats to be arriving in the Canaries, this being the port of call before Atlantic crossings in November – January.

We went to see the very nice and polite customs man this morning to officially check in (they shut at 2pm, so we just missed this yesterday). He took a few details, though it was far from a grilling and told us that it would be 177 Euro for the month (equiv. 5.9 Euro / day) we are planning to take here to recuperate from months of planning and hard work and complete our last boat jobs. There is no electricity and water to the pontoons, but we have a generator and you can go alongside the main quay to fill up water tanks. Compared with 33.75 Euro per day – 15% for 30 day stay (860 Euro total for the month) for Marina Rubicon on Lanzarote we are pretty happy with the facilities!

Graciosa is quite a bustling little harbour and there seems to always be lots of coming and going. The glass bottom boat tourists presumably from Lanzarote arrive for the lunch apparently daily and there are three supermarkets and about 6 restaurants that we have found so far in the village of village of Caleto de Sebo. The village of La Sociedad which is ajoining, we haven’t ventured to yet, but will be doing so to find the internet café/bar for this update.

We had a lovely meal with all the day trippers when we arrived yesterday, we didn’t realise then that was where they had come from, but we could see a busy pavement restaurant overlooking us from where we were docking so we just headed straight there and ordered a couple of beers! Kevin had green lipped mussels and Canarian potatoes (which he had been eulogising about for the previous 2 days of motoring) and I had grilled fish and Canarian potatoes. They were both excellent, though obviously the mussels were not a local dish, they are a favourite of Kevin’s and after 8 days on boat rations we’d agreed it was open choice on the menu. I therefore insisted on a desert, I had flan and Kevin the cheesecake and another beer, all this plus some bread and dips for the princely sum of 31 Euro. The desert was a special treat for me after 3 months of dieting before we set off for this trip in the usual pre-wedding bride torments, although after 8 days on the boat all my newly bought smaller clothes are now hanging off me with the weight I have lost on route just with all of the daily activity compared to my desk job. Long distance sailing certainly beats dieting, certainly sounds like a better scheme than some of these other crazy dieting money spinners.





They have a fairly extensive siesta on the island from 12 to about 6, so after our lunch we decided to do the same and grab an hours snooze. Unfortunately, the hour turned into 6 hours and we didn’t wake up until 10.30, so all of our wild plans for celebration were rather reduced to a last couple of beers before all the bars shut! However, I am confident after our further good news today that we will make up for that tonight.