Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

We woke up early on Sunday morning to a black overcast sky, the winds were still pretty light in the harbour though so after a light breakfast, we cast our lines and set off. There was another yacht just ahead of us, otherwise all was quiet. There is a wind acceleration zone surrounding Morro Jable and we were getting gusts up to 28 knots, we decided not to try hoisting the main in those conditions as we needed to charge the batteries, we motor sailed out of the worst of it before hoisting the main and setting a course for Gran Canaria. It has seemed like a very drawn out journey, so we were pleased to finally be on the last leg and sailing properly along at 6-7 knots, even with a conservative 2 reefs due to the beam swell. We kept marking off the miles on the log and the chart and once clear of land the clouds cleared and the sun came out. I was on the helm with the iPod on and it was fantastic sailing. We had to pass across another TSS (Traffic Separation) scheme directing traffic round the north coast of Gran Canaria, we saw just one large ship, travelling extremely slowly for some reason, that even his smoke stack was overtaking him, this meant a rather arduously slowing down and tightening up on the wind for us to go round the back of him, but that clear, we continued into Las Palmas. Las Palmas really is the big smoke for us as we have really been living in such small towns for so long, it was odd to see it emerging gradually out of the clouds over the two hours of the approach. The harbour is enormous and it is tricky on the approach to distinguish the features and work out where the entrance is. There were large ships anchored all round the bay outside the harbour, which can be disconcerting when you are approaching until you can workout that they are stationary! Even more confusing was a very large oil dereck (not on charts) which we were planning to pass infront of, until we got closer and saw it was apparently under tow by a tug boat. We found the large yacht marina and the anchorage just north of it, where we were planning to stay. It appears that several others had the same idea though and when we arrived we found 10-12 other boats anchored. We found a spot fairly close into the town beach and anchored ourselves. It was 6pm by now and in order to make sure the boat was holding we haven’t both yet gone ashore, though Kevin did a quick sortie into the yacht harbour by dingy.
It’s an extremely busy harbour and tug boats motor back and forth through the night creating quite a bit of wake. However, the anchorage seems very sheltered from the wind judging by the very overcrowed marina is definitely the better option of the two.


The mobile oil derreck