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Wednesday was a fairly quiet day, we spent fitting / using the supplies we had bought in the chandleries. We also had another trip in as inevitably the beginning of this job on Tuesday afternoon revealed additional parts were necessary. This necessitated a run in on the tender, but as the chandlery in question is the same end of the marina as we are anchored, we opted to tender over to the beach rather than all the way into the marina then a walk round it’s full circumference and back for couple of stainless steel bolts. So, I got to sit on the beach with the tender while Kevin popped along the path to the marina. It was a lovely sunny morning and the usual kid’s schools party were over running the beach, dive bombing off the pier and generally enjoying themselves while the Monitors were running around trying to control them.
Kevin has improved his preventer running through the addition of a pad eye and block on each side deck – though will do a blog update shortly with the details and photos. I spent the day using some of my new cleaning products such as Rust Stain remover and various other potions, probably won’t sound too interesting, but again, it means being out on deck and these specialist products do all the work for you. I get bored sunbathing, so this is just as good for me, especially as I usually seem to get the washing the inside of the boat job when we do a big clean, so I appreciate getting to come above decks.
We also got to meet the famous Pedro of the Texaco fuel station at the marina who is mentioned in all the pilot guides as the man to help you with anything. The staff t-shirts in the garage even say Pedro Texaco on them. We tendered over in the afternoon to fill our new petrol jerry can and just one diesel can. We pulled up at the fuel dock, there was no one to help and a guy beside us in a tender looked like he had filled up himself, so we did the same and went into pay. The lady at the counter just looked at me blankly when I walked in and called Pedro. I tried to explain to him that I had come to pay, he then had to go out with a piece of paper to write down how much we’d had (this is a car petrol station too) as they appear to have no way of knowing at the till how much you have bought, in fact there is only one chandlery in the harbour working on an electronic till. Even though this is a capital city for three islands it is still very laid back. Any day, sat on the bench outside the petrol station you will always find three of four people sat having a coffee with Pedro or one of the other staff.
We have used less than 10 litres of diesel (approx) since 14th May when we arrived at the Canaries due to the constant wind here and that includes having to run the engine in Graciosa for power due to no petrol available and post engine service running. We have logged 210 miles during this time!
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria marina
Tuesday morning started with a visit from the Port Authority official, informing us and every other boat on the anchorage by the looks of his round that we needed to go and check in at the port office. We did so as soon as they opened and paid our 3 Euros a night for anchoring in the harbour, which also gives us access to the showers in the marina. We continued from there to find some more of the chandleries and finish our shopping list. This meant heading a little further into town on the side of the beach in front of which we are moored and the main dual carriageway into the town centre. It seems so noisy and busy, but we found another of the chandlers who stocked the brand of fitting Kevin was after and we got a few more of the items ticked off. Including a doormat for me (we have so moulded into 1950’s gender stereotypes now!), after a busy morning’s shopping we stopped for lunch at the Sailor’s Bar where we both had sandwiches, which turned out to be toasted much to Kevin’s delight as he has been craving toast (no toaster in our oven and electric uses too much power). Two beers and two sandwiches for a very reasonable 10 Euros sat alongside the harbour. It seems like a nice place, they are opposite the main visitors pontoon and have an very large visitor’s book on the bar, so I guess that is where the sailors head, so we are planning to go there for an evening soon.
Although, Kevin had some other plans for that evening after seeing a posh kebab café at the harbour complex (I think these carvings maybe the lack of meat on board!). So we headed back to the boat with our purchases and set about our jobs for the afternoon. Mine was to clean the decks, when we are on passage, clearly they get covered in salt, which is fine when you are going straight to a marina with water on tap to rinse down, but at anchor the salt spreads everywhere on clothes and throughout the boat eventually. So I decided to give it a wipe down, I managed to clean the whole deck with 5 litres of water using a hand spray bottle and a cloth to dry down afterwards. It sounds ardous, but actually in the sun it was quite a nice job. Also, every morning here we are surrounded by school children learning to sail, windsurf, in peddlelows, on RIBs etc etc. There seems to be some school based watersports here too based from the beach, as with only a few youngish looking “monitors” there are dozens of kids in the water either on the beach of weaving between the boats at anchor on various craft. The beach itself seems crowded with townspeople everyday anyway, so there is always something going on around us. Including a local sailor who brings his grandchildren everyday to the beach on his lovely wooden yacht, tying up rather unconventionally to the safe water buoy used to protect the swimmers!
So, in the evening we jumped back in the tender in our scruffs for quite a wet ride to the harbour for meal out. We brought a change of clothes and had a shower on arrival. Then a beer or two on the harbourside followed by a kebab for Kevin and Falafel for me which was actually really good and again only about 10 Euros.
Busy Town beach
The first order of priority on Monday was to find all the chandleries in Las Palmas, as I think I mentioned previously, they are especially well equipped here because of the number of boats which leave from here to go across the Atlantic. Kev had a few bits to get (blocks etc) to improve the running of our preventer (to stop the boom flying across unplanned when sailing downwind). We also bought some specialist boat cleaning solutions to help keep the boat well maintained. Finally, we need to get pilot books, charts (may need some additional) and courtesy flags (you have to fly the host countries flag when you arrive) ready for when we cross the Atlantic.
We are debating at the moment whether we are going to go via the Cape Verdes Islands and straight to the Caribbean from there; or via the Cape Verdes to Brazil or just directly to the Caribbean from the Canaries. There are pros and cons with each choice but we will need to make a decision to finish our shopping list. We are both quite keen to visit Brazil, but want to do some more research into the route and the potential places to visit when we arrive. After Brazil we’d go via Venezuela to get to Grenada. I think ultimately it all rests on how long we decide to stay in the Canaries and therefore how long we have before we need to be in Grenada in February to see other places on the way. We plan to head off from Gran Canaria after we have visited the other Canary Islands, so if we don’t decide now then we can pick up the last items just before we leave the Canaries.
We headed into the harbour via the dingy, leaving Invincible for the first time at anchor on her own. We managed to find one of the larger chandleries Rolnautic which was very well stocked and we got a good few of the spares and other things we needed. I also went to find the nearest supermarket, which turned out to be another Hiper Dino, you know you have been somewhere for a while when you start to have brand preferences. It felt very strange being in such a big city again, I just can’t get used to the traffic noise and smell.
We had a look round the marina, it seems very good, very large with boats from all over the world, lots of bars and restaurants and shops, which is not what you normally find in a local authority marina such as this, but I think the ARC (Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) has definitely added to the fortunes of the place. It’s certainly the smartest marina office I have ever seen, normally they are a single windowless room, this is a beautiful little building all curves, wood and local clay. A few beers overlooking the harbour then a trip back in the dingy – who needs a car!
An evening at anchor with our new neighbours
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
I guess, this is quite an amusing title considering the protestations about Morro Jable in previous posts. However I think I may have jinxed us with the use of the p word in relation to the weather on Friday morning, such that on Friday afternoon the wind picked up, as usual in the afternoon only stronger. The white tops out to sea looked like Christmas and all in all, it did not look like the leisurely sail we had in mind. So by 8pm, we decided not to go Friday night but to set off first thing on Saturday, knocking a few miles off the route, then perhaps breaking the journey with anchoring off a beach for the afternoon and heading off overnight.
We headed off at a very leisurely pace, as we weren’t expecting to be able to do the full trip in daylight, therefore, we didn’t want to arrive in the middle of the night. We raised just the genoa and sailed gently along at 3 knots, looking at the coastline, trailing the fishing rods and generally enjoying the ride. The development of the various towns and villages along the way seemed to have progressed somewhat since our pilot books were written and the sleepy fishing villages seem to be a thing of the past. We were waiting for the vast expanses of white sand dunes and beaches, but the bigger ones were, perhaps predictably, surrounded by large hotel complexes. We hadn’t found anywhere that we wanted to anchor up by the time we were drawing close to Morro Jable, which surprised us by being rather cleaner and nicer looking that we had expected. The old town could be clearly seen on the south end, the modern part of the town extending a long way along a very pristine beach where the inevitable hotel complexes were sited. The town did look better architected than a lot we have seen and we decided we may as well pull in for the evening as with an early start in the morning we would now be able to make Gran Canaria in the day. There were also a number of catamarans buzzing around plus the apparently inevitable pirate boat, which suggested signs of life.
We dropped the sails and motored into Morro Jable in preparation for the potential 50 knot gusts! We didn’t get anything like that more in the 20 – 25 knot range. The reason for these potentially strong winds appears to be the fact the port sits at the bottom of a valley under a large hill and the string winds blow down it, as the mistral wind in the mediterrean is generated by wind blowing down from the Alps but on a small scale. Apparently this wind is more likely when there is cloud on top of the hills, which there was as we approached, but we did not receive the full force of the blast.
Morro Jable
We moored on one of the visitor pontoons to the west of the harbour, which seemed to have a lot of local boats also moored plus a few cruiser boats with little signs of life. We grabbed some food and freshened up when we arrived and were a little surprised to see people swimming in the harbour, which although cleaner than your average British harbour, was nonetheless still a harbour. We had also spotted a small natural beach on the other side of the breakwater from the visitor pontoons as we were approaching and there were a number of cars pulled up, we later realised after a walk into town this was where all the locals were escaping the predominantly German invasion!
Morro Jable beach from the Old Town
There is no water or electricity to the visitor pontoons in Morro Jable and only one has walk-on access to shore (albeit this is a lashed on affair). We wondered round to the harbour office a good 5mins walk round the circumference of the harbour on the off chance we might find someone to pay at the weekend. The Gran Canaria ferry that we had seen in Gran Tarajal was also moored here ready to embark and they have a full passenger boarding building complete with bar/restaurant and toilets, where the port office was also located (closed). A little further round is a petrol station with a pump on the jetty side for boats, though it is on an L-shaped wall so I think you’d need to motor in and reverse out. The third visitor pontoon which is described in the pilot books is actually used by dayboats and there was no space there when we arrived.
We hiked into the old town area up some winding stone steps at the back of the ferry office, then through a small estate of houses and up another hill into the old town. The old town area was quite nice, lots of narrow streets and tree-shaded seating areas sprawling down right to the water’s edge to a narrow path that bordered the beach and a number of pavement cafes/restaurants. The beach was a beautiful white sand creating that fabulous turquoise appearance of the water. Infact that end of town was lovely quite idyllic if you ignored the hundreds and hundreds of tourists disrupting the tranquillity! We walked along the water’s edge up yet another hill in the full heat of the sun. The beach stretches about 2- 3miles along the front of several enormous modern hotels, with the accompanying identikit sunloungers and shades on the front. The end of the beach is marked by a large new light house which doesn’t appear to represent any navigational benefit lying part way along a flat coastline which is presumably lit up like a Christmas tree with all those hotels, so perhaps it is there for the tourists? The town continued on some way, with more hotels, we had seen enough though and moved a street back from the front to find a bar.
We’d been trying to listen in to conversations to work out where everyone was from and judging by the bar selling currywurst and bratwurst and the conversations passing us the resort seemed to be predominantly German. The bar owners were German and then it became a challenge to know what language to speak to them in, we plumped for Spanish as I can’t remember much German for school. We had a couple of beers and did some people watching. The row back from the beach was basically row on row of shops and shopping arcades, an aspect of package holidays which was new to me, but seems to be becoming a theme. I went to pay for the beers and the bar owner seemed amused I couldn’t understand her heavily accented Spanish (I’ve had no problem when talking to the Spanish), after some discussion as they thought I was Italian – the tan is obviously improving - she said the price in English. We walked back to the old town and had another beer at the Cofradia (cooperative) Social, which seemed to be a bar run by the locals, it had off duty post ladies and other various locals all chatting animatedly round the bar, it was not as plush as the other bars, so there was just Kevin & I enjoying the tables outside over looking the beach. More people watching then, back to the boat for a tomato salad and an early night.
A resident Fueteventuran Chipmunk (there is apparently a colony on the island)
We are all set for a 4pm departure today to go to Gran Canaria, a distance of just over 70 nM from here. The wind has dropped off, as forecast and it is a beautiful day, perfect. There is still some swell outside the harbour, but nothing too concerning and overnight last night the wind dropped away almost completely so we may end up having to motor part of the way. We should have a lovely afternoon of sailing though, we plan to stay fairly close to the coast of Fuerteventura initially and will be passing along the famous white sand beaches along the south coast in daylight. We may even get another chance with the spifurl later so Kevin can check his latest additions.
Ironically last night we met the first British cruisers, Colin & Carol, we have come across so far on our neighbouring boat, "Marra". They arrived yesterday evening after a long journey in via Lanzarote, so we didn´t get to chat to them much last night. However, they came accross for a coffee this morning so we exchanged cruising routes and tales for a while and I am sure we will bump into the again somewhere in the Canaries.
So, all being well, the next blog update will be from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Attached are some of the photos taken by my parents as we left Marina Rubicon in Lanzarote. Our only shots of Invincible underway- so thanks very much to them for those.
As you can tell from the title, we have not headed to Morro Jable today, it is still rather blustery and the forecast is due to improve each day, so we decided to stay another night. Today is 18 kts NNE with 2.5m swell, dropping through the next few days, it has also been a particularly high tide and a slight veer in the wind which seems to have increased the swell. It was really crashing on the beach in town at lunchtime and would have been great for some body boarding. We also made another decision when going back over the pilot guides that actually neither of us really wanted to go to Morro Jable, it is really just to shortening the jump to Gran Canaria. Morro Jable is described in the pilot as having “one of the largest concentration of timeshare and hotel accommodation” with regular 50 knot winds down the hills on approach, which didn’t sound too inviting. We decided we are not averse to a longer passage so have opted to go straight from Gran Tarajal to Gran Canaria tomorrow, we will set off in the evening and travel through the night, aiming to arrive mid-morning. The wind tends to be a little lighter at night and we enjoy a night passage.
I am really excited about moving onto a new island and Gran Canaria sounds like it has a lot of interesting aspects too with banana plantations, pine forests and golden sand dunes which will be a real contrast to the volcanic islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. We have some more kitting out that we want to do to the boat before our Atlantic crossing too, as Gran Canaria is apparently the best stocked in the Canaries. Kevin can’t wait to get to all those chandleries!
So, we just had a few beers on the seafront last night and it was actually much livelier than on Tuesday, so perhaps it’s just Monday and Tuesday nights that are quiet. Today, we walked over to have a look out to sea from the hill to see what the conditions looked like. I went to the internet café to get the latest forecast and we decided to delay. Consequently, Kevin has taken the opportunity to start the next Patrick O’Brien book– The Fortune of War, which has kept him quiet ever since, though I’m assured he will drag himself away for a beer later.
I have just been doing my Spanish lessons and a then a blissful half hour on the trampoline in the sun with the iPod this afternoon. I may have slightly overdone it today though I think, Kevin recommended the one album timeframe, but I think I may have only have ¾ or even ½ album complexion.
