This will be out last morning in sight of the rock of Gibraltar, and what a beautiful final sunrise. It’s been a nice week or so, but we did get a little caught out by winds and tides, spending more time here than originally planned Made use of 3 different anchorages and 1 marina, getting lots of boat jobs done, walked up the rock (pictures to follow), did some snorkelling, but still no fish yet. Next stop Morocco
We did end up getting stuck in Gibraltar / the med for more time than we planned, but that did end up leaving us with lots of time to take pictures of monkeys.
We spent 2 days tacking into the med, and by time we wanted to leave the wind had switched and we spent multiple days in short hops a with some multi-day stops to get back out again.
A big sail even if it was downwind.. but it wasn’t, we tacked all the way from Cadiz to Gibraltar, over 60 in total, we basically tacked every 30 mins for about 28 hours straight!
And experienced just about every wind condition you could possibly think of, from none at all to perfect conditions with about 16-17 knots and often gusts came through of over 30, they were very sudden and quickly disappeared but not quickly enough to keep full sails up, so throughout the day and night we were putting more sail out, then less, then more.. it was exhausting…
When we neared Tarifa there was a lot of wind and there were many kitesurfers out making the most of it, at one point it looked like they were racing us.. I think they’d win pretty easy tho!
The thing which did go in our favor for the most important bit was the tide/current going through the straights of Gibraltar, somehow we managed to time it well to be going in the same direction as the 3knot tide which took us nicely into Gibraltar in the early evening.
On our way into the Bay of Gibraltar, we passed a number of huge container/cargo ships, hiding in the mist.
Dolphins saw us into the bay before disappearing into the night 🐬🐬 no pics this time tho 🙁
We arrived more quickly than expected even with all the tacking and we had reserved a marina spot for the next day as there’s no anchoring allowed in Gibraltar, so we sailed on by and anchored to the north in a Spanish anchorage, I didn’t realize quite how small the country is till we sailed from one end to the other in about an hour!
As we came into the anchorage we spotted a boat that looked strangely familiar but not because we had seen her before, she turned out to be another Nic 38 from the same era as Hannah, called Salara.
After a night under the suspension bridge, we made our way to a marina for some much-needed tlc.
We are getting better at this slip mooring, everyone else makes it look so easy in their boats with bow thrusters and controlled steerage in reverse! Neither of which Hannah Penn has! But after an uneventful docking we were able to have a real shower and Hannah was able to have her salty deck hosed down too, a nice and cooling thing to do as the heat was almost unbearable, luckily there was a bit of wind so we forced some air through the boat with the scoop
That evening after it started to cool down we ventured out on the hunt for fresh fruit and veg, not far into our journey we noticed that the place was packed out with cars parked literally everywhere! And wondered if there was a big event happening
Soon we heard a brass band playing in the distance and went to find out what was going on, we discovered this band playing and watched for a while before moving on, still wondering if they just practise here or if there was something more going on
We walked through the old part of Cadiz, it’s a beautiful historic city with strong religious ties, which we discovered in the form of a celebration festival depicting scenes from the Bible and Jesus’s life and death, each scene was like a mobile shrine which was guided through the streets each with its own brass band and many people guiding it with lot candles
They all arrived in the main square in view of thousands of onlookers, it was even televised and we saw people watching it from pins and bars nearby
After trying to see all the different scenes, which there were about 10 moving slower than a snail! We quickly hurried to a shop outside of all the chaos of people to find some dinner, it’s safe to say we didn’t make it in time to do a proper shop as was planned! With a couple of mins to choose some food before they closed for the night, we found some things to make sandwiches and ate it all at the side of the street!
After the evening’s excitement, we wandered home along the waterfront, where there was a park with some of the most amazing trees I’ve ever seen
One of many ancient trees in the park
The next day we got on with a few boat jobs including one which we had been putting off for a while…cleaning and replacing the plug/handle of an underwater sea cock because it had seized up and couldn’t be closed.
We will write about this in a separate post as it might be quite interesting for other folks with these seacocks.
A job well done and we didn’t fill the engine bay with too much water in doing so.
We started off in the evening to another of our planned destinations, Huelva which was about halfway to Cadiz, 55nm away. It was an easy light wind night sail and we arrived at Huelva just before lunch the next day.
Sunset sail
We anchored up and got settled in to make lunch, whilst baking a fresh loaf of bread we put up our awning canvas which sits over the top of the boom, it gave some much-needed shade to the main saloon because the temperature and sun were scorching
Adams loaf 🍞
Whilst eating lunch we checked the weather again only to find that, that afternoon and night was the only time in the next 4 or so days that had any wind at all!
So instead of staying the night in Huelva we pushed on for another night sail to Cadiz, which we needed to get to relatively soon to check out of the EU as our days here were quickly passing, we had used over 2 months of a 3 month allowance (damn Brexit!) And still, want to go to the Canary Islands which count towards the allowed 90 days in a rolling 180 day quota.
Another vibrant sunset 🌅
The sail to Cadiz was a lot faster, we left around 4:30pm and arrived around midnight, averaging 6.2knots.. our best average to date, as well as our fastest recorded speed of 12.2knots 🤓
After getting into Cadiz we anchored amongst a few other boats right next to the massive suspension bridge
