Gran Canaria  Second report 23 September 1998

Peter writes:

"Sorry to have been out of touch for so long but it’s been a bit hectic here, one way and another. We’d no sooner had all that wind in the Bay of Biscay, than the whole thing stopped. We got round the top of Spain, near Vigo, when the wind disappeared. The sea became completely glassy with visibility dropping until we were hemmed in all around by thick mist. It’s a feeling you don’t get on land I think. There is suddenly a tangible edge to your world - a hemisphere all around, like being inside one of those snow-storm toys you had as a kid.

In the end we had to go into the port of Bayona under radar alone in pitch dark with nil visibility. At one stage there were three fishing boats and us all trying to get across the same bit of water. It was quite funny as, repeatedly, all the blips on the radar screen stopped - each waiting for the other to make a move. Then one would restart and we would all tip-toe around each other again.

The entrance to Bayona is so easy that the French pilot book the "Livre du bord" doesn’t bother with a chartlet - which makes sense when you see it all in daylight, but is worrying at night. We left some paint off our keel on a large outlying island, but otherwise had nothing more worrying - except shearing the shear-pin on the propeller shaft as the anchor went home. By now it was two am and we were past caring after four days and nights at sea.

Bayona is somewhere I’ve never been before and is still pretty much unspoilt by tourism, having mediaeval castle and churches. We were delighted to find a performance of local dancing with Galician bag-pipes. It was like a cross between border Morris dancing and flamenco.

A couple of days in Bayona to sort ourselves out and it was time for the longer leg to the Canaries - I guess it’s about 800 miles, and with there still being no wind it was going to be slow. But we got the cruising chute out (like a small spinnaker) and managed to make a couple of knots for a while before giving up and starting the diesel. In the end we had to motor for about 30 hours before the Portuguese trades kicked in, growing with the seas until we were in 22 knots of wind, moving along at about ten knots for a while.

Sadly it all came apart just before dawn the next day when the chute halyard gave way, dumping a thousand square feet of sail in the sea alongside. In the end it didn’t matter as the wind kept building so we would have had to drop the chute anyway, and it was certainly a simple technique - if a bit radical.

Under Genoa alone we soon clocked up the remaining couple of hundred miles to Gran Canaria, arriving at the port of Las Palmas in broad daylight (which made a nice change for us after Bayona.) If any of you ever use pilot books for cruising foreign shores, beware! We relied on Donald Street’s Atlantic Crossing Guide, which recommended we bypass Las Palmas if collecting crew from the airport, anchoring instead in 12 feet behind the peninsular at Gando - yards from the runway. A good idea except the harbour there is now a military base; and the area is a well renowned acceleration zone, where the wind tumbles off the mountains of Gran Canaria, building up huge seas, driving spray and awful sailing conditions. You may well imagine we were not best pleased when - having at last stopped in Gando - a dinghy full of machine gun toting soldiers boarded us and insisted, albeit very politely, that we hoist sail again and depart into the howling gloom of a stormy evening, back upwind to Las Palmas - a journey that took five hours of serious motor sailing into force seven near-gales. Thanks, Mr Street!

In the end we arrived (much more in our usual style) in pitch dark at midnight, back in Las Palmas, just in time to grab a taxi and meet Sally at the airport, weighed down with another load of gear from home.