Day 1: Our passage from Gibraltar to the Canary Islands

The weather window had finally arrived and it was time to leave the safety of Gibraltar and begin our 4-5 day crossing to the Canary Islands - and the Atlantic Ocean. With our boat fully provisioned, a foghorn on board - plus bags filled with sand - in case of an orca attack, we took a last dip in the Mediterranean (or more accurately the Alboran Sea), and headed out of the Bay of Gibraltar.

We were crossing to the Canaries with our buddy boat Parallel - also a NZ flagged boat - a Nautitech 46 who had a young couple and toddler on board.

And so began the Frogger-like game of dodging massive container ships and tankers, as we moved west along the coast towards Tarifa. Next step was to raise our sails, which should have been easy. However, we had a small ‘mishap’ when Jacques (10) - who was raising the main with the electric winch - kept pushing on the winch button after the main halyard had jammed. This resulted in us shredding the main halyard’s rope casing and exposing the dyneema in one area. Jacques was super upset with himself and quickly retreated to his cabin, while Rich, gutted at such a bad start to our longest crossing yet, dramatically declared the trip was over and announced we’d have to turn back. However, after we had all calmed down, consoled Jacques, and spent a few minutes floating and thinking on a solution, we decided we could fix the rope by stitching the casing around it to the dyneema so it wouldn’t get caught on anything, and then pull it back up through the mast. This took about 20 minutes and worked out well as the affected area of line was actually in the rope bag once the main was raised. By this point Parallel, who had radioed us to find out what was wrong, had continued on and got quite a bit further ahead of us.  With our halyard problem solved, the main up and the headsail out, we were on our way again with all eyes back on the water watching for orcas, container ships and other obstacles, as we navigated the busiest shipping channel in the world.

We saw what we thought was a large turtle coming alongside the boat but on closer inspection, it was a huge Sunfish! So cool to see. There is so much traffic in the Strait of Gibraltar it is quite insane, especially as you navigate across the shipping lane between ships to the Moroccan side. We had the wind behind us at 25 - 35 knots, a messy sea state, and big waves with a short interval - not fun!

As we safely moved out of the Strait on our westerly path, we were glad not to have seen any orcas yet, especially as they had recently ripped the rudder off, and subsequently sunk, a monohull not far from our location. The sun began to set and we moved into the night shift routine. We ate a pre-prepared Thai Green Curry meal and the kids went off to bed. They sleep so soundly onboard, especially while we are under way, it always amazes us. Rich and I had decided to run the shifts in 3 hour blocks. I started the 8pm until 11pm shift, Rich did 11-2am, me 2-5am & Rich finished off with the sunrise shift. We experienced some HUGE waves out of the Gibraltar Strait off Morocco, but Uno handled everything really well. Surfing the waves can be quite scary at times, especially in the pitch black darkness. I lost my stomach every single time we surfed down a wave! It was also quite scary looking back in the dark from the helm station and seeing only the whitewash of really tall waves, above the height of our coach roof! Still the wind kept on at 20 - 25 knots all night. All in all the first day and night went well, and while Parallel had managed to get quite a bit further ahead of us, we made good progress. 

Our average speed on day 1 was over 9 knots, with a maximum speed of 16 knots surfing down a wave!