Day 4: Our Passage from Gibraltar to the Canary Islands

Sailing Uno: Our Passage from Gibraltar to the Canary Islands

Day 4
Woohoo the seasickness has definitely subsided today - yay! My first sourdough loaf proofed overnight and came out of the oven this morning - success! Just in time as the store-bought bread had run out.

Today was a slow day. The wind dropped early around 6am to 9kts and so we put on one engine as the battery that powers the radio is very low, and it’s been very cloudy the last 2 days, so other things could use a charge. The engine also gave us a bit more speed, so we were moving at 7 knots. Our plan is to arrive by Saturday (day 5) evening at this stage. We spotted 2 turtles swimming by - definitely turtles this time, we saw their shells. We still have not caught any fish but both lines have been out for days. It’s actually crazy that we haven’t even had a bite.

On the 8 - 11pm night shift there was still not a lot of wind. We continued running big red which we don’t usually do in case of gusts or sudden wind increases in the night, because it takes 2 of us to furl it. But the wind is only 5 - 8 knots and our speed is 4 - 6 knots, so it’s not going too bad.

One of us may get interrupted during our nap to come help put it away if the wind increases sometime after midnight.. At this rate though we would not arrive until well after dark tomorrow night, which is never ideal when it’s an anchorage you’ve never been to before. Parallel are about 20 nm ahead of us. 

The stars look amazing tonight. I came out for my 2-5am shift & wind had picked up. Rich said it was the fastest 3 hour shift he’d had, big red was running at its limit & we’d been consistently going 7-9.5kts.. As the gusts are getting stronger, we furled big red in a lull, and put the white headsail out. Wind is a beam reach (90deg) and had increased a little to between 13 - 18 knots. At our current speed & heading of 210°M, we would likely arrive to Graciosa Bay around 3pm. It often makes me nervous taking over the helm when conditions are a bit sporty like this and the wind is picking up. But I have to learn to embrace it and trust myself; I know what Uno is capable of too. If the wind increases to over 20 knots we will need to reef the main, which means I'll wake Rich up so he can go up on deck and reef at the mast. We're hoping we don’t have to do that while it’s dark & we’re flying along, so we’ve agreed that if the wind increases I’ll instead alter our course by 10° increments, until the apparent wind decreases. 

We had 90.9 nm to go when Rich went down for his last nap. It seemed our planning was unnecessary because by 4am the wind had dropped right off to around 6-9 knots.