Atlantic Ocean: Sailing from Gibraltar to the Canaries | Ep. 52

Welcome back. We've got a few days to go before we set sail to the Canaries and we're busy just finishing up with some final boat jobs. Leaving mainland Europe meant that it would become harder to get a hold of boat parts and gear so we made the most of the chandleries to buy any extra parts we might need now. We also made the most of being in a marina to enjoy some good sleep, run errands and do some exercise before being at sea for a longer period of time. Our friends Seb and Funny were joining us for the passage down to the Canaries. You might remember them from when we were in Sardinia together. We frantically finished off the last jobs and were ready to cast the lines. All right here we go. We managed to get our hands on an Iridium Go sat phone last minute so we quickly set it up so that people could track us and we could download weather underway. Canary Islands here we come. We had about five days ahead of us before we reached La Graciosa Island. Following seas eh? Yeah. We've got some proper wind now. Yeah first day we left Djib about five and the wind's just picked up ever since so we haven't crossed the street yet we're still on the Spanish coast just following the Spanish coastline west and we've got beautiful wind and a beautiful sunset. I think it's just a really perfect start. Funny, what's happening right now? Woken up by a massive turning upside down. And water coming in right? A little bit of spray in the face. And water spraying on our faces in our bed. Yeah. It's 2am. It's pretty intense. It's pretty messy in here right now. Oh my god. Lars and Alex they're at hard at work upstairs. Oh god. Just like trying to film right now is a bit of an ambitious undertaking to be honest. I have no idea if you can see the sea state out the window. Right. We're gonna cross the shipping lane to Gibraltar. Headed out pretty far west. We're well past the strait. We've been following the north side of it just because of the wind. And so now we're just watching the AIS for a window to then cross through but it's not easy. We've also got about 25 to 30 knots of wind. It's a bit like Frogger, did you ever play that? No. It's like you're like this frog and you have to cross the road without getting squished. Oh yeah yeah I know I did used to play that. But instead of cars it's tanker ships. We're properly lounging. It's been a bit of a wild night. I'm not really sure when to debrief on it. We've had a bit of a baptism of fire. Before nightfall all was going well. We were almost like is this it? Is this all the wind we've got? And then it just all of a sudden picked up and then everyone started getting seasick. It was gusting. It was 25 knots gusting 35 or something. The waves were huge. We had waves breaking into the cockpit. Seb was out for hours. It was bad. What else happened? Lars was sick. There was carnage down below. Oh yeah. The toolbox went flying. It's probably the strongest seas and wind we've had on this boat. So yeah now we're just recovering a bit. Caught up on a bit of sleep. Still quite a bit of wind and we are I don't know how far off the coast of Morocco but we're out of the straits now. Said goodbye to Spain and mainland Europe which is crazy and on to the Atlantic. I went up to the foredeck to help Lars put the pole and I didn't return. I mean well you returned but then you threw up and I splatted on the foredeck and couldn't get up. Funny on the other hand. It's killing it down here. Wowee whoa that spoon's about to fall. There isn't any left. Is that funny? There's a bit left. Do you want some? I mean I'm loving it. I've got an appetite. What's it now? Oh sorry. At this point I think it was starting to kick in that we'd actually left and that it would just be us and the ocean for the next four or five days. We transitioned into a nice watch system doing four hours on and 12 off rotating every day by four hours so that our watch time would be different every day. This is also known as a Swedish watch system. We wanted to try out this system as we hadn't done it before but personally I found that I prefer sticking to the same watch times every day in order to get into a routine. Lars is feeling a bit seasick. This is about all I can manage right now. Some crackers and sleep. What are you doing Lars? I'm doing something I've never done before which is placing a call from the middle of the ocean. We just invested in this. Big passages. I'm trying to get a call through to my mum. The reception's not great but Alex just called her granddad for his 97th birthday and wished him happy birthday from the sea which is pretty cool. So it's day two or three depending on how you want to count it. Things are going okay really except for the fact that Lars has been seasick on and off for the past two days more or less but yeah things are overall pretty good. Just whapped out the Haribos which always helps. Just got some music playing and Lars has got some riddle games going on with 7 Funny here whilst he takes a nap and they try and figure it out. We're going on on Langsley. We've got an average speed of about five and a half knots, 5.8 actually, and we've done about 250 miles maybe now so another 300 something to go I think. The wind's better than we expected today. We expected a bit of a lull. It's actually more than we thought so that's good and then tomorrow we should have pretty consistent and solid good wind for the last two or three days. I've been seasick since we left which hasn't been fun. It's the first time this season I've been seasick. I think the heavy wind as it came out of the strait just really got me and then I just couldn't recover from it but there I just managed to hold down a seasickness tablet for long enough for it to kick in. I'm feeling so much better. I'm getting some more food in me. I'm just recovering. Starting to feel good so we're going to go up onto the foredeck and just play some dice. How are you feeling, Seb? Pretty great. Actually yeah, for the first time I think on this passage I feel like a human being with possibilities ahead of me. Let's go play some games. Yeah. You knew that's where this was going didn't you? I thought it just as you were saying the sentence. I was like so every cow fart of all history there's this finite probability that we're breathing it. I think the chat has hit a new low I've just been saying how the swell is so light there just isn't really any but we are starting to get a bit more of the Atlantic swell feel that's kind of long rollers but they're really small so it's pretty flat. Lovely. Didn't expect it to be this chilled out. What are you doing? This is the Iridium Go sat phone. It allows us to send sms's, make calls and download predict wind weather offshore. It's a really great piece of kit that we use a lot on all of our offshore passages now. This is chaos. Red one. Blue one. Lagretto. I said it first. Cheese cheese cheese. That's where all this cheese come from. The guys next door to us in the marina had just uh were leaving their boat for a while and they came into the marina in Alcaidasa the day before we were leaving and they said hey guys do you want this big bag of food it was basically filled with cheese. We don't eat that much cheese on board so in a way it's like a treat but also probably not great for our insides. This one is particularly foamy as well. They came from France so all the cheese is French cheese. The extra extra smelly. Can't complain. So it is Thursday today and we've been going since Monday evening. The wind's picked up quite a bit now and it's forecast to stay like this until Saturday so we should be there by Saturday now. We're taking bets on when we'll get there. I think we might get there early Saturday morning maybe maybe before daybreak on Saturday. Depends how fast we go and how much we keep up our speed. Yeah we've had a really pleasant day. We've just been playing games and taking it easy really and I'm just enjoying some time up on the and it's my watch that starts from 8 to 12. So that's my watch. So how are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm just downloading the next weather forecast trying to get the rain with it this time but otherwise things are great. We've got awesome wind behind us. We're going along in six knots. The boat's being really comfortable. The Atlantic has proven to be pretty friendly so far compared to the Med. Just the swell is really relaxed. I mean honestly down below I'm pretty chilled out right now but more than anything I don't know I didn't expect to feel so excited about leaving the Med. I don't know this first leg down to the Canary. It's like down to the Canary it still felt like preparing to cross the Atlantic but already I just feel like this is something pretty exhilarating and a pretty cool accomplishment and I'm proud of us and I'm proud of the boat. I'm excited to get there. As Mark said it's really chill down here. Everything is flying. Oh you're doing it in the dark as well because we haven't turned the lights on. Yeah we're trying to skimp on this. The battery's down to 12.6 at the moment. 12.6? Yeah. That's okay. It was down to 11.8 this morning. We kind of like the darkness. Good. So we realized this morning that we have a bit of a battery problem or difficulty charging the batteries. We have had quite a bit of cloud coverage yesterday and even today so the solar hasn't been able to really perform as well as we wanted and also the sun comes in front of the boat for most of the day and the sails shade the solar panel so it just means that we haven't been able to get as much solar if we want. We turned on the engine earlier and tried to boost some charge but it didn't work as well as it should. I think it has something to do with the alternator to battery charger. I'm not entirely sure but what it means is that we're only putting about 20-30 amps into the batteries when the engine's running when we should be putting 80 amps in or 90 amps in and that obviously like quadruples the amount of time you need to have the engine running. It just isn't possible really. Something to figure out before our next passage to get that fixed because it's pretty important that we can like charge the batteries fast when we need to especially since we rely on it for the water maker and right now it's not dishing out enough power for the water maker so luckily we have enough water to make it there and we we can still run it if we had to but not the best situation. It means no showers and we're all looking forward to showers today so oh well let's get that quick. I think everyone smells okay so far though. Maybe we just all smell the same. We can't smell each other. We smell equally as bad as each other. There's quite a lot of wind. How'd you sleep? There's this crazy swirl that came in and like it just rocks you from over from side to side when you're both sleeping in so I slept on the floor. I just put like the cockpit cushions on the floor and then I stole your spot when you went on your walk. It's been like hot bunking every three hours or four hours. It's been like right change beds, change beds. Hopefully the last day. Last day. So we've got about another 110 miles to go. We should put us in Lanzarote about 8am tomorrow morning It's been good. We've learned a lot about what makes life easier on passage. There's been a few systems that need repairing or upgrading but in general things have gone pretty well. Crews worked together amazingly. Couldn't have asked for a better crew. The wind's been behind us the entire way. We basically haven't done any sail changes. We took one reef last night and that's it. I think we went below five knots just a couple of times so can't complain really. Great first passage in the Atlantic. This is the longest passage we've ever done and there's something different about doing a multi-day passage compared to like a two-day or even three-day passage. You really get a sense that you're going somewhere, that you're traveling by sea whereas usually I have the feeling of sort of hopping between anchorages and I'm sort of on the water but not properly traveling on the water in the same way and this has a completely different feel. It's hard to put into words. There's something really special about it. It's really simple where life just gets reduced down to making food, taking care of the boat, hanging out, sleeping, keeping watch and nothing else needs to get done. There's no other problems that can be solved and it's funny because the first two days on passage you can see or three days even you can sort of see your mind still looking for things to do. I kept picking my phone up and just reflexively opening the mail app and opening Instagram and took a few days for that habit to go away and then just enter this other place where I don't even feel like I need to read or do anything really. I could just sit and watch the waves go by which sounds completely dull and boring in most moments of life but out here it just seems like the only thing that needs to be done and there's something really really nice about that and I kind of see how there will definitely be a bit of nostalgia when we arrive even though it's gonna be really fun to arrive and I can't wait to celebrate our first huge step out into the Atlantic. Still there's something sad about leaving such a simple life and re-entering kind of all the dynamics of people and society and your problems. It's been a really cool interesting experience and I'm really looking forward to the next one. So we've got the headsail and the staysail pulled out with the with the main boom which is a bit of an operation questionable expenditure of effort and time but you know what I think the verdict is in and it was worth it. It looks kind of puny from here. Staysail doesn't look to be doing anything. To arrive somewhere so different to the place that you left from made us realize how far we'd sailed and that the adventure had truly begun. Land ho! You can see all the anchor lights, all the other boats. We're just motoring down the channel here. Hey! Breakfast time everyone! We made it! It's very windy. We've arrived. We are tired, a little bit worn but also pretty pumped and excited to have sailed to our first Atlantic destination. This is La Graciosa Island, a small island just off the northern coast of Lanzarote. It has a pretty special feel with its untouched sandy beaches, no roads and volcanic landscape. It's like nowhere we've been before. A little fishing village has a sleepy feel to it almost taking you back in time. It was the perfect place for us to land, catch up on some rest and celebrate a successful passage. Thanks for watching this far and see you next time for some more adventures in the Canary Islands.