PREPARING to Enter the ATLANTIC - Tranquilo Sailing Around the World Ep.52

We finally reached the end of the Med and here our key task is preparing Tranquillo to enter the Atlantic. So there it is finally, the pillar of Hercules. I guess folks around here are keen to reinforce that this is still part of the British Empire. Tanker Central Gibraltar. Tankers everywhere you look. That's the marinas of Gibraltar. All three say they are currently totally full. Mostly people who are wintering over the winter, naturally. So we're heading just north to La Lina, which is essentially 500 meters across from the border between Spain and Gibraltar. We've arrived in La Lina. I'm very tired but very happy to be here. I arrived about an hour ago and I can just gradually feel the energy levels. It's like pink. So Chris and Alyssa from Barefeet have just arrived. They've just been in Gibraltar picking out fuel. Apparently it's considerably cheaper, around 60 cents per litre. They're here so I'm going over to say hello. Well they've put us back-to-back. I love you guys. Hey? Yeah. Cheers. Cheers. Not a bad sail. Bumping the current and the fog. And the whales that get on bumping us. That's not true though, whales are very polite. Yeah it was fine. It's just a shame we had to motor. I was really hoping we could do that 250 miles on the sail. And yeah. And Elle's asleep. She said yeah apologise to the guys but she needs sleep. Okay just have a look at that. That's the kind of impact that the rock has on winds around here. One of the great things about spending more than a few days in a place is that we finally get to things that we've been putting off for five months, like installing the boom break that we bought. A while back in preparation for downwind sailing I got what is considered the best boom break on the market. At least Yachting World did a lot of testing of several of them and this one came out on top in terms of installation and effectiveness. So considering that we're going to be doing now quite a lot of downwind sailing pretty much all the way to Australia hopefully, I thought it's time to install it. And what is a boom break? So what happens is say you are on a particular tack and you do an accidental gybe, it's supposed to slow down the boom going across from one side of the yacht to the other side of the yacht. It kind of replaces a preventer. Now it's great as a preventer has been, there have been one or two times where if we had to tack or gybe it's caught particularly on the bimini. I can just imagine it catching under the bimini and ripping the bimini off. So this should be a lot easier to work with and a few fewer issues. This is all highly theoretical but let's I'll show you. So that's much slower. Now bring a bit of tension. Can't do it by hand, it's too tight. And now it's like a preventer. Now the sail is going to have a lot more strength to it. We'll see how it goes. Giddy up. Another DIY job here on Tranquilo. We've just noticed there's a little snag point on our spinnaker furler. It must have caught on something as Phil was furling it in. And so what we need to do is take some of this, it's known as a whipping line, and just whip it. So sort of tuck it back in and hold it in place so that that doesn't further open up and fray. And then I'm going for a sleep. I'm just about to wrap up and this is the almost finished product. A nice protective layer there now. So what are we doing? We're going on our celebration dinner. Celebrating what? What are we celebrating Aiden? You say one thing and I'll say another thing. Coming out of the Mediterranean. And I have another thing that we're celebrating. 3000 miles. Almost 3000 miles. Same as us. Exactly, so we're both celebrating the same thing. I think we've seen 1000 miles ago. I know. This would be nice on the bridge as well. Okay, Chris and Alyssa, you're about to disappear and set off for the Canaries? Yep. The wide unknown. Do you have some advice for us? Prepare, prepare, prepare. I think we've been preparing for the Atlantic Crossing for five months really. Learning how to sail the boat, learning how to provision. The last week has been manic in provisioning for the Atlantic Crossing. We've done an awful lot of shopping. We had to hire a car. I think we've got enough dry goods now for all the way to Panama. I mean, Alyssa is better to talk about. She spent the whole day yesterday just packing the boat, didn't you? Yep, that was very exciting, so we've had to do a bit of repacking for all our food and dry goods, so we've got a bit of a place for everything. Luckily we've got three bedrooms, so one of them is just completely filled with food and other junk, so that's good. I think one of the other big things that we've got our head across in the last couple of days is some of the weather and route planning. So previously we've sort of just winged it, which our Tranquilo friends found quite funny. So we usually just pick a spot on the map and we just go for it, but we've done a bit more planning this time. We've looked at old Jimmy Cornell, so we've got a route planned out and we're going to be a bit more practical this time. But there's no wind, so hopefully we won't be motoring all the way. We've also taken advantage of the cheap diesel here, or not here, over the road in Gibraltar. Very, very cheap, so we filled up every jerrycan we can find and both of our tanks. We're about to fill up gas bottles because gas is hard to find in the Canaries. So yeah, we're pretty much... You are sorted. We are prepared. Fantastic. All right, thanks and we wish you good wind. Yes, and we hope you have a good time in Morocco. Thank you. See you guys. Catch up soon. Bye. So we've just done a bit of more shopping to get us fitted out for the Atlantic crossing, primarily. 10 diesel cans, 20 litres each. Doubles the capacity. 180 litres altogether? No, 200 litres. Oh. You've got 10. And secondly, we've got a few other things like spare hacksaw blades, just in case the mast goes over, and a dry container for our flares. So we're almost compliant for the Arc and also ready for the Atlantic. Hooray. New country. We're about to cross into Gibraltar, up in the UK. There's a strange sensation that the footpath to town actually crosses the runway. So, not that many flights a day, but I imagine they have people to stop the pedestrians when it does happen. We are in a tiny piece of the UK. This really is like any high street in England. If you've been to England, town after town, the main streets are pretty much the same, in the sense that they all have the same chains, Debenhams, Waitrose. Wow. Anyway, you get the picture. Except that it's a weird mix of Spanish and English, because a lot of the goods in a lot of the shops are Spanish. Look at the cargo ships and the tugboats. I can see Tranquilo's mast. I can, but I don't know. I don't know if that is it. You can see why there's a cloud hanging over Gibraltar a lot of the time. Just all the moisture just gets funneled up. It's great wind and it's straight over the top. I can't feel much of the wind here. If I go just two meters that way, so now you can see why I'm always wary of getting too close to big cliffs, just because the wind just gets bottled up and then just gets shot out. Yeah, that's why. Hello cheeky monkey. We have a stowaway in our cable car. Just an easy way down. It's time to prepare for our canary crossing. So I'm going to do a big batch of veggie pasta mix and meat pasta mix. And the other thing I'm doing, because I love my fruit and veg, is for the first time playing with the vacuum sealer. My first priority was ginger, which is awesome for keeping seasickness at bay. And you can actually do pretty much anything in a vacuum sealer. And it goes something like this. Pull down the lid and press a button. Voila. The other thing in preparation for crossing across the Canaries of course is to determine the best time for departure. Primarily right now we're just seeing the tail end of Hurricane Ophelia, which hit Ireland only yesterday. And then we've got another major low. As you can see I'm looking at predict wind, just building here towards Friday. You can see. So we really got to pick exactly when we want to leave. Yesterday we decided not to go because the waves are still three meters and on the beam. So we decided to let those waves that had been created by Ophelia die down. And so we are looking to leave today just cutting it fine because we want to get into Canary Islands before we feel the effect of that next major low that's coming through on Friday. Right, you do your high fives. Good luck. Bon voyage. It's been fabulous staying here in La Linea and getting to know you all a bit better. We'll see you over the other side. It's been really great. Really good. Have a great trip over. Yeah, you too. Good luck. Catch up for some tips. Oh, I know what it is. I'm waiting for blue wire in that one and brown wire in that one. We've been extremely conservative with our sail set up as we head into the Strait of Gibraltar. Yesterday, Tika, one of the boats that headed out, got caught out in 35 to 40 knot winds, which they don't forecast it here, but with wind coming through it gets bottled in and just gets quite strong. So even though right now it's 5 to 10 knots, we are playing it very safe just in case and just had the headsail up. With just a headsail up in 30 knot winds, we're going fast and we don't really want to be hurling sails in 30 knot winds, so mainsail's down, headsail's up. Well, goodbye Mediterranean, goodbye Gibraltar, goodbye mainland Spain. We've just done our last task in Gibraltar, which was to fill up on their very cheap fuel, probably the cheapest we'll ever buy. When we just did it then, it was 45 pence. So there's 4 tanks and 5 jerrycans, and they said, kind of looked the other way and said, okay, you can fill up the jerrycans, but they have to stay on the boat. Apparently that's something they say to everyone, they're just concerned about people filling up on super cheap fuel and taking it across the La Linea and flogging it off. But we're all good. Oh, they've surrounded us. Good one. Help us inspire others to live their dreams. Please support us on Patreon.