Gibraltar to Graciosa Island
It’s a dank place, Gibraltar, because of the Levante, the easterly breeze that causes a great pear-shaped cloud to spread from the top of the Rock every morning like a white shroud suspended over our lives. The locals complain of asthma and arthritis.
Each morning, we find all the outside surfaces are moist with a wretched dew. The cabin top and covered cockpit are both as wet as if from rain, and water drips depressingly from the awnings and booms. The damp even seeps down through the saloon and the cabins, making everything clammy and humid to the touch.
By midday the cowardly sun finally shines through and burns away the mists, giving us fine afternoons. The boat is dry by three o’clock, but by six the dew builds again. Like the locals, we long for the Poniente, but this dry wind from the west is not for sailing south to the Canaries, so when it does come and the weather clears, we must wait for the Levante to return to speed us on our way. We wish to sail south from here before the winter gales make the voyage a miserable experience, but we cannot cross the Atlantic until the hurricane season is over, so it means filling in time between September and the end of November. Cruising the Canaries sounds like a good plan.
Aside from the humidity it causes, the Rock certainly is a magnificent sight. Not merely visually, but geologically also, as the Rock is different from its surrounding terrain. It’s a little bit of Africa from aeons ago, abandoned by the great African continent when it crashed into and then split again from Europe. Culturally, it’s also very different from the surrounding terrain, a tiny globule of England dropped in between Spain and Morocco, and we find its very Englishness constantly entertaining.
The main street is ingeniously called Main Street. This is a horse-and-carriage-width walking street, featuring such English icons as British bobbies, Marks & Spencer, and lots of English pubs called delightfully absurd names like The Friar’s Hat, serving typical British pub fare and a Sunday roast. There’s even a London-style political demonstration or two in Main Street!
We take the aerial gondola to the top of the Rock and, with all the other backpack-toting tourists, run, laugh and squeal, frightened of the apes which scratch and bite and leap on your head to grab your lunch if they can . . . so we fill in our time while we wait for the Levante.
We also spend time with our fellow cruisers in the anchorage, planning our escape through the famed Pillars of Hercules and out into the Atlantic. The Straits of Gibraltar are a curious small challenge for the sailor. The evaporation of the Mediterranean is so great, and it has so few rivers, that it is one metre lower than the Atlantic Ocean, which creates a shallow waterfall effect as the ocean rushes in through the strait trying to fill the Mediterranean. This, combined with tidal flows, some overfalls, currents, vagaries of the weather forecasts, and the 80,000 ships a year that pass that way, makes a complex situation for the wandering sailor.
It’s the end of September when the Levante returns, and our leaving is precisely timed to catch the tides. Just after daylight, engines whispering and anchor chains making soft growling noises, we slip out of the anchorage, three boats together, Fantasy1, Chatti and Blackwattle. Our hulls make small wash-waves in the satin-grey stillness of the water but that’s all we leave behind, and soon that will be gone as well.
Apart from an early-bird sailor drinking coffee in his cockpit who waves goodbye, most of the anchored boats are still sleeping as we move into the main channel of Gibraltar, sliding past the lines of great ships at anchor, towering above us. There’s movement up there, silhouetted bodies moving smartly around the decks, early-morning duties.
It’s momentous, this moving from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. We arrived in the Med at Port Said on 24 May 2004, and two years, four months and two days later we are leaving to start our next great ocean journey. By three in the afternoon, we’re clear of the land. There’s still mist around – a brown mist to the north over Europe, that bastion of progress and modernity; and a pure white mist to the south over Africa, that ‘backward’ continent that hasn’t learned properly yet how to poison the air it breathes. Birds hunt low to the water, skating over the waves. There are cuttlefish floating, and seaweed, and two, no three pods of dolphins putting on a display. One charcoal form leaps clear out of the water, its snow-white underbelly shining wet as it arcs back below the surface. Damn! Too fast for my camera!
After several days and nights of blissful downwind sailing, smooth seas, fragrant nights and sun-filled days, the Canaries are in sight – clear black shapes, without foliage, volcanic. Drawing closer, I can only see white rectangular blocks breaking the stark monotony of black rock.
‘It looks like a giants’ cemetery,’ I comment. ‘Or maybe one of those temporary mining towns full of portable buildings.’
Graciosa is a minute island at the far north of the Canary Islands, formed from the remains of five volcanoes and their black-streaked lava overflows. Today the volcanoes still brood over the prickly saltbush which spreads along the yellow sand of the long, deserted beaches.
The houses are white, flat-roofed with traditional Spanish blue windows and doors, and holiday tourism has replaced fishing as the primary industry. The local men, old and young, sit in the sun, and holidaymakers troop along the shoreline and laze in the shallows. Homeowners plant palms, cacti and prickly pear, and make stone gardens from the different colours of volcanic rock. The roads between the houses are soft yellow sand, and nowhere is very far, so walking or riding a bicycle is the happy solution. Sometimes the post office has no stamps and sometimes the internet cafe just doesn’t open. And though the marina has electricity and water outlets, they’ve never been connected. It’s laissez-faire for the locals and ‘make do’ for the visitors. We haul our water, all desalinated, from the town centre by jerry can.
This is a good place to wait for the end of the hurricane season. The marina is full of cruisers intending to cross the Atlantic this year, and we work on our boats, getting them ready for the long passage. Everyone is hammering, scrubbing, polishing and painting. When not occupied with maintenance, we hike the beaches, climb the volcanoes, explore the nearby island of Lanzarote, and swim in the clear, fresh water. We’re reluctant to leave, but in November we sail southwards to Las Palmas in Gran Canaria to join more than 200 boats in the annual Atlantic Rally for Cruisers – otherwise known as the ARC – now in its twenty-first year. Many European yachts use the ARC as a way of ‘getting their feet’ on their first ocean crossing, others come back time and time again, enjoying the camaraderie of joining other cruising sailors to cross the Atlantic. We’ve never been in a formal rally, and we’re looking forward to the adventure, little realising just how much of an ‘adventure’ we are destined to have . . .