This has taken a bit longer than planned to post, due to being asleep, lack of shore power and dodgy wifi connection. The nautical life is certainly tough when you have these things to contend with.
I drafted the story of my journey down here, but it looks too long for a blog, so here’s a summary.
I left Quinta do Lorde at 5.30 on 9 September, heading for Selvagem Grande, a small rocky island inhabited by a single warden (it’s a nature reserve) roughly 160 miles SSE. Conditions were worse than forecast. The wind was around 25 knots and the waves were around 2m with some larger ones, and they hit me on the aft quarter, which made for pretty uncomfortable motion. Trying to do anything below deck was particularly difficult. I got chucked around a lot, and have lots of bruises as a result.
A couple of minor issues came up pretty early on. The electronic autopilot kept bleeping and giving me error messages. The chances of it conking out completely seemed pretty good. Also the steel frame supporting my solar panels came loose, which meant I had to stand on the edge of the cockpit and stretch up above my head to reattach and reinforce it with rope. Certainly my most dodgy moment yet. I tied a cat’s cradle of rope to various parts of the frame to stop it coming apart, which looked pretty ugly but ended up having the desired effect thankfully.
I then set up the Hydrovane, and life got a lot better. This is a pretty simple bit of kit that holds the boat’s course at a set angle to the wind. It is very strongly-built and reliable, and it was one of the main reasons I bought the boat, as they don’t come cheap, but it really made this trip possible. It steered virtually the entire way to Lanzarote, with fairly infrequent adjustments necessary, which meant I didn’t have to rely on my electronic autopilot much, or even worse steer myself.
I needed to arrive in daylight, as the waters around Selvagem Grande are quite rocky and the pilot book said that it’s essential to have good light when navigating in. Unfortunately the wind died completely when I was around 40 miles out, and then started up again pretty weakly from a less favourable direction. This meant I had no chance of arriving in the daytime, so I headed for Allegranza, another uninhabited nature reserve north of Lanzarote. This involved a single 150 mile tack, but on a more comfortable and faster point of sale (closeish reach for the initiated).
Unfortunately daylight failed me again on the evening of the 11th. This time the sun went down when I was four miles from Allegranza, which was really frustrating. The anchorage there is less tricky than Selvagem Grande, but I still didn’t fancy dropping anchor in the dark in such a remote location, so I decided to continue down the east coast of Lanzarote to Arrecife, roughly 30 miles or so. The wind and seas were much calmer on this stretch, although this meant I slowed down a fair bit, particularly on the approach to Arrecife. I had a dolphin pod escort at one point, which was nice.
By this time I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept at all the first night, had probably only slept two and a half hours the second night in short naps, and hadn’t slept at all the third night. I had a problem with my steering on approach, and then lost reverse gear in the marina, which caused a bit of drama. Getting into a marina berth without reverse is pretty tricky, as it’s your only brake. Seven tons of boat has a lot of momentum, and is pretty hard to stop even when moving relatively slowly. Two marineros and Mel, the nice lady who runs the marina and who had come down to welcome me, grabbed on to ropes to bring Suzerain to a halt. Unfortunately Mel was pulled into the dock, which was a bit scary, but she’s ok. This embarrassing episode brought the journey to a close, at around 9 am on 12 September, slightly more than three days after I set sail from Madeira.
I then had a shower (best marina showers ever, although also the hardest to find) and passed out for the entire day.
I’ll be in this marina for a month, getting new rigging, new sails, new halyards and a few other bits. I’ll probably then move to the south coast, maybe anchor for a bit and stay for a while in Marina Rubicon too. Then I’m hoping to head for the western islands, particularly La Palma. Although this might all change. At some point I’ll post some video, although my camera battery life seems rubbish, and I didn’t record much. Here’s some photos of Lanzarote though:
You must be logged in to post a comment.