Las Palmas

November 6, 2009 -- Skylark is at Berth 13 on Pontoon T at the marina. We connect shore power and water and the coffee machine is the first piece of vital equipment to be deployed. After a quiet meal on board, we walked the little strip fronting the marina which has some restaurants and a few ship chandlers.  The town is a little further away with supermarkets and stores.  The old town is a half hour walk from the marina with older buildings and streets closed off as pedestrian malls. Las Palmas is surprisingly large and developed as a city,  The main trade is tourism with mainly northern Europeans making an escape from the winter chill.  The ARC is a major event for the city and the waterfront is bedecked with flags and signs.  This will be the 24th ARC to start off from Gran Canaria.

 Ed cleans the galley, Skylark and dinghy at the Las Palmas marina

Monday, November 9 -- we checked in at the ARC office and are assigned a Rally number and given an appointment for the safety check on Tuesday.  Our Rally number is 69 and there are some 220 boats expected in the final tally. We get a visit by "Jerry the Rigger" who gives us a free rigging inspection, courtesy of Skylark's insurer, Admiral Insurance of the UK.  Jerry climbs both masts and makes a complete inspection of the rigging and lifelines.  As might be expected, Skylark's rigging gets a clean bill of health.  We got some practical tips from Jerry on things to look for when inspecting the rigging while at sea. Most dismastings on sailboats are avoidable if problems are detected early and promptly rectified, or if sailing tactics are changed to put less stress on the rig.

  Another shot of Skylark at the Las Palmas marina.

Our safety check went OK.  Our safety equipment meet requirements and in some instances, exceed them.  Still, we got some good suggestions from the ARC safety inspector, Paul Tetlow, especially on making ready to deploy equipment should the need arise.  We also learned some things about our equipment which we had not been aware of.  For instance, the second antenna on top of the mizzen mast is dedicated to the AIS tranceiver.  If needed, the antenna could be used as a spare for the VHF radio should its own antenna become disabled.  We had to concede however, that despite our sophisticated collision avoidance electronics, a passive radar reflector had to be carried in the unlikely event of a total loss of power while under way.  We purchased one for 30 Euro and stored it in a cockpit locker, nicely out of sight.  Our inflatable life vests had new strobe lights installed on them which automatically come on if the vests are deployed.

Sunday, November 15 was the day the ARC was declared open with government officials from Gran Canaria and St Lucia gracing the occasion.  There was a parade of sorts with crews carrying their national flags down the street to a spot near the port office.  There are boats from 30 countries participating in this year's ARC.  The "parade" is accompanied by a brass band playing tunes like "Roll Out the Barrel" and is watched by locals and other yachties lining the street.  At the end of the parade, the flags are raised on a row of flag poles while canons went off in salute.  The Malaysian flag is carried by a motley crew -- one real Malaysian, a Texan and a Frenchman (both of whom have longstanding connections to Malaysia).  Ed has lived and worked in Malaysia and is married to Jun, a Malaysian the skipper has known for almost 40 years.  Francois has spent many years in Malaysia managing civil engineering projects.  We are asked by many about the flag and where we come from.  We left the questions to Francois who would answer without a trace of self consciousness "....Malaysia!"  So here are pictures of the parade:

Finally, a photo of friends from the Amel Super Maramu, Voyageur, David and Susan MacKay who are on their second circumnavigation.

 

We have begun provisioning in earnest.  Water, drinks, breakfast supplies, etc. and a large supply of half cooked bread which can be stored without refrigeration.  They only require 10 minutes in the oven, and the result is  fresh bread as if we'd gone out to the boulangerie in the morning.  We will get meat, eggs and vegetables a couple of days prior to the start on Sunday, November 22. The second deep freezer has been started up in preparation and the food inventory updated.

The Amel technical crew from La Rochelle turned up the morning of November 16 to retrofit the rudder post assembly.  This should fix the water intrusion while under way for good.  Nicolas, who we'd met at La Rochelle during Skylark's commissioning in July, is working on the problem.

We start out across the big ocean on Sunday.  Our limited email capability via the short wave radio will be used for daily position reports to the ARC and weather reports. The next blog post will be from St Lucia in the Caribbean. For those interested, the positions of boats in the ARC fleet are updated daily on the World Cruising Club website and Skylark's position should be available on the site.  We expect the crossing to take up to 20 days, perhaps less if winds are favourable.

The adventure begins....

Have been unable to post a blog since arriving at Las Palmas due to the poor internet connection.  We normally go to the inappropriately named "Sailor's Bar" for wi-fi but the connection breaks off frequently.  The Sailor's Bar isn't quite the sleazy dive the name implies, but a friendly little cafe serving simple meals and good coffee.  The internet cafes in the inner city have more reliable connections, so here goes...

November 1, 2009 --left our berth at Marina Bay, Gibraltar at 1:40 pm.  High water at Gibraltar for today according to the tide tables is 1:41 pm.  The advice from passage planning guides is to leave Gibraltar a couple of hours after high tide and to stick on the Spanish side to take advantage of the favorable west bound current in the Strait.  We refueled at the Cepsa dock – 270 litres at only 40p per litre, a bargain compared to France where Gas Oil A sells at 1.35 Euro per litre. 

Slipped the lines at the fuel dock at 2:45 pm – with time to spare before the outgoing tide works in our favor.  It takes a while to transit the harbor,  The apparent wind is about 45 degrees off the port side. We’ll sail for a while and see how the current works for us up to Tarifa.

After some 5 hours, a 3 knot adverse current works against us, so much for the passage planning guides. With sails out, we run the engine at low RPMs to maintain about 5 knots speed over the ground.  As we pass Tarifa on the Spanish coast, the current slows to 1 knot which is a relief.

The lighthouse at Tarifa on starboard as the sun sets and we head for the traffic separation scheme on the Gibraltar Straits.  The traffic separation scheme is an imaginary 2-way highway with ships in a "keep right" pattern along the designated stretch.  It is a busy night and we are glad for the AIS to help us weave our way through the large ships under way.  The commercial ships travel at up to 18 - 19 knots, making it necessary to anticipate their course and intentions in the dark.  the picture below is a screen shot of our chart plotter, each triangle representing the AIS signal of a ship.

You can see the enlarged plot by clicking on the photo.  The red boat icon is Skylark off Tarifa, the red dotted line is our course to the next way point and the solid red line is our intended course after that way point.  The AIS information on each ship can be retrieved when we click on individual triangles and a read-out giving the ship's name, speed, course over ground, length, beam, destination, call sign, etc appears if we click on the triangles.

It is a long evening as we make way through the ships, most of whom are turning north to ports in Europe, although a few are headed in the direction of Skylark, towards ports like Casablanca, Las Palmas, Cape Town and beyond.  The moon shows itself later in the evening and we have the wind almost directly from our stern.  We motor sail for most of the night but as the wind shifts to our starboard beam at around 15 knots, we are able to sail on the Main, Genoa and Mizzen at about 6 knots for a while.

Francois prepares a meal with the jumbo sized pressure cooker he brought with him from Burgundy.

November 2 -- winds shift almost directly to stern making it difficult to maintain the course on the rhumb line under sail.  Engine on again for most of the day.

The wind picks up to 20 - 22 knots and shifts to the starboard quarter, making it possible to sail at 6 - 7 knots on just Genoa and Mizzen.  Progress is good and we may have to re-think the timing for our Las Palmas arrival, not wanting to approach an unfamiliar harbour in the dark.

The Atlantic swells are constant but not unpleasant as the waves have long periods.  The nights are cool but day time temperatures allow for shorts and t-shirts.

Ed, with gin and tonic in Skylark's cockpit.  Note rear curtain enclosure which was welcome protection from the cold and rain.

Sailing conditions are good for the next couple of days with intermittent engine runs when the winds shifted now and then. There seemed to be much shipping traffic on their way to the Canaries and other ports.  In the early hours of Wednesday morning, we saw a ship some 30 miles away bearing down directly on our course at 18 - 19 knots.  By the time it was 4 miles to our stern, we called the MSC Seattle, a large oil tanker on the VHF to ask about their intentions. The ship responded immediately and said they would alter course and pass us on our port side.  some 20 minutes later, the ship passed about half a mile t our port.  While we had our navigation lights on and visibility was good, it is always reassuring to hear from the ship and to confirm that they are aware of our presence (which should have been evident from our own AIS signal).

 By late afternoon on Thursday, the winds had built to 25 knots and we were making up to 8 knots on reduced sail even in the increased swells.  We needed to slow down as that speed would have gotten us to Las Palmas harbour in the wee hours of Friday morning.  The Genoa and Mizzen sails were reduced to tiny little triangles but Skylark still made in excess of 6 knots.  We went off the rhumbline for a while to delay our entrance to Las Palmas.  The extra distance sailed slowed our arrival at the harbour breakwater at around 7 am UTC, on Friday, November 6 -- still a little dark as skies were overcast.

The reception dock and the fuel dock at the Muelle Deportivo de Las Palmas were fully occupied newly arrived ARC boats.  We hovered around that area of the marina until approached by a marinero (dock hand) in a dinghy.  He guided us to a temporary berth alongside some very large boats and told us to wait for a berth assignment which we would get to directly prior to checking in.  An hour later, we were assigned berth T-13 where two other Amels were already docked.  One of them was Voyageur with David and Susan Mackay on board.  We'd met them in early August at Gibraltar and they recognized us immediately and even remembered our names.  Check-in was quick as we had provided the required information ahead of our arrival through the ARC organization.

The journey from Gibraltar to Las Palmas covered about 760 nautical miles.  Since leaving La Rochelle in July, Skylark has accumulated some 4000 miles under her keel. The lady is now quite experienced...

More on Las Palmas in the next post.