David, Anne-Laure, Paul, Graham and Sara flew to Malaga on Wednesday and then took a cab on to Alcaidesa Marina. La Linea for our cruise to the Canaries.
The forecast for a Thursday departure wasn’t great; the wind would be on the nose exiting the Strait so we decided to delay until Friday when all the forecasts suggested we’d have a NWly and an easy fetch out to the Atlantic. We spent Thursday morning on our various tasks; collecting our comprehensive medical kit, cleaning the boat which was covered in Saharan dust yet again, fixing a few items (new bilge water alarm sensor, loading new charts for the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands onto the B&G systems and provisioning for the voyage ahead.
It was Graham’s first trip to the area so we decided to spend the afternoon site-seeing and enjoying a delicious steak dinner at Gauchos in Gibraltar. Paul and Steph had a yacht in Queensway Marina, Gibraltar for 18 months so Paul was a great tour guide (especially for bars and restaurants! 🙂).
The plan was to leave at 0800 on Friday morning. We were all set, safety briefings completed the day before, plan agreed to leave the dock. … however the engines wouldn’t start. A little investigation and the diagnosis was both engine batteries were flat (!). Calls back to the factory ensued and much to the service teams (and our) disbelief, it turned out that the 24-12V DC chargers to connect the shore power charger to the starter batteries were missing and the engine batteries had gone flat after being left for a month with the breakers on, although engines powered off! The local yard came to the rescue with a jump starter and with both engines running we set off at 1000 (calls to the factory ongoing as we left).
We left the marina, hoisted the mainsail in the bay and practiced putting a reef in. This was not really necessary in 15kts but was a good way for the team to get familiar with the process. We set off into the Strait passing through a large pod of dolphins only to discover that the promised North Westerly and reach to the headland past Tangier was in fact a southwesterly on the nose.
We sailed over to the Moroccan coast on starboard tack across the separation zone then motor-sailed into the wind against 2-3kts of tide for a couple of hours until it turned in our favour and we rounded the headland about 1630 in the afternoon and turned for Lanzarote.
Two hours later and a series of emails from the factory confirmed that the 2 Orion 24/12 DC-DC Converters were indeed missing from the build spec and with lots of apologies they asked us to head for Tenerife where they were making arrangements for the installation. Time to redo our routing but we at least we were on our way.
