Sailing slowly – on purpose!
We had a quiet night on Monday, with a little light rain for the first time. At least it started washing off the Saharan dust which had been caked on the shrouds for the last 4 months, it just shows how dry it’s been in the Med this summer.
On Tuesday morning the wind was hovering around 12 knots but Tenerife was dead downwind of us. We did our sums and realised that even with the best possible speeds we’d still arrive after dark. This wouldn’t work as we needed to meet the yard team to get the engines started before entering the port, so we decided to drop the Code 65 and sail on main and genoa alone in order to arrive after daylight on Wednesday morning.
We spent the day sailing lazily at between 5 and 6 knots as we slowly approached the Canaries. The night watch got busier, there is a TSS (Traffic Separation Zone) between Gran Canaria and Tenerife. This lines all the commercial shipping into Northbound and Southbound lanes. We were just to the north of the TSS with about 30 miles to go when we had about 4 ships converging on us at 0430. Graham got me up for a quick conference and we routed ourselves between the ships and then to the west of the TSS out of the way. As first light appeared we could see Tenerife ahead of us, now time to think about the arrival.
Arrival in Marina Tenerife, Santa Cruz
I had been keeping Plinio at Navalia Yachting briefed on WhatsApp about our ETA. We’d agreed that they would come out in a marina rib with a jump-starter to get our engines going. Apparently our berth was going to be very tight to get into and we’d need both engines. As we approached the marina and went into the lee of the island the wind died completely and we had to sail offshore a little to keep the boat moving but finally as we came close we saw the rib coming out to meet us. They’d actually brought 2 fully charged batteries. The rib came to our stern and the two men from Navalia came aboard. Within 10 minutes both batteries had been switched over. the engines started first time and the engine controls all functioned normally, PHEW!!
We motored into the port and yes, it was an extremely tight berth. The marina is really designed for smaller boats, most were less than 10 metres, we were by far the biggest and it turned out afterwards that they’d actually removed a finger pontoon to create a double width berth for us. Our well oiled machine swung into action again and within minutes we’d reversed in and tied up securely. No dramas at all in the end.
Gibraltar to Canaries leg completed safely and with a such a great crew. We logged 801 nautical miles and we’ve now sailed over 2000 nm on the latest Offbeat. Offbeat will stay in Tenerife for the next 4 weeks and the yard will fit the missing DC converters for the engine batteries. We will return at the end of October for the 45 nm sail round to the Las Palmas marina on Gran Canaria for the build up to the ARC+ Cape Verde rally which starts on November 5th.
