Canaria

9th - 27th November Puerto Calero, Lanzarote, in port

28th November Puerto Calero - Marina Rubicon, Lanzarote

29th November - 2nd December Marina Rubicon in port

3rd -4th December Marina Rubicon - Marina Santa Cruz, Tenerife

5th December - 11th December, Marina Santa Cruz in port

12th December, Marina Santa Cruz - Marina las Galetas, Tenerife

13th December, Las Galetas - Marina La Gomera, St. Sebastien, La Gomera,

14th December Marina La Gomera in port

15th December, departure Cape Verde

Saturday 10th November Lanzarote

Climbed the hill behind the marina this afternoon. It took one and a quarter hours so it is probably only around 300 m high. This is hill walking reduced to its simplest form as I like it. See hill, walk directly to hill, walk straight up hill to top. No fiddling around with maps and walking trails. No sneaking through farmers fields or keeping off the ridges so's not to get spotted by the game keeper. No farmers, no fields no game, only rock, rock and no water. And behind, a view over Lanzarote's wierd and wonderful landscape with barely extinct looking volcanoes and smooth hills which look as if they were painted by Dali and arrays of little crescent shaped scoops with dry stone walls on one side and bushes in them like some mode of cultivation from Dune. I wondered what sort of volcanic activity had produced this hill. It was entirely composed of diffferent colours and grades of gravel, black red and olive green held together in a matrix of whitish cement like a kind of inferior concrete. But it was great for climbing, interlocking with the grips on my shoes like gear teeth. A good afternoon.

Lanzarote. Dry planet ecology.

Monday 12th November, Punta Mujeres, Lanzarote

On a lightning tour of the island. San Bartholomeo. Nice church, white with black volcanic pillars. Nice dark woodwork in the interior. Great painting in the left hand chapel; St. Michael slaying the dragon with heaven purgatory and hell.

San Bartholomeo church. Nearly the only church I found open in the Canaries

Heaven, Hell and Purgatory in the San Bartholomeo church

The house of Caesar Manrique is great. Built on top of bubbles in a lava field. It is really fun with a series of rooms in the bubbles and bits of lava incorporated into the rooms and flowing in the windows. There is quite a good gallery of smallish 20th century artists including a poster by Joan Miro and drawings by Picasso. The paintings by Caesar Manrique are mostly stony looking things heavily inspired by the lava beds. Quite interesting and probably better if you weren't quite so surrounded by the stuff which had inspired them. I was haunted though by a feeling of familiarity as I walked throught it. Then it struck me. Dr. No. It even had the bridge over the swimming pool. I couldn't take it quite seriously after that.

The underground pool in Cesar Manrique's house complete with opening bridge and piranas.

His mobiles are very good. There is one in the house which is a series of contrarotating rotors with cups and rings which revolve in a mesmeric fashion. There is one at an intesection on the road north which is a series of cones mounted on pivoting arms with counterbalances which nod in the wind.

The Jameos Del Agua is a bit of a rip off after that. Also designed by Caesar Manrique, you pay 8 euros to visit what is effectively a series of bars and cafes. The style is identical to his house except instead of being rather intimate and witty it's a bit heavy and repetitive. I decided I had had enough of Manrique.

Amazing scenery in the Timanfaya NP. Tortured landscape. Its difficult to imagiine how all this... Crap could come up out of the earth. The volcanoes hardly seem big enough. Then again, the eruptions went on for 6 YEARS.

 

Cesar Manriqué style sign for the Timanfaya national park. Lanzarote has César Manriqué like China has Lenin

23rd November Pico Naos (or not far from it) Lanzarote

Still in Lanzarote awaiting delivery of the spare pilot drive. Very frustrating.

Climbed another hill a bit to the south of the last one. An obvious extinct volcano with about 3/4 of the crater standing. I climbed up from the inside of the crater where at some stage somebody has constructed terraces. The NE facing side of the crater is positively lush by Lanzarote standards with things that looked like Yuccas (let's call them Yuccas), green leafed plants and lichen on the rocks and even a smell of damp. I found fresh animal droppings, though probably only bunnies' and on the top where the vegetation goes back more to the Lanzarote norm with low scrubby bushes and a few Yuccas, a very pretty little hawk about the size of a pigeon circled around and there were red and black butterflies. For Lanzarote, that makes it practically the Amazon rainforest. It was a lovely, blue, still, slightly hazy afternoon.

Good shot of my feet

The view is magnificent with the whole of the Timanfaya Park visible and the volcanoes which created it looking positively Martian with their black and red blasted summits. You can see right up the valley where La Geria is and though it is supposed to be the centre of typically Lanzarotoid farming using the black ash, it just looks black from here. I imagine at one time there was quite a lot of farming on Lanzarote. Now, you see the odd field of potatoes or tomatoes but not a lot. I guess everybody just works in tourism and they import the food. Despite the rain we have had every day this week, apart from the crater of this volcano, I haven't seen any signs of the plants blooming. The only evidence is that some of the thorn bushes have their tops entangled with stuff that looks like a cross between bean shoots and yellow string. If this is their flower, it isn't going to catch on with Interflora.

19th December N21 30 W21 24 En route for Cape Verde

In all I stayed sixteen days in Lanzarote. I had decided that I couldn't attempt the crossing of the Atlantic without a spare auto-pilot drive. It took two weeks to come. I disregarded all the information in the books about Spanish customs and the advice of other people including Jean-Gabriel of Lady Emily who had work done and ordered pieces at PC. Wrong. I should have ordered it through the yard at Puerto Calero as everybody suggested.

New crew! Ali and volcanic backdrop.

In the end, I spent such a long time in PC that Ali, who was supposed to join me in Tenerife, changed her ticket and came to Lanzarote instead. This let us visit the Timanfaya park together. This is Lanzarote's main tourist attraction and is largely worth the 8 euro ticket. Included in the ticket is a tour on a bus of the central part of the park on a road which winds through the craters with a commentary in three languages. The road is very cleverly constructed threading through open lava tunnels in some places. The walls of these tunnels are plastered with gobs and drips and runnels of lava in red and green and black and grey whose colours are so bright they look like they had been liquid only moments before and not three hundred years. We had lunch at a nice restaurant in El Golfo called Restaurante El Golfo. Good views even though it was coolish and we were eating inside. The new owner was born in Isle of Man strangely enough. A good welcome.

Big splooshy rocks on the way to El Golfo

The pilot finally came and we split. But only to Marina Rubicon in the extreme south of the island. This is what we had planned but, as the day was so nice and the wind and forecast fair, we decided to go on straight to Las Palmas. Just as we came into a local accelleration zone near Playa Blanca, the auto-pilot started saying it had reached the limit of angle when the wheel was only turned 45 degrees. I tried to modify the limit angle but the problem clearly didn't come from there so we turned into the marina after all to try to fix it. Bob Ryerdon was just coming out in Tiger Lily as we came in. He obviously wasn't planning a fast passage as he had only his main up and that was reefed down to the third reef. I tried to call him on the VHF but he must not have been listening. We waved as we went past.

The problem turned out to be due to my misunderstanding the instructions for performing the quayside regulation of the auto-pilot which I had done in Puerto Calero. When it says turn the wheel to starboard, it means turn the wheel to full lock.

Much Later

We eventually left Lanzarote five days later after waiting in Marina Rubicon for the wind and 5 metre swells which had appeared, to go down to something manageable. I didn't want Ali's first overnight crossing to be so rough she would never want to do another.

We did the whole crossing to Las Palmas on Gran Canaria under genoa alone and, apart from being rather rolly, it was a good trip. We arrived at the Muelle Deportivo at 09h30, then had to hang around for a while until a space became available at the rather diminutive welcome pontoon. The guys at the port office at the Muelle Deportivo are not to be hurried. With the ARC starting here, I guess they handle hundreds and hundreds of boats all full of anxious first time transatters anxious to be off. I can't imagine what it's like. It took us an hour to clear in.

We were only staying one day in Gran Canaria so we had a sleep then set off rather late to visit the sights. We saw the Christopher Columbus museum for free as it was about to close. The building is lovely with a central courtyard and wooden interior balconies. The display is really quite interesting and made me realise that Columbus was not quite the naive dreamer I thought him. He had done lots of previous trips up and down the eastern Atlantic and had researched the existence of land within sailing distance to the west as much as possible before setting out. The most interesting map was one where his first voyage was laid out and superimposed on it was where he thought he was. Apparently he took Hispaniola for the coast of India and Puerto Rico for Ceylon.

Gran Canaria. Interesting eastern looking architecture.

We crossed to Santa Cruz de Tenerife in one day, leaving around 10h00 and arriving around 22h00.

The entry to the Marina Santa Cruz is slightly forbidding as you motor up the commercial port between parked oil exploration rigs and cargo ships. The guy at the marina was wide awake, however, and spoke good English and handled our ropes competently. He bid us good night without wanting for a form to be filled in. It was a holiday the next day so we didn't get signed in to the marina until a day later.

Day crossing to Tenerife

We spent the next couple of days doing not much, visiting Santa Cruz, which is a nice town and eating and drinking too much. We hired a car and drove around the north of the island which is mountainous and very pretty; you start at sea level with the usual desertish type vegetation of the Canaries and finish up in a European alpine climate with pine trees and drizzly fog. We ate at a great little restaurant on a bend in the road which was barbecuing meat outside on big open grills. We sat outside in the cool air and had chick pea stew, roasted chestnuts and goat stew. It was extremely yummy.

View down from the mountains on Tenerife

A closed church on the west coast of Tenerife. Note clever juxtaposition of palm trees and chrissy prezzies in this shot.

We met Ocean Kid, which we had last seen at Puerto Calero waiting for parts for a self steering gear to complement their electric pilot. They had decided after all not to install the self steering gear before crossing as the time to order the parts and the time to install them would have meant putting off their departure for the transatlantic trip too long.

Ali left from Tenerife on the ferry to go back to Lanzarote to do a Competent Crew course with Endeavour sailing in Puerto Calero then to fly back from there to England. Snif.

Dany, who had finally said yes to coming across the Atlantic with me arrived a day later at Tenerife Nord airport.

We spent four more days in Santa Cruz mostly completing stores for the trip down to Cape Verde and the Atlantic crossing. We had decided to do one short trip in the Canaries to let Dany get the feel of the boat so we went to San Sebastien in La Gomera.

Another closed church on Tenerife

We cleared out from Tenerife as it is not possible from La Gomera. This was very easy and fast at the police office in the ferry terminal building just north of the marina. The police were friendly and cheerful and stamped our passports rapidly despite being in the middle of processing several hundred passports from a cruise ship which had just arrived.

We broke the trip for one night at Las Galetas in the south of Tenerife. Las Galetas is a slightly off-beat marina with lots of drunk Russians there for some reason. We didn't do anything at Las Galetas other than hope the woman in the amazingly drunk, violently argumentative Russian couple in the boat next to us would wait until after we had left to set fire to their boat. There is a good view of the mountainous peak of Tenerife from Las Galetas.

Las Galetas. Drunk Russians and the top of Tenerife.

San Sebastien is lovely and La Gomera has a very nice atmosphere, much quieter and more laid back than the other islands. The marina is good with friendly staff and good toilets and showers. It is not nearly as busy as marinas on the other islands to the grand damn of the local ship-chandlery. The owner puts it down to the crisis, but I think it has more to do with the multiplication of new marinas in the east of the islands, particularly on Lanzarote. Many people will arrive in Puerto Calero from Gibraltar or Morocco like me, find a clean, new, professionally run, re-assuring marina with a good yard attached and look no further. Puerto Calero may be a bit soulless, but it is a very comfortable place to stay.

We saw the local Christopher Columbus sights in San Sebastien too which are all free.

Stubby tower at San Sebastien, La Gomera. Chris probably stood on top of it trying to catch sight of the Indies (though it faces east).

Having run out of excuses, we left for Cape Verde on the 15^thof December.

Bye bye Canaries. A nice shot of Tenerife as we motored down the coast of La Gomera heading for Cape Verde.