28:07.71N
15:25.52W
Island Kea II arrived in Las Palmas about 10am on Wednesday 3rd of
October.
We left
Lanzarote about midday on Tuesday planning to sail slowly and arrive in the
early hours of Wednesday as we did not want to arrive in complete darkness in a
place we had never been to before.
Typical,
winds were very favourable and even though we reefed the Jib, we were still
doing 7 kts at times - typical when you want to go slowly you go fast and if you
need to go fast you never can.
At 2am it
was clear that we were going to arrive about 4am so we hove to until 6am.
For those of you not familiar with sailing vocab, this means stalling the boat
by pointing it into the wind with the jib the wrong way so the boat is basically
stopped.
We had a
wonderful acrabatic display from a large and small dolphoins, we think there was
a bit of training going on. They really seem to know how to have
fun.
It was
very difficult to get any sleep though. Trying to sleep in our cabin was a
problem. The metal watertanks are under the bed and as they were full
water was sloshing to the top and making a lot of noice. The waves were
rolling the boat side to side so not sliding out of the bed was an
art. When we are sailing the steering mechanism makes a lot of noice and
being under the cockpit means that every step taken by people on deck is very
loud. This has made us think seriously about the reality of using our aft cabin
on the Atlantic crossing.
Las Palmas
is living up the expectation. It is a very large commercial harbout, not a
tourist designar marina like Marina Rubicon was. We are on pontoon 17
which is not one of the most diserable locations, but it is fun to have a lot of
boats around us who are also doing the ARC. Electricity and Water is off
now as they are replacing all the units on our pontoon but hopefully this will
be on again by the end of the day, otherwise we will need to run the generator
which woudl be annoying having paid for mains
electric.
