Islas Canarias
Heerenxvii
Tue 26 Oct 2010 09:29
A.
I forgot to mention, in the trip from gib, that in the middle of the turtle experience, we also did spot a shark, and of course lots of flying fish.
Anyways, after our first night at anchor just north of Lanzarote, we sailed south west, and only encountered a fishing boat. It was quite windy, 6 bf, and S suggested to go south further than needed in order to be able to have a more relaxed sail when turning east, sailing between Lanzarote and Fuerta Ventura. We gybed, and A looked up after a funny sound, and saw that the recenltly repaired radar dome was again broken... The lid was still on the dome, but some rubber seal was hanging out, and the message on the screen said:'cannot rotate radar beam'.. We switched off the radar (it was raining and dark when we had left the anchorage) and concluded $$fgh&@@!) bla.
Then we spotted 2 boats ahead of us, while sailing south on the east coast of Fuerta Ventura and decided the race was on. Our tactic was to sail out to sea, and then hours later sail back to land. We believed this was faster than sailing a straight line downwind. Tuning the sails, reading the huge waves and holding course for optimal speed according the boats polar diagram, we reached speeds of 11+ knots repeatedly and one time 12.0 knots!!!! On the 30 mile stretch, we estimated the boat ahead of us to 4 to 5 miles further and the wind was bf 7 with 3 to 4 meter waves. And after hours of sailing, doing the extra miles out to sea, we JUST passed them on the south east side of the island, brilliant! S now believes the polar diagram of the boat :)
We anchored just before sunset, and almost ran aground as we were trying to find an area undeep enough to anchor in. The depth meter gave 3 times higher values than we read from the chart... After careful consideration, we finally spotted that someone, lets call him S, had changed the configuration from meters to feet :(
But no damage and went to shore for dinner.
Yesterday we cruised from Fuerta Ventura to Gran Canaria in about 12 hours, and lost the radar dome lid. We tried a man over board procedure but no luck.
We arrived in the dark in Las Palmas, which is the departing harbor for the ARC. The commercial harbor is huge, the entry itself is already a mile wide! The anchorage was very full and the lights ashore and on all the ships were not helping us finding a bit of space, but we managed in two tries.
I went into the mast just now with a piece of plastic and used lots of duct tape to get the radar dome near water proof.