36:41.898N 002:48.065W

SV Eleonora
Michael A. Andronov
Wed 12 Sep 2018 18:36
We are still there, on anchor, in front of the Almerimar marina.

Lovely place. But too small… Well…

There is a huge marina, well built… in the middle of nowhere… Nice town around the marina… With a lot of small restaurants, shops, etc, etc, etc….
Marina is more then half empty… The properties surrounding the marina — also look more then half empty…

There is a couple of hotels along the nice big beach… I do not know what the situation is with hotels… But for the first time — I see no people on the beach, even though there is no complains about the weather….

Does it mean that the school season started and what I’m observing — the consequence ? May be, I do not know…

Marina has a very attractive deals for keeping the boat around in ‘winter months’…
I tried to imagine myself to stay around in that town for a month… No matter how much I like it… but… no, thanks… unless some kind of emergency would keep me around…

So, with all above said, why are you still there, Michael?
Mostly because of the weather. I failed to find ANY forecast which would correlate with the local weather. But until today — the wind was blowing pretty strongly just into our face, from the East…
Today, it should be no wind at all…. But suddenly, it picked up around noon, and blowing from the South West… Whom should I trust? The forecasters, who claim it blowing from the East, NE… or what I’m seeing ?!
If I had known that it were SW, I would have gone probably towards Cartagena…
Instead, I spent another day going around the town, making some maintenance, enjoying warm weather, making some more provisioning… at prices which put Montreal on the list of ‘one of the most expensive cities’ in the world…

If everything goes well, I would probably leave tomorrow… or the day after tomorrow…. We will see…

About nights…

I hope I would sleep tonight… The ‘pan-pan’ announcements are still coming in… containing basically the same news… ‘… certain amount of boats, with known or unknown amount of people… from Morocco towards the Spanish coast… sharp look… assistance… notify coast guard…’.
As listening to the new announcement last night, I finally realised what bothering me so much about those messages… ( Besides the fact that human tragedies and life are involved… )…

The boat(s) are leaving the Morocco coast, nearly with the schedule of the trains or ferries…
Spanish authorities seem to know about the departures — amount of boats, sometimes the exact number of the people on board(s)…
And then — they are trying to intercept the boats, and to pick up the people from boats…

Ok… but… Wait a minute…
Do they know how many boats leave the coast ? Does it mean they know the place ? They seem to know a lot of details about the leaving boats… So, somehow, they picked up that intelligence… But what happened next ? The authorities lost them ?! They are not able to track them ?!
And they relay on the passing by cruising boats and merchant ships to pick up information about those boats?

Is there something wrong with that picture ?! Or is it only in my imagination ?!
I have seen with my own eyes the people picked up by the Coast Guard patrol boat… I heard the message exchange from military ship(s), who were involved in picking up the people… No matter how big the ocean looks, it is relatively small area… and the authority already aware about the number of boats, people on boats…
So, it is logically to assume that they know the place of departure too… And it is logically to assume that as soon as military ships are involved, they should be able to trace those boats…

And still… ‘pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan….’ Is going across ‘DSC all ships’ frequency… periodically… again, and again, and again….

I hope that something wrong with this picture is only in my imagination… And in reality — much less boats are involved, and much less tragedies are around…
And people, who are involved in resolving those cases and tragedies are much less busy then you can imagine based on ‘ pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan.,… all ships… ‘

Talk to you soon,
M.