36 47N 008 42W About 135 miles west and a little north of straights of Gibralter heading 108 at 4.0 Kts
Pipedream
Wed 15 Jul 2009 13:22
Spanish at least until they you answer and then they return in accented and broken English. They asked us a lot of questions - suppose it could have been even been bad guys for all we knew. No gun boat came out to check us out so we must have done ok. We are staying close to he Spanish coast to avoid being in the middle of the shipping lanes.
We have read up on the traffic control zones and tides for getting in and out of the straights of Gibraltar. Looks like there is always and inbound current of about 1 KT due to constant evaporation in the Med. Then there is the regular tide. The book says that to go in you should hit it from 3 hours before and 3 hours after and stay on the north side of the straights. Lets see if you are sailing at 4 KTS and you have a 1kt current and a 2kt tidal flow we should blow through there. Coming out is the tough one. Could be times when you just can't get there from here. Since we probably should do this in the day that limits us to one six hour time slot and unless the wind picks up we are going to be waiting around another day just for the right tide. No wonder the old time sailors had so much time to carve scrimshaw.
The trusty autopilot really died today. Blew a fuse every time it tried to steer. I just happened to have a spare central processing unit. Good old e-bay. Had to manual steer for about an hour until I could change units. I likely learned a good bit about reliability at Quantum Engineering. You could spend a fortune trying to make something ultra reliable; or, you could just carry two redundant systems.
I have a bunch of parts coming into Gibraltar hopefully as we get there. Eating fresh food again, chicken breasts and fresh green salad last night. Chilled wine and fruit for desert. We now have a good selection of Portuguese cheese and wine to choose from. It's all good.