In to Afrika

Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Sat 17 Oct 2009 15:30
Having spent a few pleasant days in Estepona and having visited old Marbella and got a few jobs, done our friend Mairi Moffat (who will be guest blogging soon) arrived on Wedneday 14th October by bus from Gibraltar 36:08N 005:21W. The next day Thursday 15th we set sail from Estepona on a georgeous day under spinnaker in very light winds. We spent the first part of the day dodging through the gill net operations all along the coast getting more and mre boxed in. As the small boats were standing by their nets we finally got one of them to lead us though the maze of set nets to get outside them. With the spinnaker up we got our resident daredevil crew to go up to the top of the mast with the video camera - all 90 foot of it. Itf we can work it out we will post a couple of photos or even make a youtube link to the footage in the next few days - watch this space. Before reaching back to the rock we then had to squeeze round a mussel farm to lay the point - I was just thinking if I had a couple of spare catalogues I could probably have made a sale today!
 
On Thursday night in Gibraltar we met with Toby and Scott from Discovery who were going to spend from Friday to Tuesday catching up on some outstanding small jobs on the boat. In addition to these jobs we now had to fix a damaged davit which had a burnt out motor due to a manufacturing assembly error. While they were slaving away and the young ones had a long lie due to being out till about 5 in the morning two nights running, Trish, Mairi and I got on the bus again and headed for a fantastic town called Tarifa which was really bohemian and seemed to be the surfing and and kite surfing capital of the area. This was a really cool town and was obviously moorish in origin and still had the remains a very old fort right on the point overlooking the straits. Time looked to be tight for the Discovery team, over the weekend on these jobs but they made good progress so we decided to head off to Africa for a couple of days - as you do.