The timing was perfect. Just at sunset Lanzarote emerged from the darkness of the night. Some time later the wind picked up and we had a great sail for the last bit to  Puerto Calero. The marina was real nice and with good facilities like excellent showers and a laundry.

Today, Rutger and I will rent a car to explore the Island. Andy had a real sore foot and stayed on the boat..
We drove up North to the national park with the volcanos. The drive itself was along the coastline with the swell breaking spectacular on the rocks. After a while we came at the national park where we did a 40 minutes bus tour through an amazing landscape. Just black lava stones and rumble with no vegetation at all. The rocks were even darker then the asphalt of the road. We ended at the restaurant where there were several holes in the ground down to the still very hot lava. To show that, they poured water into one of them and a few seconds later it turned into a geyser. In another hole they threw a bunch of twigs that was set on fire a few seconds later. At one point you could see the reddish glow of the lava. Over it they had mounted a rack and used it for a barbeque. You couldn’t really look into it because of the heat. The whole Island is just one big lump of lava with none to very little vegetation. That’s also because it hardly ever rains. Not even enough to provide drinking water for the inhabitants. It was a very interesting tour in a moonlike landscape.

When we got back I went over to refill the gas bottle, I saw this van with all this advertisement about rigging, electronics, fitting and stuff. I asked the guy if he could help me with the rigging. I was using the uphaul as a halyard for the genoa and that worked out very well. However, I can’t use the originally halyard as a uphaul for the spinnaker pole.

Yesterday the rigger finished his jobs. He also closed part of the hatch of the anchor locker. On the front the hatch was completely open, meaning that every time we had a serious wave over, the anchor locker was filled with water in a split second. The self-draining holes weren’t big enough to let it all out in time for the next wave so over time the bilge got filled also. In the meantime, Rutger and I got to tick off a lot of jobs from the list and cleaned the boat inside out and  now we’re all set for sailing again. For the first time it was just the two of us and I realized how fortunate I was to spend all this time with my son, sharing this adventure! At no point in time we had any argument whatsoever, on the contrary. We got along so very well

Today we’ll leave Lanzarote and sail over to Fuerteventura to hop down the East coast. The wind is West so that will give us some nice and sheltered anchorages. In a few days the trade winds will be back and then we’ll hop over to Gran Canari. It will be day sails mostly with also time to snorkel. There should be some nice reefs out here according to the pilot book.