Thursday 17^th June

Off first thing on a half day tour that soon proved to be a total shambles. The guide was dreadful and paid no attention to what he was being asked and was far too busy delivering his views and political leanings. The last straw was a three quarters of an hour visit to a shopping mall so 6 people could do some supply shopping despite the vast majority of the passengers being anxious to get back to their boats at the time given in the details when we booked. We endured this until the bus finally returned to the marina around 2.00 pm just in time for Sarah to attend the skipper’s briefing for tonight’s sail south towards Gaza and our destination of Ashkelon Marina.

The journey is around 100 miles but with light winds forecast there was some considerable debate about when it would be beat to set off. In the event this was all rather academic as the way all the boats were rafted together and squeezed into Haifa meant that we could only leave when all the boats blocking you had left and in our case this was nearly last!

The first boats away reported 30 knots of wind from a southerly direction which served to slow the reluctant leavers down even more. We finally got away around 5.20 pm and found that the wind had dropped to 14 knots and so we hoisted the sails and beat our way out of Haifa heading for the start of the very tight corridor down which we had to sail to avoid the wrath of the Israeli navy. Various fast patrol boats checked our early progress and we on Serafina also were singled out for a visit and visual inspection by a fully fledged warship, but by and large we proceeded uninterrupted into the night.

The fleet was quite bunched up during the night as we were required to remain in the narrow Israeli shipping corridor running a minimum of 12 miles offshore. However it is not easy for 60 yachts to sail and motor sail in such a confined space, at night, knowing that we are sharing this channel with all the sea going container ships etc. Furthermore, there are still countless foreign flagged yachts in our fleet who have no working knowledge of understanding of either the international requirements and directions for lights at sea, nor the rules of the road. Goodness knows what some of the big ships heading through this flotilla made of it all, but it must have caused a quite some consternation on their bridges.