18.06.2023 Tangier, Morocco
Graptolite's Sailing Log
Martyn Pickup & Heike Richter
Sun 18 Jun 2023 20:38
After parking up for a while in Gibraltar and side trips to the UK and Germany we were ready to leave. We had a last minute shop in Morrison's for British delicacies like pork pies and Vimto and we were off.
The tides, currents and winds in the Straits of Gibraltar are a bit complicated with tidal streams often going in opposite directions. With the help of tide tables and a tidal stream atlas borrowed from a neighbour we shaped a course across the bussy Traffic Seperation Scheme to the Moroccan side and attempted to steer around patches of charted turbulent water. There was a nasty yellow Sahara duststorm of the horizon followed by grape-sized hailstones. Welcome to Africa.
Something that has been giving H kittens for a while is being attacked by orcas. This is an increasingly common thing in these parts and a number of yachts have been sunk. Our main strategy was to play dead with no autopilot and depth sounder. Others say run for itnIt is hard to know what our reaction would have been seeing our rudder bitten off. Fortunately we had no sightings of dorsal fins except for dophin. I did strap a diving knife to a boathook as last-ditch defence like Captain Ahab. It probably would have had the same result.
We arrived in Tanja Marina Bay, firstly topping up fuel then moving on to the reception pontoon for clearance with Immigration and Customs and like in the movie we waited and waited and waited. We never did get to a real berth and we were still on the reception pontoon in the morning. The electical connections were of an enormous size I had never seen before and we were too far from the normal berths to get WiFi