Saturday Oct 16 35 deg 36N 007deg 12W
PASSEPARTOUT
Christopher & Nirit Slaney
Sat 16 Oct 2010 09:08
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I've often joked that when I'm on a boat, diesel
smells as good as Chanel No 5. In Gibraltar it definitely has a wonderful
fragrance, in fact I didn't want to wash my hands all day and even gave a
tip to the guy at the pump. Or were my olfactory senses prompted to rapture at
the price? Because at 71 cents a liter this is the cheapest fuel I've
ever taken on board apart from in Egypt, where it looked like used engine oil
and stank of sulphur. I was only sorry that I hadn't arrived at the CEPSA fuel
jetty with completely empty tanks.
For hundreds of years navigators have
understood that the best time to leave Gibraltar going west is three
hours after high water; catching the current along the Spanish side of the
straits and hopefully riding with it as far as Tarifa. We checked the tide
almanac, adjusted UTC to local time and were supposedly in the right place for
an appointment with a 3 knot tidal boost. But a strong westerly breeze was
also blowing through the straits at that moment. I don't know whether this head
wind negated the effect of the current, or we just missed being in the
right spot, but our speed gradually fell away to nothing and we trod water
for more than an hour. Slack tide found us still miles on the Mediterranean side
of Tarifa. As the afternoon wore on we gathered some speed and were
entertained by a couple of whales, surfacing and spouting a few hundred
meters away. By nightfall the lights of Tangier were winking at
us from the African shore.
We thought the straits were crowded with shipping but
hadn't reckoned on having to weave through the entire Moroccan fishing fleet as
well. Trawlers worked closely together and several times called us on the
VHF to make sure we were changing course to avoid their nets which,
they warned, stretched 'deux milles' in either
direction.
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