Day 118 - San Sebastian 'La Gomera, Canary Islands'
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We pulled up the anchor
on the 18h of November at 11:37am and headed for Well I say, we went from
motoring as the was no wind at all, I mean nothing to gale force winds in all
of a few minutes. You have no idea how full on it is. We managed to just make
the bay we were headed for as the wind was on the nose and there was no way you
could start taking in that sort of weather. I would hate to be caught out in
this sort of weather with land on the calm side. Special
comments by Fiona: Our day started off slowly and for once
we were not working on the boat! We headed into town to get a few things, had
a coffee overlooking the beach, then made our way back to Silky and swam off
her in the crystal clear, beautiful water. You could see our anchor 9 meters
down, only to find that it had not actually been dug in all night!
Miraculously how we didn’t drift away I don’t know! We set off for the next
island which was a short hop away. The journey started off slow with little
wind but that didn’t bother me as I enjoyed the sun and calm seas. We were
about 3 hours away according to our GPS, when Ben said I think the wind is
going to pick up so I’ll pull out the sails – we had been motoring due to lack
of wind. Any-way, before we knew it we went from 5 knots to 39 knots on the
nose in 5 mins! Ben fought hard to reef both sails in. Waves crashed over the
boat as we heeled right over. It was totally unbelievable! Actually it was
pretty exciting once I knew we were ok and the initial fright subsided. Ben
attempted to capture the waves crashing in on us on video but only to be
smashed by one. We’d read about wind acceleration zones around the Canaries
and now we understood full well what it meant! We both hung on, life
jackets and jack stays on of course and rode it out. We reached the friendly
marina and could relax! Day 118 Destination – Traveling Direction –
South Wind Direction – West Swell – Slight to start
then ROUGH! Average Speed – 4.4 kts Top Speed – 7.0 Knots
Through the water Total distance – 23.4
Nautical Miles Travel Time – 5hr 12min
Temperature – 25
degrees, nice and sunny Crew
- Fiona (Loving the crystal clear water) Missing Work – Not Yet Expenses – €0 Next Destination – |
