Tenerife - Gran Canaria

Trippwire
Fri 13 Nov 2009 11:14
The guys
arrived last Saturday and Laura on Sunday. Our plan was to head over to La
Gomera and have a couple of days there before heading over to Las Palmas on Gran
Canaria. Sadly though the wind was not playing ball, with several days of a
consistent 30 knots of wind over the course of several days, with gusts hitting
40 knots. Understandably the guys in particular were keen to get sailing, and
perhaps a little frustrated that we could not just go for it, but sadly, the
strong wind continued into Tuesday, and whilst I am sure that we could have got
down wind to Gomera, we did not fancy a 25 mile beat back again! I am not sure
that they understood until we set off at 4am the day before yesterday, which was the first
day that the wind was forecast to be around 20 knots and under, albeit almost
dead on the nose. Obviously several days of strong wind had picked up a 4 metre
swell, and so the going was somewhat uncomfortable, and soon after setting off
Laura was very
neatly vomming into a well found
bucket, Alex was so ill that he could not move and just vommed all over himself and Rob was looking pretty
peaky and lying semi prostrate on the deck.....gone was all the chat about our
wimpy behavior!! Great credit goes out to a
very brave Laura, who has even suggested that she may even come sailing
with us again!
The passage was generally rather hard work with 20-23
knots of wind, and lots of upwind slamming, but actually a very good test
for the boat, given that we had not done any upwind sailing into big seas since
we set off. The boat behaved very well, and aside from a couple of leaky
hatches, and the contents of a couple of lockers being generously spread around
the boat, all was well, and we arrived in Las Palmas at
sunset.
Jen and I are both very excited to get to Las
Palmas, which is our final port before setting off on the ARC, a race/rally
across the Atlantic. We have been planning this for the last 18 months, with
some great highs and some tremendous lows, but if feels as if we have climbed a
huge mountain, and finally we have arrived; we have done 2000 miles since
leaving the UK and no major problems to report. This means that we can spend the
next 10 days sorting the boat out rather than having to fix major
issues.
The atmosphere here in Las Palmas is fantastic - there
will be 220 boats on the start line in 10 days time, and so there is a frenzy of
activity; the queues in the chandlery are certainly patience wearing! I was
rather bar humbug about taking part in the ARC, expecting lots of retired people
with beards (not that I have anything against retired people with beards, but
the sailing world does attract some slightly strange people, and I have
frequently found them to be sporting a beard!); however the first happy hour
that we have attended was full of mostly young people of our sort of
age......surprising - why are they not all working?!!
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