Day Sailing

In the past nearly all of our coastal cruising involved day sails. Frequently, a weekend would involve heading to somewhere like Fowey on Saturday and then back to our mooring on Sunday. We were of course perfectly accustomed to this. Now, of course, we tend to sail much further at a time and then sit still for a while before moving on. However, the Canary Islands have so far given us much more day sailing – albeit not returning to a home base of course. We have found this slightly strange and also quite tiring. When you are in home waters, all is familiar and we frequently didn't even need to consult a chart though it was always there should weather conditions change. Here, we have to plan the sail and there is all the excitement of arriving in a new port.

We are almost grateful that our next trip will be nearly a hundred miles rather than the twenty or less that has brought us from Puerto Calero on Lanzarote to Gran Tarajal here on Fuerteventura. Yesterday's sail in particular from Puerto de Rosario to here was quite tiring. The wind was a steady-ish force 5 but this end of the island is in a so called acceleration zone which increases the wind strength by about ten knots. This made for great sailing but we were hesitant to leave the helm to Henry the Navigator (aka wind vane self steering) as he doesn't like it much when you have the main up and the wind is from abaft the beam. On a long passage, we would most likely not have the main up at all and a few degrees of deviation from the course would not really matter much anyway. The coast of the island is steep to and there are no of flying rocks along here but you still want to keep a more precise course than when the destination is some hundreds of miles away.

We are however pleased to be here in Gran Tarajal and have also elected to go into the marina rather than anchoring outside. All the usual attractions of a marina such as showers and still water with no rolling conspired to persuade us to come in here. Pampero is however putting us to shame at anchor out there. We really can't call ourselves proper hard core cruisers. Never mind, at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria we shall have to anchor as the marina will be full of ARC (Atlantic Race for Cruisers) boats.

There is a good wifi spot here so I will try and increase the quota of photos soon.