Seville to Gran Canaria

Well, I guess it was time to re-learn a few lessons about long passages, schedules, and crew availability.

A few years ago, a good friend told me that the most dangerous thing to have on a boat was a calendar.  Over the years, Deb and I listened to this advice and have been very good about never letting a “schedule” affect our decisions regarding safe weather for passages, etc.

But, we have crew meeting us in the Canary Islands and we were running out of options.

Last week, we were lucky to have our friend Emmanuel Renoir available to help us deliver Morpheus down to the Canary Islands.  Emmanuel had a very limited set of availability dates, the weather forecast showed limited openings for safe departures, and we were running out of time to get the boat to Tenerife.

We were squeezed from two different directions and our options were not great.  Either leave with a marginal forecast and crew to help us, or wait and hope to find a great weather window to make the trip with just the two of us.

I saw an opportunity to leave Seville right behind a fairly large weather system, and thought that if we sailed fast enough we could stay ahead of the next one due two days later.

I was wrong.

We ended up pushing hard in 20-25 knots for two days and we were still caught from behind by the next system.  We spent the next 12-18 hours sailing into 30 to 35+ knots trying to keep everything in one piece (including my marriage, Debbie was not happy with me!).

Ultimately, we were lucky to enjoy beautiful sailing conditions on the last day (see video above) before arriving in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria.

There is lots of action here as the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) has their fleet gathering here prior to heading to the Caribbean at about the same time that we depart.

There are 100’s of boats here that will be crossing to the Caribbean along with us.  We will need to keep ours eyes open out there!!