1 to 5 October 2023

Porto Santo to Playa Francesca, Graciosa, 29° 13’10” N 13° 31′ 73″ W, 280nm, 48 hours

to Marina Rubicon, Lanzarote, 28° 51′ 45″ N 13° 48′ 92″ W, 32nm, 6 hours 30

Perhaps our reluctance to leave Porto Santo was in part our reluctance to say goodbye to Portugal, a country which had been so good to us for two years of uncertainty, and in part our antipathy about spending time in the Canary Islands.

I had been to the Canaries three times in my 20s and 30s and, apart from some very fond, if a little hazy, memories of a holiday with my brother to Gran Canaria, they had not been destinations that had inspired a desire to explore more.

Our only joint visit to the Canaries in 2015 had been a sailing trip with our friend, Robbie, on his boat, SV Panache which he had sailed to Lanzarote from Essex Marina. It was the kind of sailing trip that had very nearly ended my sailing career. So terrifying was the Atlantic swell and the strength of the wind that I remember little more than remaining in my cabin feeling very sick and, on my occasional visit to the cockpit, clinging to the winch whilst fearing the wall of water behind would swallow us whole.

But if we are going to cross the Atlantic we could not avoid these important staging posts and we were going to have to go sometime.

We set ourselves the target of leaving Porto Santo before the ferry arrived at 10.30am. It seemed fitting. On this island where time stands still and clocks don’t matter, all we’d needed to know the time was the morning arrival of the ferry and its evening departure.

We had deliberately left on a day with no wind to ensure a comfortable passage. So we were surprised to be sailing, albeit slowly, by lunchtime. Conditions were blissful – a flat calm sea except for a gently rolling swell. Stefan assumed his new Skipper’s position in the shade of the solar arch and it was so calm that I got busy in the galley fashioning some sage and onion stuffing mix, that was nearing its use by date, into a very passable alternative to falafel. Served with salad and tahini dressing it was a triumph of a first meal underway.

Our first day at sea ended with the perfect sunset and moonrise but it’s funny how a perfect passage can so quickly change.

During our second day at sea the wind increased. Nothing dramatic – our log records a maximum of 17 knots. It should have been perfect conditions but as the sun set on our second day we were about to feel the brunt of a confused Atlantic swell. It was a long, hard night as we were tossed around. All memories of the perfect day before were forgotten as we struggled through our watches. Sailing, it seems, can, like football, be a game of two halves!

We were very glad to arrive on the island of Graciosa at around 10am the next morning. Soon after we set the anchor with a front row view of the Montana Amarillo (Yellow Mountain), a strong easterly wind filled in and we headed wearily back to bed. Any exploring of our first Canary Island would have to wait.

When we woke the wind was still up. It would have been really nice to have been able to stretch our legs with a climb up to the crater next to us but there was no way in these conditions we could get the dinghy and outboard off the deck in order to get to land.

Graciosa sits only a couple of miles off the north west coast of Lanzarote. The sheer, bare cliffs of its much bigger neighbour looked very foreboding. We stayed a couple of nights in their shadow, confined to the boat by the strong wind, before heading down the west coast of Lanzarote to meet up with Babs and Rene who were in the boatyard at Marina Rubicon. We had a birthday to celebrate!

This short passage gave us the chance to practice our downwind sailing, once we had remembered how to get the pole set up!!

And the coastline gave us an introduction to the drama of the island’s landscape. The seemingly endless volcanic peaks left us keen to explore more…