Wednesday 18th October 2000 Graciosa,

Monday evening arrived here at dusk, an anchorage rather more crowded than I hoped - obviously the news that this is a nice place has got around! Had a nice sail here mostly beam reaching in the North-Easterly and some time spent on a dead run and broad reaching - 270 miles in 2.5 days. However it is a dry island with only desert-type vegetation but one village with a small but recently developed harbour. I guess that with so many tourists coming to Lanzarote an excursion to a nearby island can be attractive. And so quite a large glass-bottomed excursion catamaran that we saw in the harbour yesterday has recently come into our bay for a stop - with perhaps only a dozen passengers on board. Perhaps being Autumn in Europe it is now low season here. We shall probably go snorkelling around the rocks later on today - we had a good couple of swims around the boat yesterday but Robbie has found some good snorkelling spots in the bay just West of here. We listened to some chit-chat on the radio this morning - at least 2 of the boats here (out of 17) have been here for 4 or 5 days and our neighbour Skip from “Poem” came over yesterday to inform us of a radio net. Kari from the Finnish boat “Hakuna Matata” has just come over with a couple of books for Rauni and told us of occasional evening beach get-togethers here. We thought we might go on to Arrecife tomorrow but it is possible that we might revise this plan….

Rauni and Robbie close to the top of the mountain which overlooks the anchorage at Graciosa

Sunday 22nd Oct 2000 - Arrecife, Lanzarote - Arrived here on Friday evening after a fairly calm trip from Graciosa. Other activities in which we engaged there were a bit of mountain climbing and some snorkelling from the nudist beach just West of our anchorage bay. For the navigators amongst you the anchorage bay is known as Baya Francesa (29 13.1N 13 31.8W) and the nudist beach is known as Baya de la Cocina. We met one Spanish man who lives in an extensive stone shelter which he has built overlooking Baya Francesa with 11 cats (currently) - He is a refugee from civilisation but quite friendly. He does however wish that the glass-bottomed catamaran did not make so much use of its noisy water-scooters during its visits to the bay. I see that “civilisation” encroaches upon its fugitives. Perhaps the floating wanderers of this world have chosen a better way !

Fortress on the harbour wall at Arrecife 

Arrecife is of course quite a contrast to Graciosa. It is a decent sized little town being the capital of the island, which has many holiday resort areas. As could be expected from any Spanish town the night-life is fairly active with many bars, restaurants, barber shops, hair-dressers and various shops being open until quite late in the evening. In contrast to Portugal English is not widely spoken here since it is not actually a resort, and so my evening class Spanish helps greatly (- although I wish I had learned more and started learning earlier). (Robbie and Rauni speak almost no Spanish). Yesterday we found the internet cybercafe and I had to struggle with Windows and Hotmail in Spanish, and for some reason there was no Wordpad or Notepad, and I had to save my emails as .html files which I could read but I have yet to work out how to write such a file on the laptop (Any Suggestions ?). Also we did a bit of shopping and found again the friendly photo-copying shop which will copy any chart that you have or he has at a reasonable price. And so One of the jobs which I have done this morning was to make a list of the charts which I have so that on Monday I can see if there are any new charts which he has of which I should like copies. ( - Don’t mention this to copyright lawyers or at least if you do mention that the charts must be all American since these are so-called public-domain and there is no copyright involved :-)

Meanwhile here today we have a decent breeze, (N4-6 according to the forecast) and we are glad that yesterday we pulled up our anchor and picked up a mooring - after due inspection of its nature (4ft square block of concrete with chain and ~25 mm rope even though it was marked only by a small plastic bottle) it seemed capable of holding a load such as Ramprasad and it would be a lot quieter than the noise that our anchor chain was making rattling around over the boulder bottom here on Friday night. One problem reported here seems to be a good place to leave one’s dinghy. Gustav from the Norwegian yacht Fredag (whose dinghy we had rescued when we came in to anchor) had told us that children/vandals had previously set their dinghy adrift from the town wall and so subsequently they had exercised great caution when leaving their dinghy ashore. It was a rather smart-looking small zodiac RIB with new-looking Yamaha 4HP O/B. So far (I say this touching wood) we have not had problems but have taken the precaution of using a small grapnel anchor to moor out the stern of the dinghy. We have not so far felt the need to use padlock and chain for the dinghy (as is recommended for many parts of the Caribbean) but we do take the precaution of padlocking the outboard to the transom and removing the key from the outboard.

Camels lined up ready to take tourists around the Timanfaya National Park in Lanzarote

Wednesday 1st November 2000 Punta Jandia (near the SW tip of Fuertaventura)

Since my last missive sent from Arrecife we have a little tale of warning to tell. We are now in easy range of Las Palmas de GranCanaria with 2.5 weeks to go before the start of the ARC, from where I shall hope to send this perhaps making use of the services of “InterFred”. A little after my last missive we hired a car for a day and toured some of the sights of Lanzarote. We went to the national park of Timanfaya, saw the long camel trains used to take the tourists up the volcano a little way ( - Yes I know we’re tourists too !) decided not to pay the entrance fee for the Mountain of fire (- extinct volcano) but had a good look around the Volcano museum, then drove South. After a few stops along the way we got to the Green Caves (Cueva de los Verdes) in the North of the island where the volcano’s lava stream has left two spectacular long parallel caves which have been made accessible to the visitor and one part even comfortable enough as a music venue. Then we visited several places which were about to, or had closed for the day including the Jameos del Agua, Mirador del Rio, and the Jardin de Cactus. Certainly with the Mirador del Rio (I translate as “Golden look of the River”) we didn’t think that we had missed much by arriving after closing time as the view from the clifftop just next door was just as impressive I believe. One very notable thing about driving around the interior of the island is the numerous curious works of art to be seen. Almost every roundabout is adorned with some work perhaps made out of some scrap metal and painted. Even the Cactus garden had a giant steel cactus outside of it. And there were obviously many aspiring artists in the community. In many a front yard one would observe for example a collection of brightly painted crankshafts, or “Figure of Man and Dog” made from workshop contents. Indeed the tour of Lanzarote was most memorable.

We sailed on from Arrecife to anchor just around the southern point of Lanzarote (Punta Papagayo) and there observed many fine examples of live humanity, and then sailed on to the island of Lobos (off the Northern tip of Fuertaventura), where we observed that the lagoon is indeed fairly inaccesible to keeled yachts since the entrance dries out (tidal range about 2.5m but I have no tide-table !).

The marina at Puerto Castillo on Fuertoventura

Then we sailed on to the promised luxury of a shower and the possibility of a sauna at a marina at Puerto Castillo. However registration formalities being complete the showers turned out to be luke-warm to cold and the sauna probably non-existent. Fortified by these realisations we set out to explore the resort (OK probably some people had been there already) and have a good Saturday night. Enticed into a karioke bar by the offer of a free drink we all proved that we could not sing and then, after a discussion about the bill, proceeded onward to a cocktail bar called Whiskis. We enjoyed one cocktail and then seeing a group of 8 sharing a bucket of something through straws, we ordered one such bucket for us to share between 5. Rauni, Robbie and myself had by this time been joined by two ladies from Luton. About 5 half bottles were poured into this bucket (and nothing was weak apart from the ice !). Rauni remembers the bucket getting about half empty - then nothing more. I remember meeting Gustav from “Fredag”, chatting a bit to him and holding on to Rauni’s glasses for a bit. We think that Rauni fell over - this may be why she has a black eye. Apparently I carried Rauni out with the help of Neil who we met on Monday. Gustav brought Rauni’s glasses back next day before they left. Robbie almost got into a fight with the bouncers when they tried to take the bucket away. Gustav pointed us the way home to the marina and Robbie kept us marching properly. Needless to say Sunday was spent trying to recover from the hangover - only partially successful - and all of us were surprised to see Rauni’s eye.

On Monday we thought “Check out of the marina - Buy some bread from the supermarket and let’s get out of here”. However on the way back from the supermarket an Englishman called Naty met us and announced (by scratchcard) that we had won 2 bottles of champagne and a free holiday. Intrigued we got into his car to get the champagne and we were then led through a tangled web of time-share holiday salesmen. This is when we met Neil who had helped me carry Rauni! They found it very hard to understand that all we wanted was the two bottles of champagne and the free holiday. Mark the last salesman couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to buy 48 years worth of holidays in a resort as beautiful as his. Well I had pointed out certain unfinished bits of it ! However clutching our champagne bottles and leaving the salesmen disappointed we made our escape at last and managed to sail out and arrive at the next port (Gran Tarajal) just before dark. Yesterday we sailed on to Morro Jable and soon from here we shall cross over to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

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