As planned, we left Cartagena Spain on 20 May.
It was not “exactly” as planned because we did book an appointment at ASCAR (the local shipyard) to haul our JOANA on 24 April: to pull the shaft, replace the shaft seal – and replace an oil seal in the transmission. Unfortunately, despite making that booking 9 months ago, ASCAR could not honour it. They could not supply the mechanic and could not afford the yard space. We waited 3 weeks, and nothing happened, much to our disappointment. Seriously!
One of the “improvements” I made before leaving was to install this heavy duty KONG anchor swivel. Unfortunately, after trying it out in action at several anchorages – I found it too difficult to hoist over the bow roller. For the moment, I have removed it and reverted back to the previous system. More testing required.
Therefore, we set off from Cartagena with a leaking shaft seal (sea water), and a leaking transmission. Most of the “anchorages” along this coastline are what I would call “open roadstead”, or just lousy, rolly anchorages. This makes it tough to sleep at night.
Our second stop was at at Almerimar Marina, a dated, well used municipal marina at only 80 euros for 4 nights including water and electricity. This is a very popular place for cruisers to stop and stay a while. They have a 100T travel lift, bars and lots restaurants – but not much else. It is an artificial “tourist town” devoid of tourists in the off season. We enjoyed our 4 nights of very restful sleep while we waited for extremely calm conditions to continue moving west.
Along this leg of the passage, in addition to the other two leaks I already mentioned – I discovered a pretty serious engine oil leak. This has never happened before with our engine. Over a 15 hour motoring session, the engine leaked (slow drip) about 2.5L (of a capacity of 9L) of engine oil. At the time of writing this blog, I still don’t know what is the reason for the leak. It does not leak at all when the engine is not running, only when it is running. I am suspecting the oil cooler gasket but that will be refined in the coming weeks as I dive deeper into the problem.
We were pretty intrigued by the Spanish coastline, highlighting hundreds of greenhouses, and of course, the majestic snow covered mountains.
We were also treated to many visits by dolphins/porpoises and we were told these were likely porpoises.
When we set off from our last anchorage at Fuengirola Spain, we had planned to stop at the popular anchorage just outside of Gibraltor called La Linea. There, we expected to stop and wait for the right conditions to transit the Strait of Gibraltor. This passage requires careful consideration of wind, current and tides. For example, the current ALWAYS flows from west to east, sailing the Atlantic Ocean into the Mediterranean Sea – due to the marked increase in salinity. There are normally two high tides per day (range about 3.5 feet) and this introduces an additional tidal flow, from the east or the west. You should not set out with a west wind (wind coming from the west) and against the tidal flow – because this sets up “standing waves” and creates very tough conditions for small boats.
Here, we see Gibraltor in the distance as we are approaching the Strait.
Just before reaching Gibraltor, we realized that we had ideal conditions to continue pushing on directly to Tangiers (making for a long motor day, 0615 to 2115) but avoiding a potentially long wait (1 week at anchor) for the next ideal conditions. So, we pushed on. Crossing the Strait itself – was peanuts. People talk about the high volume of shipping trade, as expressed in this photo of our chart and AIS targets – but for us, the traffic here was much less than what we saw in the Singapore Straits nearly a decade ago.
After crossing, and moving west along the coastline of Morocco (after a 1 hour time zone change), we discovered that we had to get much closer to shore (150 foot depth) in order to get out of the extremely high east setting tidal flow. Changing the boat direction from strictly west to south meant increasing the boat speed from only 1 knot to 6 knots! Once we were close to shore, we continued west, and arrived at Marina Tanja Bay at 2015 local time.
Our view of the Moroccan coastline was very enticing.
On 27 May, we arrived at our destination of Marina Tanja Bay, in Tangier Morocco. We are now “in a new country”, changing our “countries visited” from 79 to 80. We sat on the visitors pontoon for several days waiting for the very strong winds to abate and moved to our final berth, at M01, a substantial floating dock. We have been to a Carrefour grocery store just once, and were quite impressed with the quality and variety of food available.
I would be remiss if I did not mention something about the persistent threat of Orca attacks. Since May 2020, a subpopulation of orcas (killer whales) in the Strait of Gibraltar and nearby waters off the Iberian Peninsula (including Portugal, Spain, and Morocco) has been involved in hundreds of interactions with boats, primarily targeting sailboats. These interactions have led to significant damage, including the sinking of at least five vessels. We have met many people who have had their boat damaged by Orcas. Here is a photo of a damaged catamaran rudder that I took in the chandlery at Tangiers.
I won’t say that our steel boat, with a steel rudder, skeg, and keel is immune from Orca attacks, but it does seem obvious that the end result would be different.
I should finally say that the many improvements we made to our anchoring systems at dock in Cartagena worked very well. The chain counter, accurately displaying how much chain has been laid – provides an important bit of information for Diane at the helm. Also, the aluminum racks we made on the boom, to help capture the mainsail – work extremely well. Finally, after nearly 20 years of pulling in anchor chain, and needing someone to correct the pile (in the fore cabin) – this has now been solved. The chain piles very well.