From Gibraltar to the Canary Islands

After crossing the really famous Gibraltar strait, with heaps of container ships and tankers on the way, we’ve had 3 days of real calm weather, with a sea of oil, absolutely beautiful… unfortunately, calm sea also means no wind and then motoring…
Nothing really exciting then to tell you about this part of the trip. However, we did have the pleasure to see a whale quite far away, blowing its jet and jumping on its side, showing us her flipper… magical, like the view of a turtle swimming on the surface in the middle of nowhere!

We had pretty good winds for the last 3 days, sailing downwind and had a good fright on Saturday the 1st of december… at 1 am, everybody was on the deck to give a hand… the genoa furler rope had not been secured and was caught on the front of the boat, making it impossible to take a riff whereas the wind kept increasing… impossible also to put the sail down… In addition, there was a big swell which made us jibe several times (jibe it is when the main sail abruptly changes side, the boom passing quickly on the other side) and the preventer block broke after all these repeated incidents… Unfortunately enough, impossible also to put the main sail down… We had to face the mind so that Michel can go to the front of the boat with the harness on to manually put all sails down, repair the broken block… and set up everything again…
I have to admit that I really freaked out in my bunk when I felt the wind increasing crazy as, the boat keeping accelerating, and when I realized that we were jibing unwillingly! I understood something was really going wrong and jumped out of my bed to go on the deck give the guys a hand… fortunately, it was more fear than harm done!

Apart from this incident, we only had to face minor problems, occurring all the time on boats, auto pilot not working anymore, navigation lights down in middle of the night, broken winch, engine stopping because of a bad quality diesel… nothing that Michel could not not repair so far…

We kept on being lucky with our fishing lines… I got 2 nice dorados. I confess that I really felt guilty with the first one which was still alive and I had to kill… it kept on shaking even after cutting its head off… not choice bro… but honestly, it was so yummy fried with some garlic…!!!
Our friends the dolphins came to visit us twice again, making massive jumps and playing with the boat for ages… I think I’ll never get fed up with it…
They are pretty small, around 2m long, grey with a white tummy, like those we saw on the Mediterranean Sea.

At last, I’ll finish this story with a hilarious and fresh note… Mike managed to totally screw up the toilets with a shit the size of a good egg plant!!! I could not stop laughing and had tears in my eyes… cause it was the second time. He was lucky and got away the first time as we could sort it quickly enough. This time, Michel had to tear the whole thing apart… to face a real compact bloc made of shit and toilet paper… hard not to laugh when I was looking at Mike, so embarrassed, even though Michel was getting angry, thinking the only solution would be to stop the boat and dive and push the disgusting thing from the other side!!!
All good in the hood, after putting a lot of bleach to try to soften the horrible stuff, the egg plant got split into pieced and we could enjoy using the toilets again… just before reaching the Canary on this Tuesday the 4th of December, happy enough to be able to have a full night of sleep and a nice shower!