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| Maret reflected in the Atlantic on New Year's Day |
Landfall at Graciosa was at dawn after a windless 100% motoring
four day passage from Rabat - our first New Year at sea, when the VHF came
alive with New Year greetings in all kinds of languages: Spanish and French of
course, also Russian, English, German, Arabic (I think) and several other
languages that we couldn’t recognize.
Maret added Estonian to that mixture.
On board we celebrated with slow-roasted lamb and a reduction sauce,
cava, and the Spanish tradition of 12 grapes at midnight - a brilliant piece of
Ivy Lee-style marketing to resolve a grape glut in the 1930s that stuck, and
which has ensured that no-one in Spain takes photos of each other at New Year’s
midnight, as everyone has pouched cheeks with 12 grapes stuffed inside.
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| Lanzarote from the Graciosa anchorage |
This time our visit to Graciosa was tranquil. The anchorage, which last time had about 30
boats, had just 3. Last time Wendy,
Szilvi and I ended up partying with Dani, the local kingpin, and Rufi, his
trusty sidekick, seemingly every night, either ashore, on Otra Vida, or on
Dani’s farm in the uplands. This time they
and their boat were not in evidence, giving our livers a pass on the serious
workout that would have undoubtedly ensued.
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| La Graciosa |
Following a drizzly week in Las Palmas getting our refrigerator
fixed we headed south and started to learn about the very localised nature of high
island weather. Being finally in the
trade wind belt the big picture was fairly consistent N-NE-E winds of 12-20kts.
However the wind behaviour around the islands is more complex: a bit like water
around a rock in a stream. The water on
the upstream side bunches up around the rock … this happens with clouds, so the
NE sides of these islands are typically cloudy, and therefore somewhat cooler
because of the reduced amount of sunlight.
On the downstream side of the rock there is a slack-water eddy,
similarly on the SW side of the islands there are rarely clouds or wind, and it
is sunnier and warmer. On the sides of
the rock, the water flows more quickly, logically, as the water bunched
upstream of the rock has to go somewhere.
This happens with the wind around the islands too, with “acceleration
zones” to the sides where the wind can be 10-20kts higher than the prevailing
wind.
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| Gran Canaria |
All this leads to interesting sailing conditions. Going E or W from the south of an island there
are dead calm conditions for the period you are in the wind-shadow of the
island, and then suddenly within 500m you are in strong winds, quite often
30+kts. In anchorages a few hundred
meters can make a significant difference in the amount of cloud or the amount
of wind you experience, and a 10 or 20 degree change in wind angle can turn an
anchorage from comfortable to swelly and untenable. Anchoring and sailing here is never routine,
and I’m grateful we were able to stay long enough to learn about it. It is knowledge that will be useful in the
Cape Verdes and no doubt in island anchorages further afield.
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| Oops, time to get the sail repair kit out |
The biggest effects come from the biggest mountains. Mount Teide on Tenerife is the highest
mountain in the Canaries, and in Spain.
There is a cable car that moves you to 300m below the summit in minutes,
and which is, apparently, the #1 tourist attraction in Spain by visitor
numbers, a claim I find surprising. We
chose a foot ascent instead, starting a few kilometres away from the cable car,
hiking past Montana Blanca … pale yellow rather than white, and impressively stark
with eroded hills and almost no vegetation.
After a couple of kilometres of easy walking along pista we started the
real ascent up a mountain path. Nothing
difficult but considerably steeper. 3
hours later, passing through patches of snow, we arrived at the refuge, a
pleasant enough place as refuges go, bizarrely offering wifi access,
electricity and vending machines, but no meals or drinks service.
The following morning we were away by 6.30am, and tramping
through frozen snow and ice with crampons we watched the beginnings of sunrise
far away over Gran Canaria. The sky
slowly filled in with pink and tangerine as we continued along. There is only one officially sanctioned path
up Teide, from the cable car station, but serendipitously we lost the faint
path leading there from the refuge in the half light and decided instead to
follow another older path up the steep scree slopes to the summit. This was nicely challenging, and as we later
realised, a much more interesting choice.
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| On top of Teide, sulphur clouds wafting by |
After scrambling the steep, loose last 50m to the summit
ridge we were on top. The summit is
wafted in hot sulphury steam from fumaroles in the summit crater and along the
ridge – this is a sleeping volcano, not a dead one. The now fully risen sun cast a perfect
shadow of the triangular peak of Teide onto clouds well below us.
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| Teide's morning shadow |
After half an hour on top, and feeling a little nauseous
from the sulphur fumes, we descended the official route down to the cable car
station, where all other official routes on the massif converge. The route down is almost like a stairway,
built from formidable stones and very well maintained, and designed for people
in running shoes or even sandals to go up and down. Our route up, officially illegal, was far
more satisfying.
On arrival at the cable car station we were told that all
routes (including the one we had descended from the summit) were closed because
of snow! The rangers would not let us
take our chosen onward route to Pico Viejo, or any other route, even with our
crampons and faced with the obvious fact that by being there we’d already done
some much more challenging walking that morning. They were apologetic, but said they were under
strict instructions from their superiors.
We descended the cable car and walked across the valley bottom through a
pretty desert landscape to the Parador, where we had a room booked for the
evening.
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| Teide's caldera |
Teide, while still a real mountain and wild in its moonscape
ruggedness, has been tamed into a safe, controlled tourist attraction, almost a
theme park. I do understand the desire
to avoid accidents in a tourist attraction, but the mountains are a place of
freedom, and something has been lost in the process of taming Teide. I wonder if the core issue here is one of
judgement: the rangers could clearly see we were able to handle ourselves in
the fairly mild conditions on the mountains, but to let us take a path would
have meant a personal judgement, and how to explain that judgement and the
potential commercial disruption if one of us had an accident, say a broken
ankle? Ultimately the over-avoidance of risk results
in the loss of passion, of pleasure, of adventure. It’s a balance, of course, and there are
plenty of other mountains in the world that are not tourist attractions where
we can roam freely. But still it is a
little sad.
After a relaxed day by the pool at the Parador we hiked to
the rim of the caldera and did a long, long descent almost to the coast. The trail took us up into barren high desert,
with patches of ice remaining in sheltered places, then through alpine pine
forests, a high cloud forest with Spanish moss hanging from the trees,
temperate forest, lush tropical shrubs almost like a planned botanical garden,
a gorge with German rock climbers on the walls, and finally to a small village
where we caught a bus back to the boat.
A lovely day.
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| Lazy navigation in the wind shadow of La Gomera |
La Gomera is one of the smaller, less developed islands of
the Canary group. It’s a day sail from
the bottom of Tenerife, and much of the island is uninhabited.
Valle Gran Rey, on the western side, retains a contingent of
aging hippies, mostly German. Headbands,
scarves, baggy pastel-coloured trousers and wire rimmed granny glasses seem de
rigueur. People use skateboards, scooters
or highly personalised bikes to get around. On Sundays there is the hippie
market near the bus station, selling handicrafts, hand-made jewellery, incense,
muesli and hippie clothes. There’s a
gentleness to the place, a feeling of relaxation. It reminds me of Aspen or Boulder in
Colorado.
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| La Gomera |
Sailing into Vueltas, the tiny port near Valle Gran Rey, and
looking for a suitable anchorage through binoculars, I saw what appeared to be
a person sitting on a stone beach underneath sheer cliffs. It seemed impossible to get to the beach, so
I guessed it was some washed up clothing on a rock. Several days later Maret was exploring the
area and came close to the beach. She noticed
there was a removable ladder, a pair of running shoes with pristine white
socks, and … living in a cave … a well-groomed single guy! So, single ladies, a prospect for you: a waterfront
residence with a private beach and an eligible bachelor. Maret has the details.
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| La Gomera |
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| Vueltas anchorage, La Gomera |
The island rises steeply up 1000m from sea level, then
rounds out into a rather gentle and hilly interior plateau. There have been several major wildfires on
the island, wiping out huge areas of shrubs, and leaving charred but mostly
living palm trees. New shrubs have
filled in the gaps from older fires, and the most recent, in 2012, has left
blackened shrub skeletons against a carpet of pale green moss. In the steep valleys there are old
agricultural terraces in the most unlikely places, often with impossibly green
grass.
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| Charred forest, Garajonay, La Gomera |
Hiking in La Gomera was a real highlight. The trails near the coast are spectacular,
scaling seemingly impassable cliff bands through cleverly meandering
paths. From our anchorage it was a short
walk to the meditation hotel on the naturist Playa de Argayal, and the path
next to it leads up a ravine, entering into a lost world of terraces, cliffs,
easy scrambling, finally arriving at a tiny isolated church-ette perched high
up on the side of a valley. Over two
days we hiked to the summit of the island, Garajonay, where we had views across
to Teide, piercing through the cloud layer and still showing traces of snow
near its summit, and to the islands of El Hierro and La Palma, some 40+ miles
distant and finely detailed in the ultra-clear air. Our hike back to Valle Gran Rey was via yet
another clever, precipitous, fairly straightforward path down apparently
impassable cliff bands. This is hiking
of a very high quality indeed – “dream mountains of our Eden” to borrow a line
from Jethro Tull.
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| Hiking in La Gomera |
The Canary Islands are easy for us to spend time in. It’s 2 ½ months since we arrived, and it
would be easy to spend longer here.
We’ve visited just four of the eight islands, and there is still much to
explore. Another six months would be
straightforward. But it is time to get
moving.
Liz Clark is a surfer who decided to become a cruiser. Her wonderful blog, The Voyage of Swell,
tells the story and contains much good writing describing her boat challenges,
life thoughts and her particular cruising approach (surfing, sunsets and
salads). Unlike most yachties, Captain
Lizzy actively seeks out places with great surfing … the rest of us try to
avoid them, preferring calm anchorages.
For the New Year she wrote a piece outlining her philosophy of
life. It’s a good read, full of joie de
vivre, perhaps edging on naïve at times, but so full of optimism and spirit
that it is hard not to be inspired by it.
A sentiment she includes in it: “I say that comfortable is
caustic”.
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| Tenerife from Garajonay, La Gomera |
Our trip since leaving Estonia has been entirely in our civilizational
comfort zone. Iberia is easy to enjoy;
Morocco, while certainly different from Europe, is a place of great
civilisation; and the Canaries are a variant of Iberia. There is much to like in all these places,
and I’m grateful we have been able to enjoy them, learn from them, and
hopefully give something back to the great people we’ve met.
But the time has come to move on. Perhaps the curse of the Flying
Dutchman? Or perhaps the wanderlust of
the rootless cosmopolitan? Whatever it
is, we have spent too long in our comfort zone, and we’re ready to point the
boat south. The first stop is the Cape
Verdes, islands which are most definitely not Europe anymore.
