SERENITY NOW

  ...and against all the odds, braving travel bans and Covid tests galore, Martin arrives. This is met with wide smiles and sighs of relief all round. The upcoming Atlantic crossing wouldn't have been impossible by any means, but with three of us, instead of two on watches will make everything so much easier. Despite apparently having done everything we need to do before our departure, our list of jobs is still bizarrely growing instead of shrinking. Today’s delights include safety briefings, squashing the tender into a locker and raising the rarely used (until now) spinnaker. We’re now two days away from departure, two days away from the new year and two days away from the adventure of a lifetime. This fills me with a gut tingling excitement, mixed with a good deal of understandable trepidation. So for now, I’ll finish up with a nice quote from Christopher Columbus: ‘Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World behind’   P.S. For anyone reading this who'd like to see

  We spent a laughter filled evening on anchor with the ‘Sundays’ - Ryan and Brittni. Beer, card tricks, sailing stories, quizzes and banter galore. The lack of any proper dinner though translated into a throbbing hangover the next morning. This, my angelic wife cleverly alleviated with a fried brekkie and strong coffee. Having been gruffly shooed away from the marina office yesterday, we’ve all but resigned ourselves to not getting in. Well Christmas miracles do happen: a mid morning call from the marina to tell us that a spot has become free. We excitedly upped anchor, headed to the reception dock, Chez steering us in perfectly, our docking only marred by me bashing my head on the anchor on our bow as I bent down tying our lines to the potoon. As Chez dealt with the office formalities, I sat outside and rubbed the egg developing on the back of my head. Once we’d finished there, next stop the fuel dock where we topped up our diesel to brimming. I then radioed the marineros who’d previ

  We once again found ourselves in the safe, but smelly confines of the sheltered cove that I’m calling Poo and Onion bay - it’s real name is the somewhat less descriptive ‘Punta de la Salinas’. We’re half way up the East coast of Gran Canaria on our way North to our check-out destination of Las Palmas. Having battled to Poo and Onion bay in unfavourable conditions, it’s the same as last time: too choppy and windy to get the tender over to the wind turbine lined shore. We remained stuck there, boat-bound for a joy sapping week. We roll around, listening to the anchor chain grinding across rock, and the bridle ropes squealing under the constant strain from the strong persistent wind. Chez crocheted while I played online backgammon. One minor highlight of the time spent there was catching a decent sized ‘Diamond lizard fish’ (what I’d previously thought to be a hake.. ugly thing with lots of teeth) - I was a little bit pleased with myself as I managed to catch it using a spinning lure wh

  From our previous home on the Southern end of Gran Canaria, we moved to the slightly less swelly but significantly prettier anchorage of Anfi. Dropped the tender and headed to the marina. We were welcomed by a friendlyish marinero, and although there’s no room at the inn for us to stay over the Christmas period, they’re OK for us to park the tender there if we come into town. We had a stroll around the hotel complex dominated town - its quite pretty in a false manicured sort of way, palms, perfect flat golf green like lawns, and an occasional incongruous sparkling Xmas tree here and there. There’s people galore, mainly the usual holidaying German/English mix. We spent a few lazy days there, one day taking the ferry up the coast to Arguineguin to visit the chandlers - which was sadly not as well stocked as we’d been led to believe. We slowly came to the conclusion that although the anchorage is almost devoid of swell, the town is pretty and the marina staff are friendly - we really d