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| We didn't mind staying a little longer in Ceuta and discovering more of the town's amazing hand painted ceramic billboards like this one. |
We
wandered down town on Sunday night to find some dinner and discovered Ceuta coming
alive with thousands of people packing into the city centre for one of a series
of parades to celebrate Easter. All over Spain Easter is commemorated as the
holiest of festivals with a week or more of parades and other events and we’re
hoping to witness a few more of these in the coming days.
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| We hadn't expected to run across this Easter parade in Ceuta so Rob's camera was back in the hostel room and the photos are as good as we could do with an i-phone at night.   |
After
easing Alcheringa back in the water late
on Monday looking all very smart with her new paint, we made sure all was in
readiness to put to sea next morning and then it was tapas time. We’d discovered
a small bar in the residential area above the shipyard that had been packed with
locals for lunch so decided it looked ideal for our last meal in Ceuta and to
celebrate really getting underway for the summer. De Buena Cepa exceeded our wildest expectations with fantastic,
friendly service and simply the most incredible food you could imagine. Salted
cod done to perfection, flavour filled mushroom fettuccini, pork medallions in
a rich cream sauce that melted in your mouth, a beef in filo pasty tapas that was similar to
a mini Beef Wellington but infused with Latin spices that truly set it apart.
These were washed down with two bottles of excellent Spanish red followed by
coffee and complimentary liqueurs all for 20 Euros each. ($24 Aus). How come
we always find these places on our last night in a town?
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| With Alcheringa looking her absolute best Marc was a pretty proud owner as the boat was lifted back into the water for our next adventures. |
Surprisingly
all three of us were up on time next morning and we cast off as planned at 9.00AM to take
advantage of wind and tide for our passage to Estepona on the Spanish Coast. We
raised the mainsail inside the harbour and turned the engine off as we sailed
out through the breakwaters into the Straits of Gibraltar heading almost due north across the shipping lanes with a 10
to 15 knot westerly pushing us along nicely.
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| Sunshine or not, it was a fantastic sailing day in the Mediterranean on Alcheringa |
Within half an hour the breeze strengthened to 15 to 20 knots as we got away from the coast and it pretty much stayed that way all day giving us excellent sailing conditions. Alcheringa’s newly painted and obviously slippery backside further boosted performance and we found ourselves zooming along at better than 8 knots much of the time and hit a new record high of 9.4 at one stage. Yee-Haa!
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| What better place to test out our new AIS screen than the busy Straits of Gibraltar. We were doing 7 knots in 12.5 knots of wind here which isn't too bad at all. |
The
straits were even busier than when we’d crossed from Gibraltar to Ceuta but now
we had our new AIS system installed which took a lot of the guess work out of
how close a tanker/container ship/high speed ferry/cruise liner would come to
running us over. Not only could we see their course, speed and closest point of
approach (CPA) all detailed on our little readout, we also appeared on their
screens for the first time. The AIS made it easy to see a change of course by
15 degrees at one stage would allow us to safely pass behind a huge roll on –
roll off ship that on current course and speed would have come within metres of
us. We also experienced an incredible and probably very rare event when a large
ship, still four miles away bound for Gibraltar, called us up by name on the radio
to let us know that as we were under sail they would reduce speed so we could
safely pass in front of them. Who’d have believed it? We’re loving our AIS already.
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| After crossing South from Gib to Ceuta 12 days ago we traversed the Straits again up to Estepona on the Spanish coast. |
Today
was really one of the best day’s sailing we’ve had on Alcheringa. Although it was overcast much of the time it was only a
bit cold for a while in the middle of the straits and once we neared the
Spanish coast we enjoyed a fantastic downwind run that saw us cover over 37 nautical
miles in a little under six hours to average better than six knots. Best of
all, the engine was turned off as we cleared the harbour in Ceuta and wasn’t
restarted until we dropped the sails just outside the marina at Estepona. Now
that’s the way we like it.
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| This is the Google Earth view of our current location in the marina at Estepona that our Spot Tracker provides. You can see and zoom in on our latest position as a map or satellite view whenever you click the Spot Tracker link on the right. |
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If you have only recently discovered our blog and would like to read how it all started, or work through our previous adventures, click the link to go back to our first blog entry. Stuff it. Let's just go sailing anyway.
We hope you enjoy reading the previous posts to catch up on our story.
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