Journey from Portimão to Gibraltar
The next day, Thursday 1st July, we decided to proceed along the coast. Although we had seen adverts for Aqualand and for a sand sculpture exhibition which we were interested in, we decided to leave those for now. We considered heading for Faro or Cadiz, but Faro itself is a long way up a creek which is dubious for a boat of our draft, and the creek being 4 miles long is too far to go in the dinghy. Cadiz has a marina but no anchorage for a boat of our draft, and as we have overspent this month we counted the marina out too. So we decided to go straight for the Strait of Gibraltar. We tidied up and set off at 3:15p.m. into a fresh to strong westerly wind, and put up the genoa and staysail goose-winged, making about 6 knots. The sea was very lumpy which we thought would die off once we passed Faro and went into deep water, however it remained pretty lumpy throughout the night with winds continuing at between F4-6. Dan slept soundly as usual once I got him to sleep just after sunset, but both Nigel and I had trouble getting any sleep until the wind died off during the next morning.
During the day the wind dropped to almost nothing, and the swell decreased quite a lot. We came close to the straits and were able to see African mountains on the right, in the haze – not a lot of detail – and Spain on the left, closing in until we got to Tarifa, Europe’s most southerly point, and the town closest to Africa at only 8 miles. The area surrounding Tarifa is covered with wind farms, because as the entrance to the straits it gets wind about two forces higher than everywhere else, hence it is also the windsurfing capital of Europe! The current was noticeable from several hours previously and increased our speed by two knots for a long time, and up to 31/2 knots when we finally went through the strait. We could see by then a constant stream of tankers exiting the straits on the Moroccan side. As it was getting dark we considered stopping at Tarifa, but when we got there the anchorages seemed rather exposed to both wind and current, so we decided to proceed to Gibraltar although the sun had already just set. Gibraltar was another two hours away. As soon as the sun went down at about 9 p.m. I got Daniel to bed as a matter of urgency because the area was getting busy and we needed to plan our entrance into Gibraltar. Then as darkness came we made some new waypoints with the GPS and charts for rounding up into Gibraltar Bay and then for making our way to the anchorage to the north of the runway.
When we rounded the corner to see into Gibraltar Bay it was already dark. It was difficult even to make out the whole shape of the rock as this was not lit and was indistinguishable from the sky, however the area next to the sea was lit up with thousands of lights around the whole bay. We could see the bay was full of traffic, there were tankers and ferries going in and out of the bay, the majority would be going to/from Algeciras on the west side of the bay, which is a huge commercial port. We had to avoid those as well as trying to see our way to the other side of the bay to the north of Gibraltar town and just north of the runway. Some of the tankers and other vessels leaving had very poor or non-existent navigation lights, which was very alarming! We had a lot of trouble seeing where we were to go, we eventually realised that all the tankers which we thought were alongside at various points around the bay, were actually anchored
in the middle of it! They were swinging round, and some of them were anchored in pairs, so it was very difficult to figure anything out! We eventually went around the last tankers and agreed on what was the north light of the Gibraltar harbour, behind which we expected to find the airport runway. We approached then very slowly, and although we never did really make out the runway, we were just able to make out about four boats anchored where we expected that we should, and after a little more looking we could see that they were anchored outside the spit which had been mentioned in the Pilot book. A quick check on the radar confirmed we were in the right place. We anchored in almost 5 metres between the outermost large motor cruiser and the other sailing yachts. The weather was by then very damp, as it had been since Tarifa, and the boat was very wet. We did nothing more and went to bed.