Graciosa Arrival

Hi everyone,

We arrived in the Playa Franseca anchorage at 1050 this morning.  It's good to be in the Canaries!  However where's the sun?  And I thought the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.  It has been raining on us for the last 20 hours!

Approaching Playa Francesa anchorage

Our overall and arrival tracks are shown below.  We strayed west of the rhumb line to stay on a close reach while we had wind.  When the wind died we returned to the rhumb line.

Track

Arrival Track

The graphs for the passage are shown below.  It was certainly a passage of two halves.  A great close reach with a 24 hour run of 158nm for the first half then motoring for the second.  By the end of the first half the boat was covered in a thick layer of salt.  By the end of the second it was totally salt-free!

Graphs

And here are the vital stats for the passage…

    • Distances/Speeds

        • Route Distance = 269nm

        • Logged Distance = 296nm

        • GPS Distance = 275nm

        • Duration = 2d2h (50 hours)

        • Average boat speed = 5.4 kt

        • Average speed over ground = 5.5 kt

        • Minimum boat speed = 3 kt

        • Maximum boat speed = 7.2 kt

    • Weather

        • Minimum wind speed = 2 kt

        • Average wind speed = 15 kt

        • Maximum wind speed = gusts to 25 kt

        • Apparent wind angle range = 50 to 90

        • Seas up to 1.5m

        • Swell up to 2m

        • Initially scattered cloud increasing to overcast with persistent rain

    • Engine

        • Total = 23 hours (motoring 46% of passage)

The Iridium Go! worked well as always.  The prediction for rain on departure was for very little.  That changed every 12 hours, predicting more and more rain.  And that's what we got.  Our Craftsman CM3.27 engine and Bruntons Auto-Prop drove us along nicely at 4.5 to 5.0 knots at 1600rpm, much lower revs than with our old prop.  And the lower revs are sooo much quieter!  At the end of motoring spells like this we run the engine at over 2000rpm for 10-15 minutes to 'blow out' any coke accumulating in the exhaust manifold and mixing elbow.

Most traffic we encountered was about 50nm north of Graciosa.  The half a dozen or so vessels passed at least 2nm clear.  At times visibility was poor, with no discernable horizon.  We used both AIS and radar to identify traffic.

The rain lightened to drizzle for our arrival.  I'm sure the islands would look spectacular in the sun but right now they just look soggy and remind us of Scotland.  The minimum air temperature last night during the heaviest rain was 12C which was a lot cooler than hoped for!

Approaching W edge of Gracioso with Lanzarote beyond

View N over W side of Graciosa

We stayed within VHF contact of our buddy boat sv Matusadona.  They have steering system problems which they hope to fix here in the Canaries.

Buddy boat sv Matusadona

Each evening we held a HF/SSB sked with Kiwi sv Cerulean and UK sv Ruffian.  We started on 4146 and moved up to 6227kHz which was clearer.  They are on passage from the western Canaries towards the Cape Verdes.  It was good to test our SSBs at a non-trivial range of about 350nm.  We'll continue taking part from our anchorage here which will see the range increase.

The star of the passage was the SailnSea SailingGen.  It kept our house battery bank full easily - day and night.  Fantastic.

We expect to move south to Marina Rubicon on the S coast of Lanzarote in a day or two.  Current forecasts say the rain will stop on Sunday.