Leaving Gibraltar

Tomorrow morning we're leaving Gibraltar. We've been here for four days, all the time on anchor. At the beginning we were too lazy to bother to go into marina, then we just fell into routine. 

This is our trail from Canaries to here on weather chart. We kept more to the North, away from Africa, mainly to get some more wind.

On Tuesday we were still quite tired and didn't do much. Except we changed the genoa furling line, the "old" one was actually new last year, but it was too thin and hard to handle...

...so we replaced it with even newer, thicker line.

We were surprised to see so many fish around our boat.

We were checking the weather every day and decided it would be best to sail on on Friday or Saturday. On Wednesday we sailed to fuel dock in Gibraltar and topped the boat with diesel - our tanks were quite empty and here the price is unbeatable. Later in the afternoon I rowed the Captain to the shore and he got some fresh vegetables and fruit from supermarket.

On Thursday we sailed across the bay to West side to anchor. The westerly wind was getting stronger and produced quite a chop in the anchorage on East side. This was the view from our new anchorage towards West...

...and this to the East.

It was blowing really hard the whole day, up to 40 knots, and while the wind waves were not big, there was a swell coming into anchorage from SE and Heron was rolling frequently. In the afternoon we moved a bit more to the South, nearer to the commercial port of Algeciras. And there was less swell here, indeed.

This is a town of Algeciras. It was too windy to row to the shore.

After checking the weather again, we decided that Saturday is our departure day. 

In the night wind got much lighter, but the swell bigger. While Captain slept well, I frequently woke up. Not such a good night. But the morning made up for it - already as we were drinking coffee, dolphins came into the bay to hunt. On our passage, I managed to only see one dolphin, but here, among the big ships and just a stone throw away from the commercial port, there were dozens of them! But not that I'm complaining.

Obviously the sea gulls also manage to get some scrapes of what dolphins catch.

Day was rather grey, but not as windy as yesterday. There even was a bit of rain. We did some small things around the boat, I cut Captains hair and cooked stew for two days. The temperatures got much colder yesterday, so a stew is a very suitable food.

In the afternoon we even had some sun and the whole rock was visible.

There were some funny clouds on the North.

The dolphins came by once more, hunting again. It's really a treat to watch dolphins from anchored boat.

Tomorrow after the breakfast we'll sail off, probably to Cartagena or even a bit further. We have no idea, where we'll be able to stop. Luckily we have enough food for at least a month, but hopefully we'll be able to hide away if the weather gets bad. Maybe Italy or at least Greece will be more welcoming for us cruisers than Spain.