Islay Mist Goes North West: First Over night sail to Ceuta

We only stayed in Almerimar for one night as the next day was Sunday and everything would have been shut anyway and the Easterly winds looked like they weren't going to last as long as the forecast had said a few days previous. That was infact true as we had NO WIND the whole 133 miles from Almerimar to Ceuta in Northern Morocco all night long! At least our fears of diesel bug seem to be allayed as we used nearly all the fuel we had left and went on to drums after that.

We left at 11.30 am and got into Ceuta the next day at about lunch timeish.

The trip was memorable if not for the sailing but the amount of wildlife we saw and then the fog……

Wildlife spotters Kaylee even did a wildlife tv programme for us that day!

As always in a motoring situation Alistair retreated to his bunk out of boredom so the girls and I were on the day watch. We saw what we are sure were pilot whales from the fins and then an hour or so later saw some more.

Pilot whales (minky whales in Shetland) we think.

Then dolphins a few times!

Then jelly fish, we motored through a couple of swarms of jelly fish. So of course as they were small ones there was going to be no peace until I had caught a couple and got them into a bucket. The girls got their sea life book out and we identified them we think as Pelagia jellyfish.

Inspecting the jelly fish.

I discovered a good way of staying awake at night as I had the first watch until 2am (and hadn’t had a sleep like some others all day) – dancing, coffee is no good as when you go to bed then you can’t sleep but dancing to some good old jubilee type tunes on my ipod in the companion way seemed to do the trick! Only Shetlanders about my age will know what I mean about the jubilee type tunes… I suppose dancing may not work so well when we are actually sailing instead of motoring on a flat calm or I might actually do myself an injury!

The night and the next morning was devoted to radar watching as the visibility was so poor and unbeknown to us getting much worse as we headed towards the busiest shipping lane in the world…

At least it gave me and Ali a very good catch up on our radar reading skills! It really was quite scary especially when you had a few big blobs on the screen all seeming to be coming your way. I only had to do a 360 turn once and alter course a few other times slightly and I was probably being over cautious but big boats scare me! Ali did the next watch then I did a couple of hours but I got him up again as we were approaching the Gibraltar straights as the traffic was getting heavier. However even though it was a bit scary we made it to Ceuta and were relieved to come out of the fog bank about a mile from the harbour entrance and so managed to avoid the fast ferries running in and out. We got tied up and had a rest before going out to explore a little.