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| Vilamoura to Gibraltar (lower left, on the map) |
I was saying goodbye to someone at Vilamoura, when she
wished me a safe trip. I replied,
"No big deal! It’s only 150 miles
to Gibraltar. We'll leave at 6 o'clock
tomorrow morning, and reach Gibraltar sometime the following day." With those foolhardy, remarkably
overconfident words, we began what was to be one of our stranger passages. We did get off at 6:30 a.m. after a stop to clear Customs to leave Portugal.
From the chart, we could see that the Portuguese and Spanish coasts
curved inward, so we decided on the shortcut of going "offshore" and
crossing the open water in a direct line to the Strait of Gibraltar.
There was no wind to speak of; we motored all day and into
the night. We had decided on three-hour
watches for the night. I came on at 10:00 p.m. to stand watch until 1:00
a.m. We had been motoring southeast,
but now we turned more eastward. Ed
told me I should pick up the lighthouse at Trafalgar on my watch. About an hour later I felt I was in a bit of
trouble, with a lighthouse on my left, and a ship bearing down on me from the
right. I called Ed, as I tended to panic
when a ship was coming at me. Together
we took evasive action to avoid being hit by what turned out to be a large
fishing boat heading north along the coast.
I told Ed, "Well, I found the lighthouse." We looked over the chart to see what would
be coming along next. Ed said I'd be
seeing lights along the coast (houses), and to just keep on picking up the
lighthouses, and to keep all land on my left.
Then he went back to bed. Shore
lights gradually appeared. It seemed
that I was veering off more to the south than I had expected. The depth sounder was on, so I knew I was
still in deep water. I passed another
lighthouse, then picked up yet another off to my right. Looking ahead, I could see shore lights
connecting out to this new lighthouse.
And, not only was I getting readings on the depth sounder, but I was
down to only 45 feet. I veered way to
the right to put this new lighthouse on my left. I looked at the compass and saw that I was heading due south,
instead of southeast.
When Ed came on watch at 1:00 a.m., I told him we were going
due south, and pointed out the lighthouse.
He responded with, "That must be the light on Tangiers (in Africa,
guys!), and those white lights are fishing boats." I was distressed, and swung the wheel hard
over to put us heading north. Then Ed
got out the radio to pick up the signal from the radio beacon on the lighthouse
at Tarifa. He found it was indeed in
the direction in which I'd been heading.
So I swung the wheel again back to due south. Then Ed decided that since Tarifa was "just ahead," and
Gibraltar only 15 miles past that, we'd arrive too early (before daylight). We would anchor in the bay, and wait till morning
to finish the trip. Tropic Moon must
have started wondering about us as I swung the wheel yet again, and we headed
north toward the shore lights in the bay.
When the depth decreased to 35 feet, Ed dropped the anchor.
Without radar, it's hard (read impossible), to judge how far
away a light is at night. The next
morning we found the lighthouse to be far off in the distance. Up came the anchor. We motored along the shore for three hours
before we reached the light at what we believed to be Tarifa, the western
entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar.
The wind had started to increase.
When it’s blowing hard from the east, you don't have a prayer of getting
through the Straits. We put our nose
around the point, but came back and anchored.
The wind continued to increase - up to about 50 miles per hour - and we
had a full-scale levanter on our hands that blew for three days. At that point, with the wind howling, and
the boat rolling from side to side, there was nothing to do but set a second
anchor, and pick out a new paperback from the bookshelf.
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| Tarifa, at the southern tip of Spain, is at the entrance of the Strait of Gibraltar. The Strait of Gibraltar connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean Sea. |
On the fifth morning of our “overnight" trip, the wind
had abated considerably. We decided to cover the last 15 miles to
Gibraltar. We picked out a tower on the
shore, and matched it with a tower on the chart. We peered ahead into the haze, hoping each point of land would
mean the start of the large Bay of Gibraltar.
The wind (dead ahead) increased throughout the morning. We found ourselves motoring into steep
seas. Our bow would hit a wave, and the
speed on the knot meter would drop to zero, then slowly climb to three knots
before we'd get knocked to a standstill again.
Every wave we hit with our bow sent water flying back over the whole
length of the boat, to land on my head where I was standing at the wheel. I was quite angry about our
progress, but when Ed said conditions were getting too difficult, I said I
wasn't turning back. We had been
motoring for four hours, and would have had to retrace all our morning's effort
to reach an anchorage. Ed named me
"old-press-on-regardless." I
started weaving the boat back and forth across the waves, rather than directly
into them, and we were able to make better progress.
At long last, we had a bay on our left, and through the haze
up ahead we could make out some buildings.
I was ecstatic! Finally,
Gibraltar! As we crossed the bay, Ed
got out the binoculars. He said the
place didn't look like Gibraltar.
"Why not? Here's the
bay. There's a hill, a city, and a
lighthouse on the point! What more do
you want?" Ed got out our book on
lighthouses and read that the Gibraltar light was supposed to be white with a
red stripe - and this light didn't have a red stripe.
I was having none of his pessimism. "So maybe they're painting it? There's absolutely nothing else on this part
of the chart that could possibly be what we're looking at!" Some doubts were creeping in though, and we
decided to get close enough to the point to look things over better. I was still saying that it had to be
Gibraltar, when we approached some beautiful beaches that were sadly lacking in
the breakwaters that distinguish Gibraltar.
And though there was a fortification on the point, it was most definitely
not "The Rock."
Confused, we decided to motor around the lighthouse point to
see if we'd find the Bay of Gibraltar on the far side. I was still at the wheel, and as we rounded
the point, something clicked in the back of my brain. Something had just happened that I'd been subconsciously waiting
for the whole trip. For the first time,
Tropic Moon was pointing northeast (the lay of the Straits) rather than
southeast. Also, it was like coming out
of a back-country lane and finding ourselves at the highway. Several freighters and tankers were crossing
in the hazy distance ahead of us. I
realized we had only just reached the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar.
Being a bit overwrought by this time, I started yelling,
"Do you know where we are? Do you know where we are?" No, Ed didn't know where we were, and he
didn't for one minute believe I had a clue either.
"This is Tarifa!
This is where we thought we were when we sat through that levanter for
the last three days." Ed doubted
my conclusion, but one thing we did agree on was that we would retreat back
around the point, and anchor in the protection of the land.
We studied the chart.
Ed checked out the radio beacon.
He took two sun sights with his sextant. Though the first sight, thanks to the hazy horizon, placed us eight miles
south on the continent of Africa (yes, on land…), we did determine that we were
anchored at Tarifa, on the Spanish coast, at the entrance to the Strait of
Gibraltar.
We settled down for a post mortem. I asked Ed if it hadn't bothered him that we had never gone
northeast. He said "no," and
mentioned our compass deviation, which was up to 20 degrees at some
points. Once, when a lighthouse hadn't
shown up where we had expected it, we dismissed it as "not
working." When we couldn't pick up
a radio signal from Gibraltar, I had come up with the bright idea that since
Spain was trying to get Gibraltar back from the British (at that time the
frontier between Spain and Gibraltar had been closed for 17 years), they were
probably jamming the Gibraltar radio frequencies.
I was appalled by our performance, but Ed just put it down to overconfidence, because he knew all we had to do was follow the coast, and we would eventually reach Gibraltar. In case you wonder where we originally went wrong: When we left Vilamoura to cross the open bay, we were out of sight of land for twelve hours. When we closed with the Spanish coast that first night, the lighthouse I saw wasn't Trafalgar, but further north at the city of Cadiz. We’d probably been pushed north by a current. From there on, we just counted and judged everything incorrectly.
I was appalled by our performance, but Ed just put it down to overconfidence, because he knew all we had to do was follow the coast, and we would eventually reach Gibraltar. In case you wonder where we originally went wrong: When we left Vilamoura to cross the open bay, we were out of sight of land for twelve hours. When we closed with the Spanish coast that first night, the lighthouse I saw wasn't Trafalgar, but further north at the city of Cadiz. We’d probably been pushed north by a current. From there on, we just counted and judged everything incorrectly.
The following morning, in very light westerly winds, we
motored the last, and final, 15 miles to Gibraltar. I said, as I had the day before, "Wow, here we are in the
Strait of Gibraltar!" We saw a
tower on the shore, and matched it with a tower on the chart. We waited for the Bay of Gibraltar to open
up on our left. I spoke of a sense of
deja vu, like we'd done it all before.
Like maybe even yesterday.... (Ed was having none of my humor.) At noon, October 17th, on the sixth day out
from Vilamoura, we finally arrived at the majestic Rock of Gibraltar.
Though overconfidence and carelessness had been a major part
of our poor navigation, another contributing factor of considerable importance
was that we had made the mistake of leaving Vilamoura on a Friday. An old sailor's superstition states that one
never begins a voyage on a Friday - dire consequences are almost sure to
follow. Up until that time, we had made
a point of never starting a trip on a Friday, but I'd been anxious to get
going, since we'd been having trouble getting ourselves on the move again. I'd pointed out to Ed that we weren't really
leaving on a voyage, since you could hardly count an overnight sail as a
voyage. Needless to say, we never
started another trip on a Friday.
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