On the 25th of September I flew from London to Gibraltar to start my adventure. And even the first leg of the trip ended up being more adventurous than planned. A flock of birds occupied the landing strip and our pilot had to pull up the plane in the last moment, which caused quite a commotion on board the plane. But we were rewarded with a 360-degree-view of the Rock at sunset, which was pretty nice.
I then arrived at the boat in the marina around 10 PM and settled in again fairly quickly. We spent the next day getting boat-jobs done in the marina before heading out for an anchorage just a few minutes away.
We left at 3AM the next day to cross the Gibraltar Strait and head over to Morocco. The strait of Gibraltar is normally a very busy area but when we left the anchorage we were lucky to have little waves and traffic, even though we were surrounded by fog for the first few hours. Little wind and no waves meant smooth going but also that we had to motor almost the whole way.
-- The busy strait of Gibraltar at dawn with Europe in the background and Africa/Marocco ahead. --
Because of a big low (Lorenzo) nearing the Canaries and Azores we won’t be able to cross over to the Canaries as we need 4-5 days of good weather from here and we would not make it there before the big waves would hit us so we will head down along the African coast towards Rabat and then do the 3-day-jump to Lanzarote from there.