We’ve been hanging out with two American couples, James and Karen from Blue Heron and Peter and Carol from Eight Bells.  Neither of the ladies is doing the Atlantic crossing (both have done it before), but James is sailing his yacht over as part of the ARC, and Peter is not (a NARC).

So Peter and Carol left Las Palmas a few days back and sailed to Santa Cruz on Tenerife, where they will be picking up their crossing crew – and the rest of us decided we’d take time out and visit them – but by ferry.

Tenerife is the largest of the seven Canary Islands, and roughly triangular in shape.  It has an area of around 2000 km2, a resident population of close to 700,000, and the highest mountain in Spain, El Teide, a gigantic volcanic cone often snow capped, rising to 3,700 metres.

We got a reasonable package organised by the Corte Ingles travel shop, and walked down to the ferry terminal to pick up our 8 am / 3 hour ferry run over, on Monday morning.

Took this shot back over the Las Palmas anchorage area as we left.

Santa Cruz has two big boat marina facilities in it’s harbour – but the plusher Club Nautico has no room for visitors.  As you can see, it’s a well set up social place, but like many Spanish ‘Yacht Clubs’ focussed more on the pleasures than the sailing.

Regular visitors (including Peter and Carol) park up in the main Santa Cruz Marina situated a few hundred yards further south.  Guess they have space for a least 100 visitors, with newly built showers etc making it quite upmarket for a council run place.

From L to R our mob includes Sue, Peter, Karen, James and Carol.

Had a great first day driving over the mountainside on the north part of the island and also lucked out that evening finding a real Canarian restaurant where we able to leave it to the waitress to pick dishes and wine.  Fabulous tucker – great ambiance and company - and less than 25 euros per head. 

Got the good nights sleep needed before we were off again heading higher for our second days tour up El Tiede.

The area around the volcano is a National Park, full of warning notices about the high temperatures experienced daytime, and the extreme cold that descends at night.  The vocanic cone dwarfs all the other islands around -  and on a clear day most of those islands can be seen from the top – even tho’ they spread over 200 miles in an east / west line. 

The driving was fun.  The company good.  And the scenery stunning.  The variety of colours and textures from past eruptions of lava are truly something to experience.  In parts it looks like twisted toffee, in parts as smooth as ashfelt, in others as jagged as.  You’d think some of the the ground is mud, ploughed up by some giant piece of Gods gardening equipment – but of course it is all rock – hard, unyielding, and impassable in many directions except on the road.  You can see why they filmed parts of The Planet of the Apes and Starwars in some of these locations.  Awesome.

Although it was hot out of the wind, when one got exposed on some rock faces it was decidedly chilly even in daylight.  Not much wildlife on the barren terrain, but we caught this lovely lady out looking for family food from her own mountain peak. I was more surprised than she was.

We also had other pals Robin and Charles off Robin Leigh who were at anchor south of the island off the beach at Los Cristianos, so late on day two we drove our car from the top, down to visit them, whilst the rest of the mob headed back direct for Santa Cruz.

Robin and Charles are also heading home to Florida on their Trintella 47 (NARC’s) and are sitting it out on Tenerife awaiting crew member Alan (also old pal from Kemer in Turkey) plus heavier winds, before heading off westward.  Los Cristianos is a typically Spanish holiday town with lots of resident expat Poms and Germans.  But pretty and nice, with flat water over sandy bottom protected from prevailing winds by the hills and mountains to the north.  Seems to be a great freebie place to hang out - plus it has a used expat book store.  We picked up 12 new-to-us novels circa 3 euros each - a find!

The winds right now are all from the right direction for a crossing, and it appears the tropical storms which start each summer on this side of the Atlantic have stopped being formed.  But they’ve only been replaced with light breezes and most people defer starting off until the heavier and more constant trade winds set in.  It’s why December / January are the favoured crossing months.

Actually for those sailors out there - we've found two new beaut weather sites.  Try www.passageweather.com for longer distance stuff, and www.gribus.com to get grib weather files when underway.  Looks like we've settled a deal to carry three lightweight spinnakers for a fast race boat in exchange for thier meteorologist providing 12 hourly weather updates whilst we're underway........so hopefully we'll not lack the needed info to maintain maximum sailing speeds.  Hopefully.

Finally got back to Las Palmas on midday ferry Wednesday, to find previously empty berths on our jetty now packed with fellow ARC boats.  The ARC office opens next Monday and the round of seminars / parties promised start about then also.............

We think the boat’s all ready.  And so are we.  So looking forward to the next two weeks rushing by and getting out to the start line.

Cheers

JOHN