Agadir to Lanzarote

One last post on Morocco before we move on from this fascinating country. Although Agadir is a modern city, it provided a good vantage point from which to explore other parts of southern Morocco. We ventured to the edge of the Sahara desert, where the girls played in the sand dunes and experienced a camel ride. We saw argon trees which grow only in southern Morocco and from which argon oil is obtained. Goats climb the trees to help with harvesting the berries, but collecting the kernels afterwards is not a pleasant task!

We visited a fisherman’s village along the coast from Agadir to see how they live in cottages in the cliffs, and went to the town of Tiznit where we tried some delicious freshly baked flatbread, from the communal oven where the whole community can bring their bread to be baked.

Our guide on our desert trip told us that Marrakesh was mostly untouched by the recent earthquake and the souk was back to trading as usual. Having cancelled our original plans to spend a few days in Marrakesh, we were able to make a day trip and see the great square and the souk. In the maze of ancient streets are many doors with two door-knockers: we learned that the outer one was for men, and the inner one for women and children; they make a different sound and women would only answer the one used by other women and children.

We had really enjoyed our time in Morocco, and found everyone to be very friendly and helpful, however it was time to continue our journey to the Canary Islands. We set sail from Agadir to Lanzarote, a journey of 230 miles or around 36 hours. At the start there were calm seas and grey skies and it was hard to see the difference between sea and sky at the horizon. As we left Morocco behind the skies cleared and the wind strengthened, and we were able to sail at around 6 knots using our mainsail and genoa.

We were visited by several pods of dolphins during the trip, and we sailed past a large number of small crabs swimming fast a long way from shore in water nearly 2,000 metres deep. A flying fish landed on our deck, trying to escape from the tuna, a sure sign of being in the warmer waters of the Atlantic ocean. On the second day at sea we saw a pilot whale, a huge grey shape moving slowly at the surface of the water – then a flick of his tail and he was gone back into the depths.

After departing Agadir later than planned in the morning following the usual clearing out bureaucracy, with a trip length of roughly a day and a half, we envisaged arriving at Lanzarote in the dark, or spending a second night at sea. In order to avoid this we tried to keep our speed up, and later on we decided to use our engine as well as our sails. Oh no – the engine started to lose revs again, and cut out entirely several times, a deja vu moment from the previous trip. Will changed the filters and changed to the other fuel tank (we have a small day tank and a separate larger tank) as the problem might be diesel bug in the day tank. This seemed to work and the engine kept going, enabling us to average over 7 knots with wind speeds up to 20 knots. There were some quite large waves which created a corkscrew motion for the boat, but we were making good progress.

On the trip we tested the hydrovane, which steers the boat using the wind – the orcas had bent the hydrovane rudder so this had been replaced in Gibraltar. By mid-afternoon of the second day at sea we started to see the volcanic coastline of Lanzarote.

We sailed down the coast of Lanzarote and reached the marina at Puerto Calero before sunset on Wednesday. We are now in the marina for the next couple of days, with a plan to then head further south to another marina or an anchorage.