.... makes an average of about 5.89kn which is not a bad average speed for the seize of my boat.
However, about half of the distance was motor sailing as the wind fell asleep Sunday noon.
I left Gibraltar Friday at around 9 instead of 8h30 in the morning as the gasoline station only opened 30 min later than supposed. This put me in a hurry in order to catch the outbound tidal current.
About 3-4 nm before Tarifa I saw a bigger dolphin or Orca hunting as fishes were jumping in all directions. When it realized my boat it quickly approached T-Fish which I observed with increasing heartbeat. Just in front of the bow it dived under the hull and... I never saw the IT again, not even sure it was an Orca or likely a bottlenose dolphin.
This was the only bigger animal I saw the whole trip, no other dolphins, no whales, only a few flying fishes and a handful of birds.
After crossing to the African side in between the two traffic zones at the entrance of the Gibraltar strait, I tried to set course directly to Porto Santo. Unfortunately, this was not possible as the wind came more westerly than forecasted. Slowly but surely it backed to the North North-East while increasing at the same time. Wind speeds peaked during the night from Saturday to Sunday up to some 34kn with some impressive waves (average height 3m but the bigger reaching up to 5m). With two reefs in the main, the Genoa rolled up until a little piece for stabilization reasons, T-Fish surfed down the waves with the autopilot in very controlled way without any sign of instability. These are the conditions when it really pays off to have a long keeler or semi long keeler as in my case. In fact, I did something I read before but never assumed I will have the guts to do. I locked the cockpit to make sure there is not water entering the cabin in case a bigger wave breaks into the cockpit, put on the headphones and watched some movies.
Around Sunday noon the wind fell asleep. I still tried the gennaker but with the remaining swell und not sufficient wind pressure this did not work out. Thus, the rest was motor sailing and a bit boring....
Here the longer version video of this passage:
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