Fairwinds Goes South . . .

Adventures in a small boat on a big sea

It was some time after our biggest wave strike of the night - cockpit half full of water and books catapulted out of their shelf down in the saloon - that I realised that the hideous creaking coming from somewhere forward in the port cockpit locker every time we rolled had stopped completely. This vile racket had been getting steadily worse since we first started rolling our way through the Canaries . . . you could feel the juddering through the bridgedeck, but try as I might I couldn't find where exactly it was coming from and although I was pretty sure it was just the locker lining shifting it certainly sounded worse. Now the slamming seas had jerked whatever it was back into place . . . deep joy. The wind even dropped off a little.

The breeze freshened again to over twenty knots towards dawn, but we were able to bear away a little and the motion became more comfortable. The sun rose in an extravagant fashion behind yet another spectacularly mountainous island, and the sea turned blue - or at least, blue with lots of white frothy bits- we had arrived in the SW Gran Canaria wind acceleration zone, which the pilot says is one of the worst in the islands. With the wind speed generally being increased in these zones by ten to fifteen knots, and having been sailing in twenty knots or more most of the night, this had been preying on my mind a bit. I had the washboards in, my Henri Lloyd Ocean jacket on and two lifelines clipped on - but in fact we had a thrilling sail as the wind bent with the curve of the coastline, enabling me to adjust the Navik to maintain our course across the frothing crests on a broad reach, and we unfurled the rest of the genoa to celebrate. By half past ten the worst of the acceleration zone was behind us, and we enjoyed bacon and eggs in the cockpit.

We tied up in the marina at Puerto Mogan at midday - not a fast passage, but an exciting one. We felt we had earned our new island in a way that ferry passengers can never know, and relaxed into the elegant surroundings of this very pretty marina development. The waterfront was thronged, but the crowds could be observed at a distance from the privacy of the cockpit.

Spent half the morning working online then had a look round the marina and environs. This is a very busy tourist destination, but it infinitely more tasteful (and expensive) that the likes of Play de Las Americas or similar monstrosities in Tenerife Sur. The buildings in the marina complex are built in colonial syle with well-established semi-tropical planting giving the whole place a very mellow look,and although the re are crowds they are never raucous.

There is an excellent (though crowded) white sand beach just beside the marina, wonderful to swim off, with freshwater showers to rinse the salt off afterwards.

Puerto Rico itself is a massive tourist town. We had gone there partly to take a bus ride and get a feel for the area and partly to check out the marina to see if it still accommodated visiting yachts. There are two marinas, the first one near the beach being purely for local boats, while the large harbour to the SE of the beach houses the Puerto Deportivo.

It looks like a nice enough spot, worth considering as an alternative to Puerto Mogan, with prices being about the same. The Port Captain told us that there were no long term berths available, but visiting yachts could usually be accommodated for up to a week.

We had a delicious assortment of tapas and a pint of cold beer on the muelle and watched the life of the harbour - glass bottomed ferries coming and going, huge catamarans full of whale and dolphin watchers, and a variety of sport fishing boats of various sizes heading in and out.

Round on the shore side of the marina we came across an old plywood sloop, Gran Canaria, propped up in the flower beds with a plaque proclaiming her to be a pioneer of yacht travel between the islands. She looked like she probably had a fascinating history - does anyone know anything about this boat?

I worked all morning then after a late lunch we took our new towels to the beach to break them in. The water felt cold after baking in the sun for half an hour, but we soon got used to it and thrashed around happily for twenty minutes or so before going back to our towels to reheat. About five o'clock we wandered back to the boat to change, then meandered down past the inner harbour full of small fishing boats and along to the end of the breakwater opposite the marina offices. Here there is a strange circular restaurant, its upper terrace attractively tiled, with great views over the anchorage outside the marina and South along the cliffs to Maspalomas. This place catches the last rays of the sun when the rest of the marina is already in the shadow of the hills behind, and is a great place to have a beer and watch the sun go down.

Friday is market day in Puerto Mogan - a massive affair with hundreds of stalls, mostly selling tourist tat and fake designer goods, although there are quite a few stalls selling African carvings which I am a sucker for. No room on the boat, though, so we were firm with ourselves. Most of the stall holders will barter, starting with a ridiculously high price which they will drop by more than 50%. Kathy was being hassled by a young African guy who tried to sell her sunglasses, then a bag, then something else . . . finally he asked what we were looking for, and when I replied 'vegetables' he laughed. In fact there was just one stall selling half decent fruit and veg, and we bought some tatties, aubergines and strawberries plus a few other bits and pieces.

This was a casual car hire even by Canarian standards. I had arranged it at an estate agents the day before, giving them E20 down payment with E12 still to pay. I met the guy in the street the next morning - he was driving past and I though, that's a Peugot 106, gave him a wave and he stopped. He scribbled my driving license number down on the form, I filled in my address and gave him 12 euros and that was it. He told me to leave the car parked down the street, locked but with the boot open and the keys under the mat in the boot. 32 euros for the day and no deposit required.

We headed NE through Mogan then up into the dry SW slopes of the mountains and down to San Nicolas, surrounded by acres of cages of of tomatoes and bananas. After a whirlwind tour of the town involving one inadvertant trip down a pedestrian precinct we went down to the beach and had cakes and coffee. Some brave or foolhardy surfers were trying to catch waves on a very stony shore - the wipeouts must have been painful.

From here the road to Agaete is a narrow ledge in the vertical cliffside - entertaining driving with spectacular views but nowhere to pull off the road to enjoy them. We stopped at one viewpoint - El Balcon, or the balcony, and took a couple of photos, but at the highly recommended miradouro of Anden Verde there was nowhere to pull off the road.

In Agaete we took a stroll down to the harbour - there are a couple of pontoons full of small local boats, and a stony beach with plenty of bars and restaurants. This is the Fed Olsen high speed ferry port for ferries from Tenerife, and it is now connected to Las Palmas by a motorway link. The map didn't show this, and the road system was unnavigable using the information we had. We found our way down to Sardina at the NW tip of the island, then back across the motorway to head up into the mountains.

For about 20 uphill kilometres we had no idea which road we were on - for great navigators and explorers the Spanish seem to have a very poor grasp of cartography. The scenery was fantastic though - very lush and green, and much more pastoral than we had anticipated, with lots of small fields of obviously very rich soil. We saw potatoes and cauliflower growing on the steep slopes among palm trees and bamboo, in one of the prettiest man-made landscapes we have ever seen.

Finally we were up in the mountains, above the stands of eucalyptus and back in the realm of the Canarian pine forest, and we stopped for lunch at Caldera Pinos de Galdar, another spectacular viewpoint overlooking a crater. From here we made our way to Artenara, the highest village in Gran Canaria, then took a road - marked only as a track on the map but in fact now tarred all the way - to Cruz de Tejeda, where the cross is under reconstruction and a man tried to sell me a donkey ride. Hastily heading on we drove up to the top of Pico de Nieves via the Biosphere Reserve information centre and the pozo de nieves, or snow well, where they used to compact and store snow in the winter then take it down to Las Palmas in the summer. The views on the way and at the top were unbelieveable, with the great peak of Teide floating in the sky over a jagged panorama of green and rocky fantasy landscape stetching for miles. We thought the Alto de Garajonay on La Gomera was spectacular, then we thought that the Caldera de Taburiente on La Palma was unbeatable, but Gran Canaria takes the prize for the most spectacular landscape we have ever seen. You could spend years exploring these mountains and never get bored.

Pico de Nieves (Peak of the Snows) is the highest point, and from here we wound our way through the mountains down to Roque Nublo and Ayucata to take the road to Maspalomas from San Bartolome. Back in the dryer but still stunning landscape of the South we stopped at a spectacular miradouro to look back at the colours and contrast of the rock and hills in the lengthening shadows of late afternoon before winding our way down to the sprawling and unappealing city of Maspalomas with its endless holiday apartments. We drove back to Puerto Mogan along the coast road in the sunset, stopping briefly to have a look at the harbour at Arguineguin.