On 21st May 2021 we left Agadir, trying to avoid all the fishing boats that you wouldn’t be able to see very well. We were trying to take them port to port and they were taking us starboard to starboard which annoyed me a lot.
We hadn’t seen calmer sea than that. It was a beautiful sunny day with reasonable waves. I was sunbathing. It looked like paradise. We also saw a beautiful baby pigeon who was pushed away from land by the wind current. Only God knows what happened with it but I believe that the little bird didn’t make it. It was too far away from land.
Little did we know that this was the calm before the storm.
The wind started to strengthen by the minute until it reached over 35 knots. It was officially a storm. The waves also strengthened making it unsafe to go on the cockpit. We thought all was going to be better when the night came but no. The auto-helm was malfunctioning and my dad had to rerset it twice. The healing was also horrendous as my mum and I thought that we was going to capsize so we didn’t have any sleep that night.
We thought it was going to get better in the morning but no. The auto-helm broke and my dad had to steer in the strong winds and massive waves. All our electrics started malfunctioning: even our GPS so for an hour we didn’t know exactly where we were going. Luckily my dad had a bearing and kept that 270 degrees (west) until it started working. I had to stay in the inside cockpit to tell my dad where to go. The current was pushing us to Fuerteventura but we insisted to go to go to Lanzarote.
It was so rough that you couldn’t go to the toilet. The main head (toilet) had broke so the only one available was my head in the fore cabin. You would get thrown around Mistress until you reached it and when you reached it and opened the door, you couldn’t sit down. I literally had three mental breakdowns because I was not able to go the the loo. My mum then calmed me down and I went to check if there were any phone numbers for the marina. When I actually went to the loo I broke the toilet adding another problem to the list.
We reached Puerto Calero at 8pm, knackered and starving for food. We couldn’t even call them via the VHF as it wasn’t working. By then I vowed never to go on a boat again.
