For the 1st time we actually left on the day that we were supposed to and didn’t stay one month in a place! Timetables are often broken on sailing boats. If you want to stay more, you are free to because you don’t have a flight on day X to catch making life less stressful.
Anyway, we left and I - silly me - lost a mooring line which my mum felt sorry for even though I was the culprit. The sea was beautiful. There were no waves, the weather was nice and I wasn’t seasick at all. I found myself sunbathing and posing for pictures with 3 cruise ships that were next to me. This was going to be an easy night as we were going to use the sails in weak winds and we were going to take our time – like sailing should be. We changed direction towards La Palma…
Suddenly the auto-helm started beeping and Mistress started going crazy in all directions. The auto-helm had broke down.
I jumped to the rescue offering to steer Mistress whilst my dad was checking the GPS to assure ourselves we were going in the right direction. My dad and I decided to 3 hour night shifts at the helm. There I was at 2:50 am waking up to start my shift at 3. Oddly I didn’t need an alarm clock because my instinctive clock knew when 3 hours had wondered off in a critical situation.
Steering in the night is hard. Every minute goes slowly together with the cold plus the solitude. I found myself singing in order to make time pass by quicker yet, even then, I found myself counting the seconds on my watch. The worst hours to be awake is from 4 to 6 (before the sun comes out) as you keep wanting to close your eyes after a somewhat sleepless night.
The best part of being on a morning shift is seeing the sun come out. The gradual change between darkness and light can be beautiful to watch from the sea as it changes from a black moving body of water to a sparkling blue body. You also start to see everything (the sky, waves, sun etc.), become less sleepy including warmer.
Before reaching the marina we passed another sailing boat and waved at them. When we got to the marina we refuelled, parked then tried to recover from the sleepless night.
In the video above you see me singing out of tune to Alma de Luz and Golondrinas Viajeras – two of my favourite songs. Excuse the bad singing.
