Ep 49 Big Weather in Gibraltar, then off to Ceuta, Spanish Morocco

We see a weather window to leave Gibraltar for Ceuta, but then get hammered on both ends.

[@panther105]

This was a big eye opener. No one else talks about this. Thanks for all the practical advice...

[@mattdabney4109]

I learned several valuable things from your show today. Thank you very much. Happy sailing

[@SailingTalisman]

Good deal Matt. Thanks for watching.

[@ABeriault]

Lovely sailing clips! Fun to watch! Godspeed in your travels!

[@SailingTalisman]

Thanks again.

[@SVImpavidus]

Another informative video guys. Keep posting. Ant and Cid x

[@markgotham5372]

Great Vid...Good to see Wendy at the helm....without pilings, very challenging to moor up....Boat looks fantastic...!!!!!...S.F., Ca... ;-)

[@TheMonkeyrock77]

It look's like your getting you real taste of Sailing both good weather and bad weather. Hurricane season is here again, Good luck where your at.

[@SailingTalisman]

Luckily not anywhere with hurricanes. Just getting into the summer months in the Med and trying to make it over to Italy so we can head south and west, eventually ending up in Greece, Albania, Montenegro, and Croatia.

[@jwrappuhn71]

Excellent vid ya'll, learned a lot from that vid.

[@renoguy25]

Good morning , I enjoyed your video ....I think ... As I am only currently in the learning stage ( still very much landlocked ) of figuring out ,what I need to figure out , about the whole sailing world thing ... I like that you are usually quite technol about what you are doing etc . But not in a boring way. And you certainly appear to know your way around . Seeing what is/can be involved in tying up ( anchoring ? ) in a marina is very educational on one hand , but also very daunting on the other . But I guess that's exactly what I here for , is to learn .... And seeing this video , I come to realize that very few videos show a lot about securing a boat in a marina slip , and the different ways that there are . " Thanks a lot " .... ( that's both truthfully and sarcastically ) Another question ( I'm guessing this one will show the nubie in me )....Whats the orange/yellow jug hanging up the rigging ? Thanks Bob from Calgary

[@twoeagledrones]

Good sailing. Nice!

[@seanmulligan1339]

Very tricky i use the midshipmens hitch to change length in simiar situations and a fender chain for your sterns , sails beautifully

[@rws210]

Great video..

[@bill4nier]

Whoa! That wind is just nasty! Glad you guys seem to be fairing ok. Looks like the winds will be dying down starting on 5/31-6/2, then pick back up on Sunday. What's your next destination? Fair winds! 😊⛵⛵⛵⛵⛵⛵😊👍👍👍👍👍

[@SailingTalisman]

Hi Bill. Thanks for checking in. We're in northern Sardinia getting ready to cross to mainland Italy. But as fate would have it our refrigeration died. Had a refrigeration guy on board earlier today who spoke zero English and we used Google Translate to figure it out. No refrigerant left in the system. I told him to bring R409A, R134 or R437A but that was a pipe dream and of course no ability to recharge or check for leaks today. He promises tomorrow but that makes getting going on a passage difficult as the winds die over the weekend. Monday/Tuesday look good so we may have to be here a few more days. Thinking about going a bit further north and anchoring.

[@bill4nier]

Yeah, some of those European ports can be a challenge (part of the adventure 😉). Sounds good like a plan. Hopefully, you're in a decent place until your next "window of opportunity". 😉 Enjoy! See you in the next episode. 👍

[@Sqeezerful]

Watching the docking situation in the second half of the video I think you can relax a bit on forcing the boat into a specific place. Particularly if the winds are not in your favour, 'vertical' bow lines are 'vertical' and anchors (concrete blocks) are shifting. There are usually two crucial ways to approach this: 1) Adjust the boat in a way that it handles the weather, waves better. (Parallel to the dock? Take down the dodger and other unnecessary surfaces to prep for >40kn winds?) 2) Understand the forces that are involved here. E.g. tightening the bow lines takes so much more effort if the force / wind is coming perpendicular. That is not what they should do. Mid ship lines etc. can take tremendous loads of lateral forces when needed.Part 2 isn’t easy to explain in the comment section, but assume you take a horizontal washing line and hang a lead weight of one pound in the middle. (Depending on the length) the forces on the string are significantly higher than the actual one pound. In other words- the more you stress a line “away from its intended direction” the more difficult or impossible it gets to maintain the higher forces.

[@SailingTalisman]

Moving the orientation of the boat was not really an option. If there was deeper water in the rest of the marina and room, we may have been able to find a better spot. But had we tried to tie up parallel to the dock they would have rightly wanted us to pay for 3 berths. This is how it goes with catamarans, where they end up paying for 2. Also, it really isn't practical to take down spray hoods and biminis every time the wind comes up. I think the point I was trying to make here is that this marina sucked for boats over 40'. The anchor/slime lines were substandard and the concrete mooring blocks too small for the loads. As for point number two, and this is mostly for readers of the comment as you know I'm sure, an anchor chain is a better example. The point of doing 4:1 or even 5:1 scope on anchor chain is that when the boat gets blown or pulled against the anchor, the real force is a lifting one, where the shock and loads are handled by the chain needing to be lifted off the bottom, while the forces on the anchor remain mostly if not entirely horizontal. This is the advantage of chain over nylon rode. The chain is much heavier (although the rode is stretchier).

[@RHP-pw8xt]

Nice vid once again Kevin. I don't see much of a solution to your docking problems so it's up anchor and get out of there. There are plenty of great places to visit in Southern Spain, no need to stay in a marina where folks are unhelpful and the boats in danger. Fair winds.

[@SailingTalisman]

Hi there. Thanks for watching. As I recounted in one of the comments below, as Americans the EU Schengen agreement gives us 90 out of a rolling 180 days in the EU. Although part of the EU, Gibraltar, being a quasi military emplacement and also a British protectorate, was not a signatory to Schengen. Britain and Ireland are also non-Schengen. This is why they still have border controls. In any event, Gib does 90/180 too, but there's no connection to the Schengen count. We could stay indefinitely by simply spending half the time in Gib and the other half across the border in Spain, but we can't just hang out in Spain or the rest of the EU. BTW, the Gib/Marina Bay employees were awesome. A phone call or visit to the office would bring them running.

[@RHP-pw8xt]

I'm with you, I didn't realise the Schengen aspect. Difficult call. Time for a flight home to see the family! Stay safe.

[@SailingTalisman]

Indeed. That's exactly what we did, heading home for an entire month over Christmas and New Years. It was hell leaving the boat behind, but our friends and neighbors at the dock were on guard to make adjustments as needed and they were all liveaboard pros at the job. Everything worked out fine in that regard.

[@crismoore6811]

Docking backward...not easy.. Looked like a nightmare. How big is your boat? What brand? It's beautiful.

[@SailingTalisman]

Oyster 485, and a hard to maneuver boat in reverse. But otherwise awesome.

[@normanboyes4983]

Enjoyed that.👍 Just one armchair comment about the berth in Ceuta. The berth was not suitable for your boat length, in the sense that the ground tackle was just too near the berth as indicated by the almost vertical fall of the slime line once you hauled it in. Going for the midships cleats as the cats had done is a compromise and works better if you can have a slime line on both sides of the boat - not always possible/available - and of course you are reducing the berths available to others which of course is the raisin d’etre of the catamaran.😂 Med mooring is great when you have no or very little tide and the ground tackle is well thought out and suitable OR if you can use your own anchor of course, the latter can bring its own problems in congested harbours and untangling anchor lines can be very inconvenient. Always enjoy your videos -maybe I should comment more but I feel - what the hell he knows what he is doing......

[@SailingTalisman]

Well said. One thing about setting anchors for Med mooring is that you need a decent amount of scope. We see most professionally run boats using 2x boat length (from the theoretical front of the berthing area. 1.5 will do with a good holding area and relatively shallow water, but Ceuta was way too tight for any of that. I would agree that the marina didn't have a good location for us. There was some question about whether the marina had been recently dredged and perhaps we had other options that the staff didn't know about. The charts showed 1 meter over by the restaurants on the east side, but the 38' school boats were parked there and they all draw much more than that. We're currently Med moored here in Argostoli, Greece on our anchor and I set a pretty decent amount of chain not knowing what the holding would be like. As I said to another commenter I would never drop an anchor in a marina with slime lines in place. There are just too many fouled areas along the bottom.

[@gregmirr]

Great video , good for novice sailors that think all sailing is white beaches and sipping margaritas . Boat tending is a full time job unless you got a paid crew .

[@SailingTalisman]

Yep. You've hit on the concept of our channel. So many of the other channels focus on T&A and a fantasy world that doesn't really exist. As you note, there are two ways to do it: You can be handy with a wrench or have a ton of money. There really isn't much in between.

[@chiefcliff]

I know the area has less anchorages than others, however, why not anchor away from all this mess?

[@nevilledesmond451]

its a oyster39 next to you

[@SailingTalisman]

Hmmm. Didn't notice that.

[@superformOG]

why don't you use your anchor with a trip line.. i would never trust one of the marina blocks/chains, drop your pick, drive back on it as you are docking.

[@SailingTalisman]

You can't use an anchor in a marina set up for slime lines. The marina staff will immediately come out and start yelling at you if you tried because there are cables and chains and concrete blocks everywhere. However, there are locations, usually in older harbors, where there are no slime lines provided and in these cases you do anchor and back to the quay. Fouling an anchor is a nightmare and often you'd be forced to hire a diver to try to get things sorted.

[@superformOG]

most med marinas i have been in i have seen a mix of lazy lines and anchors, in the end your the captain and its your boat that will get damaged. So anchoring is always your call, not the marinas. Also most marinas and anchorages in the med you will find fouled bottoms so its always good practice to have a trip line deployed. The main thing you need to watch for in the med is when boats come in after you and may lay their anchor chains over yours. But watching them come in and have a quick chat about where your lines are will solve issues about who leaves first. Also use more fenders, always use a ball fender on the stern and put it down on the waterline - that would have stopped that damage from that impact. also if your davits are hitting the dock!, then put fenders on those as well. keep up the videos very well done so far!

[@conan6329]

Another Great Video! But Months in Port is No Bueno, I’m looking forward to more Sailing Videos.

[@SailingTalisman]

Hi Conan. As Americans traveling in the EU, we get 90 days out of a rolling 180 days under the Schengen Agreement. Schengen is the treaty that allows European nationals to travel between countries without having to go through passport control at each border crossing, but it also governs visa requirements for non EU citizens. Therefore, we have to find a way to make ourselves scarce every 90 days, and that was a lot of why we were in Gibraltar. Gibraltar is a non-Schengen sanctuary territory, so a perfect place for Americans to hang out while recouping Schengen days. It's also VAT free, so 20% cheaper on goods and services. The next non-Schengen place we need to get to is Croatia (EU, but non-Schengen). Turkey would work as well, but relations with the US are not great right now and we'd have to go to a Turkish embassy and apply for a special visa in order to go there. To your comment, we have so much sailing footage coming up that there's no way I can use it all. Stay tuned.

[@romanogreminger2875]

No engine noise YAY!!!!

[@SailingTalisman]

Lot's of sailing coming up. We managed some really good weather windows heading into the Med and through the Balearic Islands and on to Sarinia and mainland Italy. Now that we're in southern Italy, really from Rome down the coast, we've hit a dead spell. We hope that ends tomorrow as we head offshore for a 2 day passage to Greece.

[@superformOG]

also dont believe anything you read about marina depths, best way to find out is to go sound it out in your tender, many times i have been told certain areas are too shallow only to find they are plenty deep enough.

[@SailingTalisman]

Yeah, this is true, and it's probably good practice to go check. But the places we're going now don't have an option to anchor while you're checking with your tender (there's only the two of us). We've been finding that comparing sonar charts to the electronic navigational (Navionics) charts will show any disparities. It's also super important to keep you electronic and paper charts updated. We're a pretty deep boat at 2.4 meters, and calling in on VHF usually gets us a marina employee in a dinghy who knows the depths of the marina. Going very slow is also highly recommended. We see a lot of boats flying through tight marinas, and although you might need to maintain steerage, there's no reason to be unsafe. Thanks so much for watching.

[@timk4944]

I can see why they are called slime lines!

[@dancundiff3316]

Very stressful to watch Kevin.

[@SailingTalisman]

That was a rough time.