Atlantic Passage

We  arrived in Gibraltar Friday afternoon about 3:00pm.

I was on lookout when we sailed and motored into the harbour to anchor. That was a bit nerve wracking keeping track of all the ships, bouys, sailboats , tugs ferries etc.

We split into two watches and luckily my watch had Saturday off.
I rode the skiff into Gibraltar, we are anchored over a mile from the quay we are allowed to land at and then John and I headed out to see the sights and do some geo caching.  I had never done that before. Geo caching consits of looking up interesting places that people have recorded the GPS coordinates for and then listing them on the Internet for others to find. At most places there is a little box or bottle with a notebook which the finder signs. Often there are other little objects like coins, little stuffies, cards (we always left a Picton Castle card) fridge magnets etc..
We bagged 5 of the 8 Gibraltar caches! They were in interesting and out of the way places that lead us to WWI and WWII gun emplacements tunnels and natural features. Pretty cool.

Today we were on watch so it was “make and mend” we washed all our sheets and bedding and “soogied” out our bunks with bleach and water to kill off any hitch hikers before we head South.

In the afternoon I helped Ben and Susie work on renewing the footropes on the fore lower and upper topsail yards.  I learned how to do repair serving, winding tarred yarn around the wire to keep water out and got thouroughly tarry and greasy.  The tar we use is pine tar mixed with turpentine or some other solvent and ha a really strong smoky smell.

I’m off tomorrow, Monday, so I think I will wander back ashore and maybe go to the museums and do a little surfing and emailing at a pub somewhere… Not a bad life at Gibraltar so far.

Thanks for reading.
KJ  

Here are some pictures from my wander around Gibraltar

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 3:15 am and is filed under Ashore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.