We had a relaxing evening aboard watching the party goers returning to the marina in their banana boats, jet skis and small motor boats. It must have been really uncomfortable on the rough seas for them, although I think they may chop through the waves for a thrill a bit more than we can 🙂
After our adventure entering the marina we were very careful to check the conditions before we left. I went for a morning walk along the beachside and checked out the sea. It was our first visit to Marbella and all I could see were apartment block after apartment block, all with very little character. The oldest things there seemed to be the marina and the lighthouse, although to be fair I didn’t wander as far as the “old town” which I understand has much more character. The beach looks nice with it’s palm trees too.
We had another swelly day on motor once again, but the advantage was that we were on very low revs and we were being pushed along really quickly. We did get the mainsail out for a while but most of the day was motoring to Marina la duquesa which is at a place called Manilva. We got there in time for lunch which was delicious wraps and a chicken burger by the waterside.
This is a lovely marina, fairly quiet with a beautiful beach and a nice walk along the beachside too. Not many people here (it was a dull Monday) and it felt very relaxing. Mind you we did almost see a full on police chase by sea….just beyond the breakwater. We heard the siren first and then saw one large and one small Guardia Civil boat followed by a super high speed police/customs boat with siren blaring. They must have been chasing a really small fast boat, this was definitely not a rescue but a chase! They didn’t come into the marina so we don’t know if they were successful but it was certainly a surprising end to the day.
The next day was finally “rock” day, we watched the sunrise as we made our preparations. We left earlier in the morning than usual as we wanted to make sure we were working with Gibraltar’s tides rather than against them. We had studied and checked “high water” the night before. The sun was shining on the marina as we left but it soon became dull again and we had to motor towards the rock as there was very little wind.
One of the most important jobs of the day was to change one of our flags. We always fly an ensign at the rear of the boat (you’ll have seen it in other photos) and then higher up alongside the mast we fly another smaller British ensign on our port side and a courtesy flag of the country we are in on starboard. We took down our tattered Spanish flag which was destroyed by the wind earlier in the trip and replaced it with the Gibraltese flag, it doesn’t do to enter Gib flying the Spanish flag as you can imagine 😉
We didn’t actually raise the new flag until we were definitely in Gibraltar waters and we spent the morning motoring along watching the rock looming out of the cloudy sky. We did see large ships in the straits of Gibraltar and in anchor but nothing like as many as in previous passages. I sometimes wonder where all the big ships are, especially the cruise ships. It didn’t seem like long at all before we were rounding Europa point and heading for the runway. We were surprised to see massive Tuna fish jumping out of the water all around us. It was quite a sight, something we haven’t seen before there must have been a big predator somewhere in the depths.
As we round the point raised the flag, radioed the marina and got ourselves a lovely berth between the runway and the sunborn floating hotel. Now time to relax for a couple of days :-). We have travelled 285 nautical miles on our journey so far over two weeks (if we came by car it would be 580km and about 6 hours but a lot less fun !)
The Adventures of Gemini J 