Las Roquetas de Mar to Gibraltar

A view of the Rock of Gibraltar on apprach from the sea — Breathtaking! A view of the Rock of Gibraltar on approach from the sea

Note to reader: The below updates were originally posted to a group chat that I was using to keep my family and friends updated on the progress of my sea adventure.

It’s now October 13, 8:15AM.

I just finished my second night shift, and the sun has just come up. We are 13 nautical miles off the coast of southern Spain, headed west, not far now from Gibraltar, which is our current destination. We should arrive in Gibraltar about noon today. We have a berth reserved in a marina in Gibraltar, so we should have a nice comfortable few days as we meet our new crew member, get some supplies and do some maintenance work on the boat. The night shift wasn’t too bad: each of us take 2 hour shifts but the time passes fairly quickly when you are actively helming (steering). I had the 6pm-8pm, midnight-2am, and 6am-8am shifts. Which basically means steer until 8pm, hand the helm over to the next crew member, and then go down and try to sleep until midnight, the start of my best shift. Et cetera.

Image of the sunset as taken from a boat at sea. — Beautiful sunset on the water

The shifts were mostly uneventful, the most challenging part being trying to identify reliable marks in the dark to keep you on course. You do have a GPS display, but steering the boat by staring at the GPS only is not a good practice, plus it is much harder than simply finding a point in the distance to steer towards. The only action I saw was to avoid a huge tanker that was smack dab in the middle of our track (blocking our intended direction). But after steering to pass behind the tanker, my shift was just about up and I was relieved.