Playa Cala de Enmedio to Las Roquetas De Mar

This is day two of the trip down the Spanish coast from Cartagena to Las Roquetas De Mar.

Image of the sea at sunrise, taken from the bow of a catamaran. — View underway, sailing south down the east coast of Spain

Instead of doing the trip nonstop, we anchored at night to get a good night’s sleep, then at sunrise we pulled up anchor and continued sailing south until we arrived off the coast of Roquetas de Mar, Spain. There were no official anchorages with mooring balls, so we pulled not much more than 500 feet out from a small local beach, and dropped anchor there to allow us to handle some business for a few hours onshore.

Image takenb from the cockopit of a sailing catamaran, with the steering wheel, GPS, and sea visible. — View from the helm

After locking up the boat, we took the dinghy not to the beach, but to a commercial marina and tied the dinghy up next to other small boats (I’m pretty sure we weren’t really supposed to dock there). The first order of business was to find the border control authority who would stamp us out of the EU….this took awhile but we were eventually guided to the right person, and between the three of us we were able to muster up enough Spanish to get our business taken care of.

Aside: International Coastal Cruising and Passport Control

On a side note, I was taken aback by the informality of the passport stamping process – unlike at an airport or road border crossing, there was very much a sense of an ‘honor’ system– we told the officer where the boat was anchored, but after we got the passport stamped, nobody really checked to confirm we really left; in fact we didn’t leave, we had lunch and then handled other business before eventually heading back to the anchored catamaran. I guess with a 42 foot catamaran, the risk of us being able to stash the boat somewhere sneaky and going to live in the town was low, but I was still surprised to see how much freedom we were given. Later I discovered that in a lot of coastal towns, there is a sort of informal rule that provided that you do not venture more than a mile or two inland, you are not really considered to have “entered” the country, provided you return to your boat in short order. In these cases they might not even bother with passport entry/exit stamps, to reduce the amount administrative work that seems a bit meaningless for a sailing crew that is essentially making a stop for gas and food before continuing on their journey.

Anyway with the passports now taken care of, we ventured in town for lunch at a café, and then we set off to retrieve the captain’s emergency liferaft from the shop where he left it. We hauled that thing in a dolly they loaned us all the way back to the marina (on foot), dropped the raft into our waiting dinghy, then after 1st mate returned the dolly we motored back to the catamaran.

Image of the road, with cars on either side and palm trees lining the street. — Walking through the town (the coastline is to the left)

We moved the catamaran to a more secure anchoring location, dropped anchor, then got a good night’s rest.

At this point we are 3 people on board: me, the captain (Blaine) and his girlfriend Vanessa.

The next morning we picked up anchor and set off with a destination of Gibraltar, which is a territory of the United Kingdom. That is a 27-hour trip, which requires an overnight passage to accomplish non-stop. That entails each of us to take up a night shift for one night. So I went off to bed early, to get plenty of sleep– tomorrow will include a night shift. Till tomorrow!

Anchored here:

36°46’06.7″N 2°35’57.0″W

https://maps.app.goo.gl/i7SAwMAHjVtzBoGRA

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