An encounter with whales. How, before our voyage to Africa, we spent a month practising self-sufficient life aboard the yacht, played with whales between the Canary Islands, and revelled in the comforts of the marina on La Gomera.
Wake up, Marina—you’re in a marina!
Around 7 a.m. Day is breaking. As usual, I go to the wheelhouse to switch off the anchor light. The boat is as still as if rooted to the spot. A strange sound appears... The fridge? No way! And only then do I wake up properly and realise that we are in a marina on the island of La Gomera.
And we can wash our faces, scooping up fresh water by the handful. We can even brush our teeth—with fresh water. And wash the dishes—not just in fresh water, but warm water too! And drink real milk instead of powdered, because the fridge is running for the first time in a month and a half :). Yesterday we spent half an hour in the shower. Hot water poured down in torrents from above. And the walls of the “shower cubicle” were far away. And that feeling of an impossibly clean body after a shower is completely different from washing out of a plastic bag containing six litres for all of us.
People who think they need all sorts of things to be happy, just try strictly rationing electricity and water—leaving only enough for drinking and cooking. Then, when a warm shower on a stable surface comes into your life, you will understand that it takes very little to be happy!
Practising self-sufficiency
No, we are not in tropical Africa yet. But our final month in the Canaries, at anchor, was all about being self-sufficient in water and electricity. Seven hundred litres lasted almost a month. We used a lot during the first two weeks, but then the captain said, “That’s enough!”—and we understood its value. We began washing our faces with a mere drop and doing the dishes in seawater...
The only supplies we replenished were food. By the way, if you suddenly hear that Gran Canaria has run out of all food, you should know—it was us. In four days, we bought up all the provisions on the island. We lugged them out to the overloaded dinghy over several runs and several trips. Now the yacht looks like a merchant vessel fresh out of a wealthy port, sitting in the water right down to her waterline.
Gran Canaria — Tenerife — La Gomera
We stopped in the south of Tenerife for a couple of days. Los Cristianos looks like this from the anchorage:
After saying goodbye to our friends at the anchorage, we saluted the departing catamaran Lucky Cat, bid farewell to our friend Lyonya, and moved on.
La Gomera is just a stone’s throw away, about 20 miles—you can even see that its slopes are green. On our way to the island, we encountered both a dead calm and large waves with a headwind. The wind blew us off course, to where we met whales for the first time.
On La Gomera
Lady Mary entered a marina for the first time in several months. The crew made the most of it while they could—three showers each, and all the computers charged to the brim. We also replenished our fuel and water supplies here before the voyage to Africa, this time
completely legally
🙂 And the water on La Gomera is said to be the best in the islands. Apparently, there are mysterious natural springs here. No taste of chlorine and no nasty desalinated aftertaste. Or so they say (I think they’re lying; the nasty taste is still there). We’ll fill every container, including the flasks and bottles. Columbus himself took on water here. Tomorrow we’ll visit Casa Colón, the house where the great navigator stayed.
An encounter with whales. We saw whales! And the whales saw us 🙂
So it was not for nothing that our yacht was blown off course. Just as my daughter and I were about to feel disappointed, a whale surfaced right beside us.
Of course, it was not a blue whale—the ruler of the seas, as big as a house—but still! By whale standards, the whales of the Canaries are small, about three metres long, and are called “pilot whales.”
We were not expecting the whales to be particularly sociable. They would wave their fins, perhaps, and then depart with dignity.
Pilot whale
The pilot whales were in fine form. They circled nearby and even let us approach them. Slowly and with dignity, the animals surfaced, swept their powerful tails gently, and slipped unhurriedly back into the water, but they did not leave.
Then dolphins came bounding over. Compared with the whales, they looked like a flock of swift birds. They flew over the whales and back again at breathtaking speed, darting gracefully to and fro, and looked so small that the camera deliberately turned away from them, as if they were hardly worth its attention.
There were five or six whales. One baby—a tiny little tail—had come with its mother. It stayed so close to her that they seemed joined together, surfacing and diving in perfect synchrony, like a scaled-down copy (for some reason, this made me think of theorems on similar triangles...).
Pilot whales. Mother and calf in the foreground
The junior crew make friends with the whales
The girls watched the animals in delight. Nastya, dangling her legs from the bowsprit, tried to swim along with the whales. Even the captain let slip something affectionate along the lines of, “There you are, my lovelies, aren’t you clever? Brilliant!”
I tried to catch something more worthwhile through the lens than ripples spreading across the water and a bit of fin. I managed a couple of shots with a large bit of fin.
An encounter with whales
At the end of the passage, the wind picked up to more than 20 knots. We even managed to bounce over the waves for a while, and I caught the boom with my head. The sparks before my eyes were beautiful and long-lasting. But despite the boom’s best efforts, it did not knock the encounter with the whales out of my memory 🙂
We entered the marina at great speed. We came almost right up to it under sail and dropped the sails literally a hundred metres before the entrance, sheltered in the wind shadow. It looked beautiful. Incidentally, you can read about the
marinas and anchorages of the Canary Islands
here.
And today it’s blowing hard on La Gomera...