After finishing our crossing from Morocco in smooth motoring conditions without further incident, we’re now in Gran Canaria in our final hours before setting off for the Atlantic crossing. We aren’t the only ones doing this by any means – in our marina at Las Palmas are around 250 other boats all participating in the ARC race, which is the famous annual trans-atlantic competition. It’s more of a fun social event than a real race, but the participants are serious sailors, and this is a much different vibe than the charter waters we came from in the summer. We aren’t competing in the ARC because the entry fees are too high for our budget, but we’ve managed to finagle our way onto the middle of the main ARC dock where all the race activity is happening, so we’re faking it pretty well and making friends with the other yachties.

Upon arrival in Gran Canaria we picked up our new friend Rupert (“Rupe”) who we met a few weeks ago in Ibiza. He’ll be showing us how to do things for the next few weeks because he’s done the Atlantic crossing before – already his experience has been invaluable during prep before even leaving the dock. Uncle Chris left us yesterday after two weeks of some serious adventure, and already we’re missing his great humor and delicious beef stew.

The past two days have been chaotic as we scramble around doing final preparation for the 2.5 week crossing. This involves a lot of food shopping and boat work, including most importantly the main sail repair, which we expect to get back later today. Once we re-install the sail, hopefully tonight, we’ll immediately set out to sea and try to chase down some of the slower boats on the ARC, which is about to officially start in a few minutes.

All eyes are on the weather forecast now, which influences the course we’ll take across the ocean. Obviously we are looking to dodge the bigger weather systems while capturing the best trade winds for the quickest possible passage. We benefit from the expert advice from the ARC forecasters and we’ll be monitoring their radio broadcasts on the way across, so it’s to our benefit to stay as close to the group as possible. We also don’t want to fall too far behind our friends on Chili Cat and Sirius, otherwise they’ll never let us live it down. Wish us luck!

All that stuff I said a few days ago about Spain and California being similar – I take it back, forget I ever said anything. The experience we’ve had since then definitely doesn’t resemble any we’ve had in CA. I’m talking about the weather now. The storms began a couple hours after we sent off the last blog update as we were in the Straight of Gibraltar. At about 4am we found ourselves in a 35 knot squall with our big light-wind sail (the “screecher”) flying, which is designed for no more than 20 knot winds. Getting the screecher rolled back up and put away in winds like that is like trying to un-scramble an egg, which is to say it’s just not going to happen. After 30 minutes of fighting it, we eventually dropped it into the water and were able to retrieve it just before we were about to give up and cut it away. We’ll ask our more experienced sailing friends how they deal with these situations.

Despite that incident, we made it up to Cadiz in the Andalucia region of Spain and tried to forget about it. But that’s been difficult because every day we’ve been getting pummeled with wind and rain and the forecast shows no end to it for the next week. So if you’re living in California and thinking about relocating here after our last blog post, hold off another week or two for us to finish this little research mission.

We’ve spent the past couple days doing work on the boat in preparation for the Atlantic crossing and we feel the boat is finally getting close to being ready. We got a chance to explore part of the Andalucian coast today, which is as spectacular as any coastline we’ve seen – our only regret was the foul weather which kept the camera gear in the trunk of the rental car most of the day. Tomorrow we head inland to Sevilla for a night, then we’ll go by car to Portugal (our original plan to sail there has been foiled by the forecast).

So far on this journey we’ve spent the majority of our time bouncing around islands in various countries, but also a fair amount of time on the mainland. Going back and forth has forced us to pay attention to the differences between the two types of lifestyles. Whereas the islands have been more fun to visit initially, whenever we spend more than a couple of days on the same island, we begin to lose interest and get bored. The reason is because the islands aren’t “real” places – they exist only for the tourism, and there’s a noticeable superficiality in all that. Because tourists have only a short attention span and require only a few days worth of entertainment, the islands tend to deliver that and not much else. The other problem with the islands is that they effectively close when the tourists stop coming for the season, so you have to time your visit right – it’s just not as fun when the restaurants and bars are boarded up and the beaches are lifeless. As beautiful as they still are, a visit to the Balearic Islands at this time of year is a bit like going to Disneyland after the park has closed for the day.

The mainland cities are different – these are “real” cities that don’t exist solely to extract money from travelers. These cities may not be as attractive on the first day – they may seem ugly and commercial, but often when we leave these places, we feel like we didn’t have enough time. There are more things to do, more places to see, the true culture is evident, you mingle with real local people who aren’t just there to sell you something, and you can imagine actually living in some of these places year-round, rather than just visiting.

In our short time on Ibiza, we did manage to see the whole island, and we definitely hope to return here sometime. But we leave it now bruised and battered thanks to a motorscooter crash on a wet road. And the beach party we went looking for on Saturday night (supposedly the last one of the summer) was cancelled because of the rain. Although we’re not expecting any sympathy cards for all this, we can say, as we sail away from our last Mediterranean island this year, that our motion towards the mainland feels very right. We’ve seen enough of the islands for now and are looking forward to a few solid weeks exploring a more “real” part of Europe.