Hail Gibraltar: Into the Med!

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CS:
Saturday 11th April (darktime): We had expected to make the Strait of Gibraltar about 8pm so see it in daylight since it has been light till after 9pm in our area lately. However things changed during the day because we are ahead of schedule and with Easter on there is no advantage in getting to Livorno on 13th so the Captain wants to kill about 12 hours. He stopped the ship about 10am but we wallowed so badly in the swell that we soon got under way again. Not for long, in the early afternoon we stopped again, rolled a bit but not as badly as before. The sea is calm with some small white caps and there is a light wind, the sun is strong and the sky largely cloudless. We wallowed about from 2pm till 8pm. The captain indicated we would therefore be going through the Strait after midnight (of course! I hear you laughing, Craig!) There was talk of whales in the area so the large animal I spotted this morning from the bridge was most likely a whale. I would have liked a better view. We got underway again just before 8pm and travelled easily into the night. Just before planning to sleep we noticed numerous lights on the horizon; we were approaching the Strait. The moon was up, not quite full anymore. A bridge visit saw us looking at Morocco on the starboard side and some parts of Spain were visible to port. We were passing Tangier (the ship was much closer to the African coast) which was well lit with what looked like port facilities - cranes and associated paraphernalia, just discernable through the binoculars - coming down right onto the coastal strip. The moonlight filtered through light cloud helped illuminate the scene. We remained about an hour watching our progress, it would be another hour before we passed Gibraltar itself (on the Mediterranean side of the Strait) and there was no guarantee we would see much other than a few lights given our more southerly course (even though at its narrowest the Strait is only about 10 nautical miles across). It was quite easy to see from one side to the other and would be equally so in daylight because the land rises steeply on both sides. I saw the fort one of the officers had referred to nestled on the African coastal tip as we rounded to go into the narrows. It was well lit and quite large, though fairly low lying on the coastal fringe.
Sun 12th April: and we are in the Med. The weather is glorious. Bright sunshine and clear air making visibility crisp, calm blue sea and cloudless skies: this is why sailors love being at sea. We can readily make out the Spanish coast; another bridge visit confirmed we were seeing the headland just past Almeria. Nostalgic memories flooded back of our last visit to Spain around 3 years ago when having driven out of Grenada to return ‘the long way’ along the coast to Barcelona we took a ‘wrong turn’ and ended up going rather more of the long way than we had planned. ‘We’ being PP myself and daughter Ella, who was living and studying in Spain at the time - she has since married her wonderful Spaniard Victor and they are soon to return to live in Barcelona, meaning of course that we too will return here. We had emerged on the coast around Almeria rather than Alicante. The southernmost country in that region consisted of dry, chalky hills and quite surprisingly to us, was desolate - stunningly beautiful for all that and the landscape, we speculated, where Clint Eastwood’s ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ had been shot. Seeing it now from the ship on this magnificent day the foreshore hills and rising land behind looked far more hospitable. Oh yes, we will be back.

PP:
Ay! Senores e Senoritas! Espana is a bueno place! (Whatever that language is - one of the pidgin latino ones - with a little imagination!?) But the “Med.” today is very friendly.

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Photos

The White Cliffs of Dover
Just for Craig!

On the Bridge at Night
In the Gibraltar Strait