A Boat Called Wanda

Well, our following wind turned out to be a bit stormy so we are staying here until it calms down…I promise not to write again until we are actually in Senegal!

Tomorrow, Saturday 3 April, we are leaving Morocco after six months, with some sadness because we really love this country. We are planning to sail from Dakhla, Morocco, towards Dakar in Senegal, with a stop in St Louis if the weather lets us. This should take 4 or 5 days, our longest passage yet, and supposedly a nice following wind is forecast.

We have had a great time here in Dakhla where we fulfilled our dream of a night in the desert. It was brilliant, unforgettable, but we will write about that later when we can upload our photographs. Here the internet is almost impossibly slow so we can’t yet show you all the beautiful dunes and camels…

We stayed here a bit longer than we planned because we had to change a head gasket on Wanda’s engine. No problem for Martin and we had everything we needed but he decided to have the aluminium head professionally planed to do a better job. And then it all turned pear shaped. We went to pick up the head and it was so badly damaged we had finally to send it away to Laayoune to be replaned. It came back usable but the guy there had lost a bit of it which we then had to have made! This cost us over a week and a bit of stress but, it has to be said, not much money. And we’ve sure been stuck in worse places!
Well, it’s all perfect now and we are ready to go…

Just a note to let you know that we arrived safely in Dakhla, Western Sahara, today, Thursday 25 February. We had a nice sail and not too much motoring. That’s why it took us 72 hours. We even caught a lovely tuna.

We have been sailing for one year already – we left Port St Louis the 31st of January 2009. Life on board Wanda seems strangely normal now. We have learnt to live quite simply and we have everything we need. Everyone is happy, school is going very well, and there is so much still to see….

We are now in Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria in the Canaries. We are here to do some shopping and take care of some administrative stuff before we go back to Africa.

We saw just about all of Lanzarote thanks to our wonderful friend, Lali, who is from there. She drove us around for days and showed us the magnificent young volcanic landscape with its underground and underwater caves. There we discovered the beautiful art and design of César Manrique including the house that he built into a volcano – each room was a lava bubble with stunning 1960s furnishings. Max said that seeing Manrique’s art has changed his “style” for life!

On the 27th of December we sailed the short distance to La Graciosa, a very small island with few inhabitants, gorgeous unspoilt beaches, dominated by three little volcanos just the right size to explore. There we met up with friends from Morocco (two boats) and made many more. It was the festive season after all! The children too had a social time – at one stage they were a dangerous gang of eight kids from the same pontoon between the ages of 8 and 12. They were free to wander about the village with its roads of sand and very few cars. At the beaches they set up camps and played until dark. It was sunny and mild enough to swim in the sea (even Caro!). So it was with some sadness that we managed to leave La Graciosa after 40 days.

This week we plan to return to Morocco, the southern part known as the Western Sahara, where the Sahara desert meets the sea. We have a date in Dakhla on the 22nd of February for an international festival of music, culture and water sports. Here is a link for that…. www.dakhla-festival.com
There we are looking forward to a visit from Erika, Jack and Max’s beloved grandmother (Martin’s mum).

We ended up spending three weeks in Agadir, which is a lovely beach resort town but not at all the “real Morocco” that we love. We did enjoy the wild, long Atlantic beach and, best of all, we met up with the Royer family, good friends of ours from Jura, where we used to live in France. We had some good times together and the children preferred Hotel Kasbah to the Wanda Guesthouse.

I, Caro, fulfilled an ambition and went to a hammam (Moroccan baths).I went with a French girlfriend to a public hammam where all the other women were Moroccan, many with children or women with their mothers. They took no notice of us at all, which was perfect. They give you a big bucket and a ladle and you get undressed and find a place in a large tiled room heated like a sauna but the heat is not dry, it’s very humid. There you relax and then you scrub off all your old skin with a scratchy glove and special soap and rinse off from time to time with cold water. It’s lovely. Then you leave all shiny and new for the price of 10 dirham (1 euro). It was a brilliant experience which I’d love to do again.

From Agadir we went about 70 miles to Sidi Ifni, sailing very slowly with light winds. I have two nice memories of this trip…during my night watch a yellow crescent moon came up which looked exactly like a smiley – I had never seen that before….and when I woke up I saw dolphins jumping in the orange sunrise – and this I saw through the window from my bed! Another first!
Sidi Ifni is a fishing port with an entrance that can catch you off guard. We were guided in by a fishing boat through a narrow unmarked channel with waves breaking on each side. Not to be attempted except in very calm conditions! Once we were in there, it was another friendly place. We took a taxi to visit the town which is a few kilometers away from the port. It’s fairly basic but with loads of character because it was built by the Spanish in the 50s and 60s in art deco style. Very cute.

We left the next day for the Canary Islands because we didn’t want to be trapped there if the sea came up. Another slow passage in very light winds which is getting kind of boring. Where are the famous Atlantic trade winds? We are now in Arrecife on the island of Lanzarote. Wanda is anchored in Puerto de la Naos next to white sandy beaches, volcanic caves and even a castle. The kids are happy. And for the adults, well we’re in Spain which is always a pleasure.

Here we met up with Martin’s brother Peter, on holiday with his girlfriend, Pavlina. For Peter’s birthday we tried to go sailing, but we had to motor again for lack of wind. Anyway we did manage to celebrate at anchor in Playa Blanca surrounded by volcanoes.

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