No Starlink & no orcas
An epic moment, the beautiful sunrise between Europe and Africa, marks a new phase in our delivery when we're relieved to enter the Mediterranean.
Europe on the left, Africa on the right and a beautiful sunrise in the middle during in the busy Gibraltar Straight.
We got up extra early this morning at 05:00h in the “Tuna-capital of Spain”: Barbate. Even the restaurant owners car, that brought us back to the marina, had a tuna smell! We didn't want the strong current against us. In the dark we carefully dodges the kilometers long fishnets and encountered the first real rain: a nice rinse off of the salt!
Approaching Gibraltar the number of other ships dramatically increased. Luckily they’re all going either west or east and the big ships have “shipping lanes” like a highway. As long as we stay out of them we’ll be fine. Due to low clouds we couldn't really see the Gibraltar rock. I'll add it to our to-do list for 2025 when we’ll pass in opposite direction.
In the rain storm we found a tiny wet bird trying to take from our deck. We rescued the poor thing and gave it some shelter to warm-up and recuperate. We doubted is it was still alive, but after 20 minutes the rain and wind had stopped and it we already hopping around. Flew in de boat were we released it by opening a hatch. We hope he/she made it to land. Or another ship.
Entering the Mediterranean also meant that we had left Orca-ally. For those not familiar: along the Atlantic coast of Portugal and Spain one or two groups of orca’s attack boats. It's a mystery why, but these powerfull creatures like to bite off rudders from sailboats like ours. Some say because the rudder looks like a whale tail, others think one orca had a a bad experience with a boat and has learned his/her children to take revenge. The result is a rudderless ship, in some cases even a sinking ship, as the rudder doesn't always just snap off. To prevent attacks all kinds of measurers are advised, from making alot of noise to dumping sand in the water. There are special apps to see where and when the attacks took place, and the general consent is that they stay out of shallow (<20m deep) water. But sailing within the 20m limit on the west coast of Portugal is impossible, one mistake and you end up on the rocks. For this part of the trip we decided to stay “close” to the shipping lane, as some say orcas don't like (the noise of?) big ships. And finally we had waterproof firecrackers on board as a last resort to scare them away during an attack. This is illegal as orcas are protected animals, but when your own life is at stake I feel that those rules can be broken. I’d explain in court and happily pay the fine if it saved our lives. But luckily we didn't see any orcas, so no moral dilemma! We did get our heart rates up a few times when we saw dark grey dolphin fins appear. All false alarm. As none of the attacks took place in the Mediterranean, we deem the Med as orca-safe 🥳 and can explain this here now without anybody loosing their sleep.
Something my wife did loose some sleep about, the first night we were out on the sea, was the tacker going offline. The sailserver tracker (https://app.sailserver.com/dashboard:549) normally operates only on a 3g mobile connection, which reaches about 20km to sea. Once we passed that it can't update anymore and people might think we sunk.
I've also installed Starlink, Elon Musk's affordable internet via satellite solution in our dinghy as a temporary solution:
Before Elon you would need an Iridium satellite phone which needs an hour to download one simple weather update, and costs much more than Starlinks 59 euro a month for unlimited 100mb connection. But… you need to enable “mobile priority” for 3 euros per GB when you are out further, just about when you loose sight of land and your mobile connection. Still a great deal, just don't do Netflix in the middle of the ocean. You would think, why not just switch on priority when the normal subscription stops working? To enable priority you need a connection, which has just stopped working… So if you don't pay attention you can't enable Starlink anymore! 🤯 Luckily some big ships/platform can act as mobile repeaters, as I received Whatsapp messages 60km from shore! This gives me a very short time to quickly login to Starlink and enable priority… and show that we’re still alive and floating! But don't worry if the tacker is offline, I was just not paying attention… 😴
