Finally, after two and a half weeks of boat prep and orientation in La Rochelle, we set sail for Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. We made the decision a while ago to go straight to Gibraltar as quickly as possible rather than linger and explore the coasts of Spain and Portugal in between – as much as we regret missing beautiful places like Bilbao, Porto and Lisbon, we opted on the side of making time so as to put us in a good position for a trip home in May for two graduations (Audrey and Felix) and then to make the Balearic islands in early June. The last days in La Rochelle were a rush of organization and chores including some things that just couldn’t get done – while we got the Starlink, new sail and an oven installed, it was a no go on the clothes washer and extra winch. We have a workaround for the missing winch that involves running inconvenient, but tolerable lines through the cockpit when we fly the big gennaker sail, but the clothes washer is going to sting. The main problem is the fact that Arcadia is wired for US 110 volt power rather than the 220-240 volts that most of the rest of the world uses, meaning we can’t find a washer in France that will work. We consoled ourselves by thinking we’ll be wearing bathing suits most of the time once we hit the sun, but in the cold France rain that seemed a long way off.

Our contacts in La Rochelle helped us find a captain to guide us on the passage, which we wanted for some education and safety along the way but also needed to fulfill a requirement by our insurance that stipulated that we must have a qualified captain sign off on us before we are fully allowed to operate Arcadia on our own. Anthony was the perfect person for all of that – in addition to many, many other trips as a delivery skipper he’s done 57 transatlantic passages. At an average length of 5 weeks per passage, that adds up to more than 5 solid years out on the Atlantic. We felt in good hands. We met him at the La Rochelle airport the night before departure and took him aboard. We immediately had a good feel about him and ended up greatly enjoying sailing with him while learning an incredible amount. The next morning we made last trips to the chandlery, grocery store and laundromat, frantically stowing things wherever they could go on the boat, unplugged the shore power and then suddenly we were off! We motored out of the marina directly into the cold wind for the first couple of hours. Once we rounded Ile d’Oleron, we turned South and raised the sails to head across the famed and dreaded Bay of Biscay.

La Rochelle to Gibraltar is just over 1000 nautical miles, making our estimated passage time around 8 days of round the clock sailing. We split the days into 3 hour shifts and set up a rotation, Sarah, then Neil, then Anthony, then Sarah and so on so that each person was on for three hours then off for 6. Each day, the person with the 8pm – 11pm shift was in charge of dinner and then lunch the next day. With that rhythm as our foundation, we handled all of the many sail adjustments and dead-of-night watches that made up our passage time. The first few days across the Bay of Biscay were a bit bleak, very cold and rainy and rough seas. Hot water became precious – our solar power enables all sorts of modern conveniences like Starlink internet in the middle of the ocean as well as a watermaker, navigation instruments and autopilot, but due to wiring peculiarites, we can only heat water by running the engines or the generator making a hot shower underway a rare but welcome treat. We got used to being perpetually chilled and lived in our multiple layers of foul weather gear round the clock to the point where Sarah spent one night in bed in her heaviest jacket under two comforters just trying to warm up.

Rounding the corner of Spain at A Coruna seemed to take forever, but as we did we started having steady winds at our back and the sun began to show itself. We slowly shed layers of clothing as we made our way South along the coast of Portugal and had dolphins and porpoises join us at different times along the way. When the winds were right, we flew our beautiful, big new gennaker and learned the ins and outs of raising and dousing it, which we had never done on any of our other sailing trips. We both had some scary moments in the middle of the night during our solitary watches as we navigated through heavy fishing traffic and shifting winds, but survived with fast beating hearts and lessons learned. As we neared Cape Trafalgar at the southern tip of Spain our apprehension about orca attacks grew. There has been plenty of news on the attacks, but the short story is that at least one pod of resident orcas has been regularly attacking small sailboats like ours with the common result being the loss of one or both rudders. No one knows exactly why this is happening, but sailors have come up with all sorts of defense tactics including throwing sand (to confuse the orcas’ echolocation) or even firecrackers and diesel fuel into the water, running with engines on, running with engines off, running with engines in reverse and so on. The one generally agreed on good practice is to stay close to shore in the shallow waters with the accompanying navigational hazards of fishing boats and traps. Anthony subscribes to the shallow water theory so we did that and tried not to think too much about the possible risks – as remote as the chances of an attack on Arcadia were, the chances are still very real and we knew we would be happy to get past them.

Finally, we reached the Strait of Gibraltar, choked thick with huge commercial vessels, and made our way into the Bay of Gibraltar late Wednesday night, May 1. We came in the dark and navigated our way slowly through the huge container ships and oil tankers, narrowly missing a tugboat that decided to suddenly rev up into reverse without noticing us behind it, and found a safe spot to drop anchor to spend a short night waiting for the marina where we had a reservation for the next few nights to open at 8:30. The next morning, we woke to see the full Bay clearly for the first time. We roused ourselves and then raised anchor to motor across the bay into our tight berth at the Queensway Quay marina. We fixed the lines and stepped off the boat onto land for the first time in 8 days. We headed to take care of customs and immigration formalities and then had a rushed goodbye with Anthony who needed to hurry to the airport to make his flight. And then, suddenly, it was just us in the quiet, sunny marina, newly blessed by our insurance company to take Arcadia wherever we can and looking ahead to see what Gibraltar has to show us.