Tenerife


We left Santa Cruz with a following wind of 25-30 knots, but in the lee of the island the vulcano of 4000 meters protects you. But for the last 10 miles to Playa San Juan we had to start the engine! PHOTO 1 Playa San Juan is a picturesque little harbour, but too small for Witte Raaf. Despite all the worries and care of local friends, our only option was to anchor outside the harbour, i.e. in a lot of swell. The trick with the anchor from the transom to keep the bow on the waves, did not work because the wind came from all directions. So after two days we had had it and went to Los Gigantes, 5 miles to the north. This is the most expensive marina of all Canary islands, built under a gigantic wall of rocks. Lots of wind up to 40-50 knots come off these rocks, and yachts strand frequently in the harbour entrance. We had lots of fun and contacts on Tenerife. In San Juan we were invited by the Italian neighbours of Maarten & Pieter for their daily marghuerita party at 1900 hrs. After the fourth marguerita they invited us to join them to a nice typical Canarian fish restaurant in the next village, Alcala.	Alcala is apperently the place to be, because the following day Antonio, owner of the diving school took us to the same village, but now it was a chicken restaurant. Christmas eve was on board with Maarten & Pieter and the first day of Christmas they served dinner at their place in San Juan PHOTO 2. It was great and in the meantime they even did our laundry! We have been doing a lot of scuba diving. We practised a lot lately, so with the Christmas dive PHOTO 3 at Los Gigantes we swam to depths of 25 meters with rays PHOTO 4, sharks, dolphins and many small fish (PHOTO 5 shows some pufferfish). The fish are nosy, they don't swim away so you can have a good look at them. We love to be guests in this world that is so different from our world on the surface. PHOTO 6 shows a fish farm, and if you swim below it you feel like a spider in a web. Our scuba diving bottles were inspected by Antonio and filled before we left, which saves us one hour of horrible noise from our air compressor.	So far so good. But for us the year ended with a broken windvane autopilot and lots of oil around the boat. The oil came from the saildrive, and if oil could come out, water was allowed in... it was the result of a rope in the propellor which had also deformed the cutter ring and the anode had vanished... So the boat needed to be hailed out. A bad day to end the year. We were at anchor in the bay of Los Cristianos but we were allowed to moor in the harbour, because the wind is quite heavy. Alongside the pirate ship. Every harbour village has such a boat, it "sails" twice per day with 50 people on board. So we have to move four times a day. But the pirates are extremely helpful and they gave us even a bonito and a crate full of bananas. The bonito is a good omen. It is Chinese superstition that fish brings luck and fortune, and of course it must be even better if the fish was a present and if its name is "bonito", because that means something good. So we look forward to the future!