We slipped out of the marina at San Miguel, Tenerife at 9am on Saturday 22nd November after a busy 2 hours making final checks. We have 12 persons on board, 4 Brits (Philip, Charlie, Max and David), 2 Norwegians (Steinar and Diderik), 2 Lebanese (Sheimaa and Remi), 1 Brazilian (Yuri), 1 Dutch (Maran) and 2 Indonesians (Dirman and Aziz). We are most grateful to David Hosking for his huge effort in restoring the ships hull to working order whilst we were in port and to Paul Bayly for all his help. Unfortunately, due to our delayed departure, both David and Paul, were unable to join us for the Atlantic leg. Thanks also to Rikki for coming out to help us in Tenerife and making final checks on our power generation amongst other things. Finally, we said goodbye to Habiba who has now returned to Tunisia having sailed with us from Essaouira.
After a few hours of motoring to get off the coast, we were able to hoist the sail by mid-afternoon. Progress has been relatively slow as we are still in the lee of the mountainous volcano (Teide) that dominates Tenerife. We have averaged about 2.5knots, covering some 120 plus miles in the first 48 hours.
The crew have settled down to 3 watches: Vikings, Phoenicians and the Chess watch, led by Steinar, Philip and Charlie respectively. We have had a few funny incidents… mainly with one or two crew members getting up to speed on cooking and sailing techniques. One crew member managed to boil the tea-pot (instead of the kettle) to make some tea!
We have also discovered that we have extra crew member in the form of a mouse, that has been attacking our fresh and dried foods. We discovered it likes milk powder, hot-chocolate powder and apples. So we have put out some mouse traps, and hope to get rid of the pest as soon as possible.
On a more inspiring note, this morning we were treated to a swim past by a number of whales. They came within just a few meters of the boat, lifting our spirits as they did. In the meantime, we are making about 3 knots to the south, south west.