Day 1

We met early to come up with a shopping list and wow was it a list… Between the 7 of us we bought 430EUR worth of groceries for the week.
We then went onboard our yacht, La Flaca, and unpacked our purchases along with the leftovers from the previous crew.
After a safety briefing, we had pizza in a nearby restaurant. Mine was called Pizza Sana, the toppings of which included avocado. I would recommend. There is almost definitely a market for some sort of nachoesque pizza.

Day 2

After a good night’s sleep and breakfast aboard the yacht, we set sail at 09:15.

We learnt lots of interesting things about sailing including:

• Tacking – the process of changing the Jib/Genoa (front sheet) sail from one side of the ship to the other.

• Tieing Fenders to the ship
• Docking Knots (zero, eight, nine)
• How to steer using the compass, horizon, wind direction, and tell-tales. The best way is probably a combination of all four.
  • The compass will keep you on track when you can’t see land and the horizon involves staring at a piece of land to give you something to aim for. These become instinctual after some practice and are used when you are heading somewhere in particular.
  • You want the wind to be between 45 and 90 degrees depending on the wind strength.
  • Tell-tales are short lengths of string attached to the sails at different heights. The aim of the game is for them to be flying horizontally. If they flap, or point in another direction, then you’re doing something wrong. In the below video we have red string and blue string. If your reds are flapping then you need to steer more to the right (note that if the sail was on the other side then it would be telling you to steer more to the left). If your blues are flapping then you need to steer more left (same idea again). This also becomes slightly instinctual and you always want to make sure your tell-tales are happy, but you can rely on them solely when you are just out for a wander/ you are zig-zagging to get somewhere with no time pressure.

We all took several turns at steering over the 7 hours and my confidence definitely grew after the first 10 or so minutes of my turn. It also helps massively with sea sickness, something which I started to experience later on when we didn’t stop for lunch.

In the evening we had a very orange docking spread before going for a brief walk on Isla Graciosa, an island with only 1000 residents. That sounds small even to someone from the Isle of Man!

We wrapped the evening up with some vegetable wraps.

Day 3

Wowie, what a day. Shattered does not begin to describe the feeling.
We went for a bicycle ride around Isla Graciosa. Part of this took place in the midday sun. The island has some stunning views, including rock pool beaches, beaches made of the softest sand, and a rainbow arch area.

We cycled on and off for 4 hours. During that time we got excessively hot from the sun, excessively splashed by the sea, and excessively tired from the exercise. The ice creams we had after were well deserved.

We moved the boat to be anchored in a bay nearby where we all went for a nice sea swim and showered ourselves off of the end of the boat. I then made waaaayyyyy too much pasta for the crew while they watched the sunset.

Day 4

Pirates lie. Or, rather, Pirates of the Caribbean do. There is no way newbies weren’t puking their guts up on the boats as soon as there was a larger current.
Yes, focusing on things helps, but only so much, especially when the planet is trying to make it clear that humans don’t belong on water…
The majority of our crew spent the day lieing down on the deck from sea sickness or throwing up over the side of the boat. In one case we had someone who was doing a mixture of the two by planking over the edge.
There was one hero who managed to steer us for the majority of the day. If I was wearing a pirate hat then it would go off to you good sir.

Day 5

We started Valentine’s day with pancakes made by our skipper. A treat indeed. They were topped off with some sea sickness tablets and mint tea.
We watched the olympic sailors fade into the distance as we left them behind in Rubicon.

After the experience of the previous day it felt amazing to have ‘champagne sailing’. I had been designated ‘dolphin watcher’ as we played dolphin sounds to try and attract them towards us. The plan didn’t work but I did spot some seagulls. When that failed we quickly moved on to elements/colour songs as we steered towards Isla de Lobos. We were all geared up and ready to go for a swim (we’d even gotten changed!) but Gatsby, our sister boat, lost its anchor and we spent several hours trying to get it back from the clear depths, first by divers and then by trying to get it with our own anchor.
Anchors are marked with different colours along the chain to tell you how many metres have been submerged in water. You want approximately 3 times the depth of the actual water in lowered chain length. It turns out that Gatsby’s chain was shorter than anticipated and the bit that connected it to the boat was either broken or missing. Fun times were had by all. We did manage to get it back though and the crew of the Gatsby took La Flaca out for dinner at an Italian restaurant. I wanted to try something a little different so had a pizza with banana, apple, pineapple, and orange. It was bizarre in that the pizza tasted sweeter than my chocolate dessert. Would recommend though, perhaps adding some chilli salt to bring it back towards the savoury side.

Day 6

I have nothing much to say about this day purely because it went so smoothly. We all took turns sailing, listened to some absolute tunessss, and had curry for dinner.
We also played ‘Golf’, the card game.

Day 7

Since Sintra, I always make sure to clean my clothes before moving on to another place. You never know if there will be facilities wherever you’re going. I’m actually considering making it a part of my routine whenever I go on holiday in the future because it means you don’t have to sort it all out when you get back AND you could be in and out of a launderette within an hour and a half. Bit speedier than back home, ey?
Let me tell you… It felt absolutely AMAZING to put on clothes which weren’t saturated with salt. And to have skin that wasn’t covered in salt. And hair that wasn’t salt and wind battered.
I still felt really clean after having volcano dust blown all over me, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Considering our previous bout of seasickness, and the predicted 40+ knots of wind, it was decided that we wouldn’t be sailing on our last full day. We were already docked in Arrecife in anticipation of this. So… What to do? We hired a car and the six of us (the skipper stayed with the boat), drove about the island in a family sized Skoda.
We walked into a volcano and I couldn’t help but keep making jokes like:
“I’ve got lava in my shoe”
And
“The floor is lava”.
It was nice to see little bits of greenery growing as well, however small they may have been.

We then went on the bus around Timanafia’s National Park.

And lastly, we visited to a funky house which was lost after one day of ownership in a game of poker.

Day 8

Goodbye La Flaca, missed but not forgotten.

One of the crew decided to take part of her with them in the form of a key for one of the docks. Woops. I guess they’ll just have to join the next crew.

So, what have I learnt? I can tie fenders to a boat, I’m poor at pulling rope, I’m good at holding rope, I am relatively good at steering. Despite being ill for the whole week, my confidence in myself has gone up, don’t ask me why because I don’t know. La Flaca means ‘The Thin One’. I don’t like making breakfast on a moving boat at 7am. I get both land and sea sick.

Would I do it again? As long as there are tablets and tea (a phrase I never thought I would say). Thank you Join the Crew.