26) Gibraltar

Gibraltar 36° 09N 5°21’W

Cold, foggy and windy.  Today was a very slow do nothing day.  I turned in my $40 USD and got an exchange rate of 1 for every 1.74 paid.  Things are expensive here.  Paid about $17 USD for my big bag of laundry, $5 for a great ½ chicken meal and made a phone call to Tina.  I literally have a few coins left.

It’s 11:45pm and I’m sitting on my bed feeling the boat rock back & forth from the 15-18kt NE winds.  It’s supposed to really blow tomorrow.  Below is a wx chart depicting the winds tomorrow:

m/s is meters per second.  The formula is a multiplier of 2.23 to get mph.  So, 10 m/s equals about 22mph.  It appears it might blow in the high 30s tomorrow.  We’ll need to keep an eye on the dock and mooring lines.  I can currently feel the boat heel left and right and surge forward and get tugged back.  It’s a sensation usually felt at sea.

 

I got some wx pics on Saturday and this one above shows the system that is blowing thru here today.  It reaches all the way down to the Canaries.  These systems also create sizable waves and are something we are going to have to deal with.  Below is a chart of an estimate for what it will look like out there on Monday. We’re leaving about Wed.

I asked Alan what the multiplier was to convert meters per second to mph and he produced this off the top of his head.  It’s an interesting environment around here.

I took my laundry in a mesh bag and John took his in uh, an ass bag.

These are the steps we climb when we want to face the world and below is the library. 

   

And this is a primary fuel filter unit.  The top screws off, etc.

The fender is rolling along the hull just outside my bed from the wind and I have to go stop it.  The boat next to us on that side left today so we don’t really need it.  It’s 12:17am, Alan is asleep and John is in the cockpit calling Nancy on the sat phone.  That makes sense since it is 9 hours earlier in CA.  I told him I was pulling in the fenders and he said that he felt the boat moving too.