San Sebastian, a perfect sail and more dolphins

Having had two long days getting to La Gomera we decided to stay for two days in San Sebastian, firstly because we wanted a rest and secondly it gave us a chance to have a good look around. La Gomera is a very different Canarian island, with a completely different climate inland creating lush vegetation and even rain forests.

Not having an international airport La Gomera is mainly fed by ferries from other islands. This gives the main harbour in San Sebastian a bit of a Greek feel with so many ferries coming in and out, as you can see from the piccie below. The small ferry just arriving is the one we nearly had a fight with the day before.

San Sebastian is a nice town, small, but very pleasant to spend a day or two. As with most of the rest of the Canaries you wouldn’t say there’s much history to see but we enjoyed wandering around plus there’s loads of bars, cafes and restaurants for in between wandering. Some piccies…

We didn’t have time to go inland but we would definitely come back to do just that. You could tell by how many people got off the ferries (hundreds and hundreds) that’s exactly what people were doing as San Sebastian was actually pretty quiet.

We left after the second night to go back to Tenerife too Las Gallettas, just down the coast from San Miguel. With a distance of around 25 NM and a forecast of wind we could use all looked good. However firstly we had to extricate ourselves from the marina, which I mentioned before was tight coming in. Man it was even tighter leaving. I can imagine there are quite a few incidents with boats parking and un-parking. For sailing chums it’s interesting to note that the average size of boat in the Marina is big, made our 40 foot boat seem like a dinghy, which made the Marina even tighter. Anyhow we made it out unscathed, although left the harbour at the same time a monster ferry was arriving. Thought I was getting 5 toots from him (which is bad, means danger or I don’t understand your intentions) but it was only 3 (I’m going to reverse).

The journey over in some ways was unremarkable, the forecast was pretty accurate, about 15 Knots with us nearly being able to make the course we needed (about 10 degrees off). This meant a short tack of about 30 minutes but a pretty perfect sail doing between 6-8 knots until we rounded the peninsula before the harbour at Las Gellates. After which the wind died but we were pretty much there at that point.

On the way over as usual (seems to be almost guaranteed) another bunch of dolphins found us for a play. These were much bigger and didn’t hang around for so long. Not sure if they were a different brand of dolphin?

The parking in the harbour was entertaining, but more about that in the next blog entry.