Navigating between continents & oceans

This night i got my first introduction to sailing. Lesson number one: navigation & steering.
Muki took his time to show me the different apps and maps to navigate, explain what means what, where i can see water depth, wind data, obstacles on the map, how to navigate to certain degrees and directions, and even where to find information on boats surrounding us, to decide how to proceed regarding them. Then container ships, fisher boats etc. had started appearing again : we reached the Street of Gibraltar, the small water street separating Africa and Europe with Morocco on the one side and Gibraltar ( a british oversea territory) on the other, and connecting the Mediterranean with the Atlantic Ocean.
My first experience steering the boat was into the harbour of Gibraltar, to get some Diesel for the boat. Sadly the gas station was closed, but ay.. we all touched the quay wall of Gibraltar!

In the next hour we had a really mind blowing moment when Muki and i were navigating the boat towards the Atlantic, but in front of us, in the night, were a lot of lights. With no coast that was or should be in front of us we got really confused and even questioned our GPS for a second, before realizing that what we could see in front of us was Morocco. 11 nautical miles away, and just in front of us due to the current course, but still - behind us Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, i front of us/slightly to the side Morocco and straight in front of us the Atlantic. So cool! And what a special moment to properly steer a boat for the first time in my life..

The next morning i woke up close to Cadiz, where the late night shift guys had decided to go just to get some gas. Cadiz was originally our final location for this leg, but since the strong wind and speed of the boat had surprised us we extended our leg to go to Portugal straight away.

The day was a bit of a lazy and chill one.finally everyone was comfortable exisiting and moving under deck. I got my first sailing theory lesson, so hopefully i can actually be of some help on this boat 😅.
Also we got our Orca Emergency Briefing: since Orcas have increasingly started to actually touch sail boats and sunk one right in this area a few weeks ago, we had brought a device that makes a noise thats supposed to reduce the chance of orcas, quite common in this area, to actually physically make contact with our boat. On the one hand the thought of seeing real life orcas in their natural habitat really excites me, on the other of course the thought of an orca making contact with our boat and actually talking about how to handle this scenario, is of course a bit of a worrying one.

That night during night shift i experienced something really cool about sailing - i saw the power of the wind and how fast it can change first hand. One minute we decide to take down the sails cause there was no wind, then within a mi ute we decide to take out both sails and then first ref the main sail, before taking the main sail down completely again cause the wind suddenly picked up so much that with just the jib we were going at a solid 9 knots of speed. Felt a bit like flying through the waves and heeled our boat so much that walking became a balancing challenge and sleeping, next to someone becomes more of a rolling into each other onto the side of the cabin.

An exciting night, but the next morning i woke up and everything was calm : overnight we had arrived in our first stop Portimão, Portugal.Læs mere