LinoCat

Good morning! LinoCat has his name now at least on the left side. Maybe we will also put it on the right side but that i have to do from the inflatable boat and so i am waiting for less wind. It is getting international here. The two catamarans in front of us are from Scotland and the US, the one behind us is now the Vanora with bettina and Peter from Germany and then a boat from Finnland and Puerto Rico and the "Wiki" from Germany. Three croatian catamaran will leave today for Tortola in the British Virgin islands. Today there is a lot to do and i will keep you updated with what is happening here, Right now Lani is sitting here and drinking milk and talking like a parrot :-)

Hi, here are some first impressions from Las Palmas. It is a fairly big city and the beach is also the anchorage and currently crowdy. Some huge cruiseships are here right now and the marina is huge and also very busy before the ARC Rallye starts. I just found out that email-to-blog does not allow attachments, so while out on the atlantic without cell coverage we can add text to the blog but no pictures. The weather here is a bit more cloudy and a lot colder with temperatures around 27 during day.

s thWe arrived at 15.00 the 5th of November in Las Palmas and directly went into the Vuela Latina, a baisin south of the normal marina basin. This is the place where all the catamarans for the ARC will be placed. The marina has a lunch siesta from 14 to 1600 and do not answer the radio. At 16.00 we registered and hooked LinoCat to water and electricity. There are huge catamarans here right now and so we look like a dwarf. Lani enjoyed smelling flowers and wanted to rip them out right away.

My mobile woke us up at 07:00 and after disconnecting shorepower we left at around 07.30 Marina San Miguel. We were happy that we had a place tied to the huge sailboat. Much better than a mooring line. Just crawling overt this boat was not so nice every time we wanted to come or go. Anyway at 07.30 we left and we set sail right away and had a nice ride. The wind vane had given up and so we could only guess the wind but from wind angle and boat speed and the waves it started with around 15knots and we made around 7knots of speed. After the waves piled up outside and we got into the acceleration zone i put a reef into the main sail. That means you shrink the sailarea and so the boat can take more wind. After another hour i also put a reef into the foresail and we still were doing 7knots. After another 2 hours LinoCat had Reef 2 in the main and foresail and was still doing 6-7knots and i guess the wind was around 30 knots ore more. Since we could not measure we had to be rather on the saf...