5th November

Tuesday 4th November 2008, day 108. 28° 40’.4 N, 017° 46’.0 W. Santa Cruz de La Palma.

Santa Cruz, which we have just walked round quickly, seems to be a really pretty little town. Masses of lovely shops … a pasteleria selling doughnuts rellado con chocolate … bars, palm trees, pretty squares, interesting “Canarian” architecture – a really nice place to end up. So often we choose our next stop because it is sheltered from the wind, or because of the chandlery or the boatyard – or simply because it has a launderette! But here we seem to have come to a destination which is worth visiting in its own right.

La Palma is the north-westernmost island of the Canaries, and not to be confused at all with Las Palmas, the touristy town on Gran Canaria. Its volcanoes are still quite active; the last eruption was in 1971. There is a self-contained maturity to the town, which is chic without being flashy, and seems to cater to the local population rather than visiting tourists.

In the end we stayed two weeks in Tenerife, having a really good go at all the maintenance jobs which have been building up – as well as those which didn’t get done before we left. I think we have finally got the upper hand on the LIST, which up till now has been growing as fast – or sometimes faster – as we can cross things off it.

We also did our victualling for the Atlantic crossing – quite a major logistical exercise to sort out food for five people for three weeks, in a fairly limited amount of storage space. First of all there was the estimating of just how many teaspoonfuls of coffee or bowlfuls of cereal the average crew member would get through happily in a day, then the Spreadsheet, which multiplies all that up, and allows for contingencies (or extra hard-working and hungry crew members) and adds just a leetle bit of extra chocolate for emergencies …, then the village fête game of guessing just how many teaspoonfuls of coffee there are in the average jar, then checking what we have already to produce the final list of requirements. Right at the end, as a reward for all that hard work, we get to spend 2 hours trudging, utterly lost, round a supermarket the size of Woodbridge, and then get it all home, filling the boot and the back seat of the taxi. Then the fun starts! Anthony gets rather miserable, as he is convinced it won’t all fit; I am stimulated by the challenge. (Which is a bit sad, but there you go.) So we pull everything out of every locker, and empty all the carrier bags, and pile it all up on the saloon table, and take a photo. Then sort it out, and Anthony starts packing it away – and he carries on packing and I carry on sorting and we only lose our temper with each other once – and miraculously, it all disappears into the lockers! But we don’t dare open them, in case the whole lot comes thundering out again.

Anthony had a birthday during all this, which we celebrated, along with our 100th day of the voyage, with a supper party with a lovely boatful of New Zealanders, and all the presents I have been collecting for him from various visitors since we left. Thank you, everybody, for getting the cards and presents to him!

We took a day off, as part of the festivities, and hired a car with the intention of going up El Teide, Tenerife’s volcano. This was what turned out to be the start of almost a week of bad weather. We drove up from the still-warm, if drizzly coast, into a bank of cloud, filling all the gaps between the tall straight eucalyptuses, with just the faintest glimmers of light shining through the trees. Then we came out of the forest into a storm of horizontal sleet, which gave way to horizontal freezing rain (like sleet, but wetter). We stopped at a café which served hot chocolate with whipped cream on top, by the side of a roaring log fire. Down at sea level, we had put what seemed like a lot of warm clothing in our rucksacks: a sweater, an extra shirt, gloves, hat, scarf and waterproof jacket. Totally inadequate in the bitter cold – full-on skiing kit would have been a good start!

Then on and up, until at around 2,200m we came out of the cloud into bright cold sunlight, and a vast barren plain around the volcano itself. The colour scheme here is shades of brown, purplish grey, ochre and dull mustard, with occasional apparent bursts of colour coming from a dried-up clump of grasses, or an array of greenish granite chips giving the impression of life. Due to the cold (-4° at the top) the cable car up the volcano wasn’t running, but we had a long walk all around the base of the mountain, and through a park of twisted lava pinnacles left behind by erosion of the softer rock around them.

Downwards, past the site of the most recent eruption, in 1798, which still looks as bare, raw and scarred as if it had happened only days ago. Right at the edge of the lava flow, where it thins out, the indomitable Canary Pines are just starting to establish a toe-hold, and their dropped pine-needles will, imperceptibly slowly, start to decompose and provide the basis for other forms of life.

We had planned to leave Tenerife a day or so after this trip, but ended up staying put for a further three days, to let some thoroughly nasty wind, rain and waves blow themselves out. So we got down to some jobs that were so dull they’d sort of got ignored in our first burst of energy … and Anthony’s resistance was so worn down that I was allowed to go shopping in the chandler’s for spares that we don’t even need yet!