Tenerife on Merrimac

On the way to Saudade

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:56:11 +0100

Right, we’ve just put on the album Miss Perfumada by Cesaria Evoria, because we’re almost out of Spanish waters.

Tanneke and Kommer Jan arrived on Saturday evening after what was a pretty long flight. Lovely to see them again! We had three evenings of truly wonderful Spanish food in random, good-looking restaurants. Selection criterion: are there enough Spaniards eating there too? The food here is much better seasoned than in Portugal, we have to give them that. And I now understand the whole “Mañana” thing a bit better: they do turn up today, but they only bring half of it. It took until Monday before I had the dinghy complete; the Honda coupling did surface in the end.

New dinghy (work in progress)

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 16:47:39 +0100

The day before yesterday it was already time to take Marion to the airport. She’d been flat out at home with all the Milûk business and caught up on plenty of sleep. Read a good book (“What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan), drove up the volcano, explored the town, played one round of golf, mostly ate well, and not much else. She needed it! The weather had something to do with it too: during her last few days it rained in south-east Tenerife for the first time in a year, with plenty of wind as well. On the day we drove up to the Teide volcano there were big waves in the north-west corner, and once again a few tourists won a Darwin Award (hopefully). People had been advised, or even forbidden, to go out on the quay, but you’re not a tourist for nothing, and stubborn with it. Three dead… It even made the eight o’clock news on Dutch TV, so I in particular got quite a few messages asking if we were all right! Nothing going on where we were. In the days after, with the wind veering around, there was a bit of a jiggle in the harbour, but nothing alarming.

The Crossing and Our First Week on Tenerife

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 11:54:05 +0100

After a good week, Arnold came back to reinforce the crew. One last quick visit to Paz, and the very next day we were off again because of the weather forecast. Plenty of wind on the first day this time, but if we waited we’d have to motor the whole way. Neither of us felt particularly at ease for the first two hours. There was a really nasty chop, so bad that we didn’t dare hoist the sails. For the non-sailors: when the waves are very short and steep, heading into the wind to hoist the mainsail is pretty tricky. The boat takes a real pounding, so if we don’t have to, we don’t. So it was a matter of motoring on until we reached properly deep water. After about two hours the depth was a few kilometres again and the waves had lengthened. Up with the sails, and off we go! She was sailing beautifully again.