First thing in morning Scott set off early to pick up some fish hooks across the runway in Gibraltar (we lost our donated lures), while I headed off to the farmacia to find advil. And then we were off !! We had to time our exit with the tides and wind. The wind had to be at our back and the tides not at their worst, and also to stay closer to shore to catch the back-eddies on the main tide flow. Its complicated !!! There are pages of description and drawings in the sailing book telling us how to exit the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. But conditions were in our favour & it was relatively easy! That’s a first !! Even got hailed on the radio by a US Navy warship and aircraft carrier doing some exercises off the north coast of Africa… they thought we were too close to them, but turns out they had the wrong boat… we were on the opposite shore. Also a tanker called us thinking we were too close… sorry, that’s not us !! We had perfect wind coming from the back of the boat and smaller swells. Making good time around 6k through the strait with a 2k current against us. That night winds got a little stronger and we had a bit of excitement taking in a reef with a large tanker nearby when one of the battens got on the wrong side of a line. But with some great teamwork we managed to get it free and not crash into the side of a tanker.
The next couple of days was just some nice easy downwind sailing. Sunshine during the day and clear skies at night. Averaged 7-8k during the day, and reefed in at night still kept it around 6-7k. The most excitement was having to make some minor repairs to the furling drum. And then the wind died…………………. After about 2.5 days of sailing we made really good progress and thought we might make it to Madeira in just under 4 days. Nope, the last 100miles seemed like it took forever… 3-5knots at best! But we still made good time… 4 days & 14 hours… arrived at 2:00am just outside Funchal. Heaved to and waited for daylight to pull into the Funchal marina.