I could have titled this post “The End of the World,” but it sounds so much better in French.
As a quick recap, January 9th (2025) Max and I arrived in the Caribbean on the island of Grenada. After saying my goodbyes to the decommissioned Hazel James, I returned to the US on January 15th via air (Max left the day before). Prior to that I’d been sailing and living on Hazel almost non-stop since May of 2024. Now, after a month’s break at home—relishing in Rhett and family and friends, fresh food, a dishwasher that isn’t me, provisioning in a car rather than a dinghy, hot showers, and eight hours of sleep a night in a bed that doesn’t move—I’m ready…ready to reflect on the voyage. As I think about it though, while the two-dimensional voyage at sea level is somewhat interesting, it’s the layers of the voyages, and the interstitial play between the layers, where the real magic happens.
With that said, allow me to rewind to early December, 2024 in the Canary Islands…
My alarm was set for 4:00 a.m. and Rhett’s for 4:05…just in case. However, none of that mattered because I woke at 3:45 a.m. The security lights of Marina Tenerife filtered through Hazel James’s portlights giving her saloon a familiar glow. She surged gently giving anticipatory tugs on her mooring lines. “I wanna go, I wanna go.” she said.
In Rhett’s and my three weeks together on the Canary Islands we’d stayed in several hotels and I had found that after six months on Hazel, the tables were now turned. While I slept soundly in those hotels rooms, the waking up in a large, soft bed that wasn’t moving was unnerving; my first semi-conscious thought of the day was, Since I feel absolutely no movement, we must be aground.
I rolled over and looked at the still sleeping Rhett and imagined ourselves in an hour or so in our final embrace—she, flying back home and I with an ocean in front of me.
Earlier in our Canarian time together, Rhett and I had looked at the calendar, the nature of sailing and cruising in the Canaries, and the number of islands that we’d like to see and distance separating them, and concluded that it would be best to leave Hazel at Marina Tenerife in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and visit the northwestern islands of La Palma and La Gomera via ferry. Ferries are scheduled, fast, and reliable; and they run with a lot of wind or no wind, and with any wind direction. Better yet, we could take a car-ferry and only have to rent a car once (on the island of Tenerife) and then visit the islands of La Palma and La Gomera without the hassle and overhead of additional car rentals.
Island and city names on the Canaries are confusing—at least until you understand “the system.” While the phrase “Spanish system” might sound like an oxymoron, I’ve got to hand it to Canarians and their logic. As an example, Hazel was now berthed in the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which translates as “Holy Cross of Tenerife” (the city of Holy Cross on the island of Tenerife). Saying Hazel was in “Santa Cruz” (without the Tenerife part) wouldn’t be all that helpful, as there is also a major city of Santa Cruz on the island of La Palma (and to boot, there are several other smaller towns and neighborhoods in the Canaries that carry the appellation). To add to this potential confusion, while the city of Santa Cruz de La Palma is (as you probably surmised) on the island of La Palma, there is a major city of Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria (which goes by the mouthful-but-logical name of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria).
For Rhett and me in our planning, this made for some frustrating but humorous “who’s on first?” banter. Our standard division of duties onboard is that I focus on the weather and sailing, and Rhett focuses on marina availability and shore-based excursions. When Rhett first rejoined Hazel and me (on the island of Lanzarote and chronicled here), and we were poring over sailing pilot books, weather forecasts, and travel web sites we found that several times we were chasing dead ends because, although were were saying almost the same thing, we were talking about two entirely different places.
Bottom-line, if you ever find yourself gloriously marooned in the Canary Islands, be specific with your nomenclature.
Rhett’s and my touring through the islands of Tenerife, La Palma, and La Gomera was a verdant contrast to our time on the parched eastern Canarian islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. While the near-constant northeast trade winds wash humid ocean air over all the Canaries, the moisture passes over the low eastern islands without separating from the air. However, the dramatic elevations of the western islands force the humid air upwards causing a mar de nubes (sea of clouds) on the islands’ northern slopes. Local flora have been naturally selected and evolved to harvest the iluvia horizontal (horizontal rain), resulting in the archipelago having both desert and “mistforest” islands…all within 250 miles of each other.
To sharpen the point about dramatic elevation, while the Canaries make up just 1.5% of the landmass of Spain, the highest point in all of Spain is the 12,200 foot El Teide on the Canarian island of Tenerife. (If measuring from the surrounding seafloor it rises over 24,000 feet.)
Hazel was berthed at the northeast end of the island of Tenerife in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and the island’s ferry port to access the more-western Canaries was in Los Cristianos on the southwest of the island. While we enjoyed driving across Tenerife—especially surveying the rugged landscape surrounding El Teide, we were excited to get to the much less populated and more natural islands of La Palma and La Gomera.
There were two “deep time” things that struck me about La Palma. First, were the observatories. Prior to our visit, I’ve always thought that high deserts were the only ideal locations for Earth-bound telescopes and stargazing. However, La Palma’s low level of light pollution and crystal clear atmosphere with relatively few cloud-covered nights produce unique conditions for optical and radio telescopes. La Palmans are rightfully proud of this and actively restrict extraneous lights and have a cellular blackout near the radio telescopes. We drove amongst the telescopes as if we were in a fiction movie-set. It struck me just how small we are (a drop in the ocean), and—at a Universe-level of thinking—how relatively small an Earth-ocean is.
My second deep time thought was the level of very recent volcanic activity on the island. As we were preparing for our visit to La Palma, this paragraph in our sailing pilot book—written with some classic stiff-upper-lip British humor—caught my attention:
A theory has been advanced that it is only a matter of time before the entire western part of La Palma detaches itself from the rest and slides catastrophically into the Atlantic Ocean. While this may well be correct—and it appears that pressure is building within the mountain all the time—estimated dates vary from anytime now to 2515 or beyond. But as it is inconceivable that there would be no warning, it would be a pity to avoid La Palma on this account.
—Atlantic Islands Pilot Book, Imray
If I squinted long enough at the pilot book’s accompanying summary-chart of the island, I could almost imagine the the northwestern side of the island looking just a bit pregnant.
However, this all seemed a bit dramatic to me. We call it “terra firma” because that’s what it is, firm and unmoving earth. I think, all humans have a tendency to consider everything through the lens of a typical 70-80 year human lifespan. Anything longer—especially the deep-time of a geological epoch—is as tangible as a sea of clouds. However, as we were checking-in to our small family-run hotel I got the inkling that there was a chink in the armor of my human-generational thinking. In chatting with our hotelier (the gregarious yet very professional son of the owners), he said in broken English that he and his parents had “lost everything” in the eruption of 2021. While his English was far better than our Spanish, we didn’t quite know what to make of this statement—perhaps something had been lost in translation? We asked, “Everything?” He replied that yes, their family home was engulfed by the lava. It was still hard to believe, until the next day as we were driving around the island and suddenly the road transitioned from weathered and pockmarked concrete to silkly smooth, brand-new asphalt. It was then that we realized the road was new because the old road had been covered by lava in that very eruption.
The next stop on our ferry-hopper excursion was the island of La Gomera. Similar to La Palma, on La Gomera moisture harvested by the island’s flora was the name of the game. Its mistforest park occupying the center-highlands of the island was a treker’s paradise and, although we did a little hiking in our several days on the island, we’re dreaming of going back to really go deep on it.
A final point about the island (and a foreshadow to this post’s seemingly apocalyptic title) is that La Gomera was de aquí partió Colón (from here Columbus left). The harbor of San Sebastián de la Gomera was Columbus and crew’s last stop in the Eastern Hemisphere before “discovering” the New World.
From a small but big world perspective, 36 days out of La Gomera Columbus made landfall on a Bahamian island that he named San Salvador (Holy Savior). Back in March, 2021 and 3,200 nautical miles west-southwest, Rhett and I toured a Bahamian monument commemorating his landfall.
The inscription in the monument reads:
This monument is dedicated to gentle, peaceful and happy aboriginal people of Long Island the Lucayans and to the arrival of Christopher Columbus on October, 1492.
Two things of note in our Columbus-connection: First, if you believe in the aphorism “Nice guys finish last.” you’ve probably guessed what happened to the gentle, peaceful and happy Lucayans. Second, although this obelisk projects a monolithic carved-in-stone confidence—like so much of history—its a bit more murky than that. While this monument is on the Bahamian Long Island, 50 miles to the east is an island with the current and perhaps presumptive name of San Salvador…and of course that island has its own set of Columbus monuments. However, today’s Bahamian San Salvador was Guanahani to the Lucayans, and then—for a time—known as San Salvador until the British buccaneer George Watling named it Watling’s Island until it was re-re-re-re-named back to San Salvador in 1926. The bottom line is that the exact location of Columbus’ landfall and the island that he christened as San Salvador is still debated.
After our planned several days on La Gomera, Rhett and I took our last ferry from La Gomera back to Tenerife and Hazel James. As Rhett prepared for her departure back to the US, I started looking at weather forecasts in anticipation of of Hazel and my next long sail—700-800 miles (6-8 days) to the Cabo Verde Islands.
To me, the forecasts looked good for departure in the next couple days. However, my professional forecasting and vessel routing team thought differently and advised me against it. While out-of-the-box weather forecasts tend to focus on what is most likely to happen, professionals who serve the needs of small sailing boats also look at what may happen—and its implications if it does. As a simplified example: along an intended route covering hundreds of sea-miles over days of developing weather, imagine a 60% of chance of fine sailing, but a 40% chance of dreadful conditions. The out-of-the-box forecast would report the most likely fine conditions, but the professional would advise you to pass on this hand, and stay in port and wait for the next deal of the aeolian cards.
In the interest of the calendar, I had planned to sail directly from Santa Cruz de Tenerife to the Cabo Verdes. However, my Mediterranean sailing education had taught me to also look at my piano piano options (softly softly, or little by little). While I’d heard good things about the southwestern most Canary island of El Hierro from other sailors and it was somewhat on my way, I had figured that after visiting five of the seven major islands in the archipelago I would have seen enough. With this backdrop, the forecasts showed a couple days of high-confidence good sailing weather before the adverse conditions might set in and that gave me enough time for an overnight 110 mile sail from Santa Cruz de Tenerife to Puerto de la Estaca on El Hierro. The distance and configuration of land was perfect for the mini-passage as Hazel makes about 100 miles in a decent 24-hours of sailing so if we departed Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the morning, in theory we’d arrive at Estaca midday the next day. Furthermore that plan would have us sailing down the east coast of Tenerife in daylight of day-one and then at dusk we should be more into open water which is a lot easier and safer to sail in the dark.
Hazel and I had one of those mystery-meat-on-bakery-bread-sandwich sails, meaning that the beginning and end of the sail were good but the middle was challenging. After a perfect sail down the Tenerifian coast under spinnaker with the northeast trades behind us, we rounded Punta Salema (Point Salema), the southern tip of the island and entered the combined wind shadow of Tenerife and La Gomera, yielding light and shifty winds. A few hours before sunrise, and clear of the La Gomeran wind shadow, conditions improved.
Late in the mini-passage something happened that I had never experienced. Or—better said—I had experienced frequently but never at this scale. In maritime radio communications, English is the lingua franca. In a non-English speaking coastal waters, while a lot of locals will converse with each other in their native language, official broadcasts are typically made first in the local language and then repeated in English. At dawn on my second day of sailing and with El Hierro at a range of 20-30 miles, I received a “pan-pan” call on the radio (pronounced pahn-pahn, from the French meaning “breakdown or “failure,” and—in terms of life-threatening urgency—one step below mayday). Next from the Guardia Civil (the Spanish Coast Guard) came the long Spanish broadcast of the details of the pan-pan call, followed by the same but in English. In the heavily-accented English I picked up that an over-crowded but unidentified boat had been sighted just east of El Hierro (in my waters). Unfortunately, this kind of radio transmission is common in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Africa (and also back home in Florida waters) and most always means one thing: human beings fleeing a desperate situation by any means possible. And at-sea “any means” is generally an unseaworthy vessel laden with way too many passengers. Obviously this is not a good situation anywhere…but especially so in the open ocean.
What caught my ear in the transmission was the number of persons onboard. I’m used to hearing the range of 10-20 persons (imagine a typical 20-40 foot motor vessel packed with as many people as possible). However, in this transmission I heard the number as an, “Estimated 160 persons.” I shook my head to clear my up-all-night-brain and heard it again…160. Even with hearing the number twice, I disregarded it as a translation error and surmised that the real estimate was 16. Even with that, I kept a sharp lookout as the last reported coordinates of the vessel were in my area.
Several hours later and in the hubbub of preparing for a single-handed entry to a harbor that was new to me in windy and moderately rough conditions, I forgot all about the pan-pan call. Once things had calmed down for Hazel and me inside the security of the harbor’s breakwall I noticed that on the ferry pier was a large line of people, many in seemingly matching fire-engine red outfits. My first thought was, How nice, they must all be part of a tour group or something. Then, as I got closer, I saw that the “matching outfits” were actually red blankets draped over the shoulders of 160 or-so rescued people. Unquestionably, the people I had heard about on the radio.
I don’t know what ever became of them, I imagine a ferry took them to one of the more-populated Canary Islands, and then from there…who knows? The population of El Hierro is only 10,000 so I can’t imagine it would have the services to accommodate 160 more people.
Although El Hierro was not on my original port of call list, almost immediately upon my arrival I was so glad that the weather gods conspired for me to visit. Having just come from the most populated Canary Island of Tenerife with a permanent population of 900,000, El Hierro’s population of 10,000 was a totally different experience. Back to our 160 African refugees, if their strategy was to land on a Canary Island, blend in, and then make their way to the EU mainland—I’m sure they would have preferred to make a undetected arrival on (say) Tenerife where the group would not be nearly as noticeable.
After getting Hazel and me settled in the harbor of Estaca and a good sleep to make up for my sail through the night, I set about renting a car for a couple days to tour the island. Fortunately, there was a local Canarian car rental agency in the harbor who clearly took a lot of pride in their archipelago’s heritage. It turns out that the artist César Manrique (1919-1992), a native of the Canary Island of Lanzarote, had also spent time in, and was captivated by, El Hierro. (For a refresher on Manrique, see our previous post: The Fire Island.) While Manrique was deeply committed to environmental causes, he also recognized the power of the ubiquity of the automobile and partnered with BMW to paint “art cars” with the vision of bringing art to an indispensable part of everyday life and thus changing the way we all see the world. In his words, “…unite in one single object the perception of speed and aerodynamics with the concept of aesthetics.”
To make a long aside short (or at least a little shorter), on my way into the local car rental office, I walked down the row of potential cars for me and noticed that, in the last space (the space closest to the office) the agency had an art car on the lot. Ok, ok…so it wasn’t a real original art car, but still it was cool and looked like a lot of fun. As I walked into the agency I crossed my fingers that the knock-off art-car was slated for my rental.
In 10 minutes I was out of the office with paperwork signed and keyless remote in-hand. I stared down the line of cars like a crime victim behind a one-way mirror, examining a lineup of the usual suspects. In my situation “the perp” was no mystery to my remote in my hands. My task now was the big reveal: After one more quick survey of the row of otherwise boring cars, I took an in-breath, clicked the remote and hoped. The art car’s lights flashed, confirming that we were destined for each other.
A creepy loner in a remote and tiny out-island pumps his fist in the air in a rental car parking lot—confirming that it’s often the little things in life.
In studying descriptions of the island’s sights and reviewing driving maps, Ensenada el Golfo (Gulf Cove) on the northwest side of the island was noted as particularly picturesque and decided that I had to visit. I glanced at my nautical chart and noticed the depth contours in the gulf indicated it was relatively shallow and I surmised that something geologically interesting had happened there.
A 40 minute, mountainous drive later I was at the made-for-selfies village of La Frontera (The Boundry) on the shore of El Golfo. While looking out over the beach and sea around El Golfo was captivating, the fascinating thing to me was that the whole area behind me was a titanic amphitheater. If the water of El Golfo was the stage, the high surrounding half-bowl were the rows of seats. I decided to take a drive to the top to survey the scene from the cheap seats.
However, wasn’t until the next placard along my drive that I started to understand the natural history I was seeing in the half-bowl amphitheater of El Golfo. Approximately 15,000 years ago El Hierro was much more uniformly shaped (think of the island of La Palma), then this entire side of the island calved off and into the sea, filling in the seafloor to make the relatively shallow El Golfo that I noticed on my nautical chart’s depth contours.
Reflecting back to Columbus’ transatlantic voyage (and my upcoming voyage) it’s estimated that the resulting tsunami (a.k.a., tidal wave) could have ranged from tens of meters high to hundreds of meters high. The wave would have raced across the entire ocean and had some ancient impact on the Americas.
As I took in all this information I involuntarily took a step back from the precipice, just in case the next landslide was imminent. A couple minutes later, it occurred to me that here on El Hierro, I was seeing a “preview of coming attractions” of the prophetic (and, to me, seemingly overly-dramatic) warnings of the eventual fate of La Palma. Again, so much for the “firma” in terra firma. For me personally this is emblematic of the kind of discovery that makes thousands of miles of open ocean sailing all worthwhile. The icing on the cake is to be able to share it with you.
I suppose for others who are better students, there are far easier methods to learn a lesson, but I doubt those lessons are as memorable.
The last intended destination on my day’s drive was to be Punta Orchilla (or-CHEE-yah). It’s both El Hierro’s and the Canary Islands’ westernmost point. In addition, for Europeans during the Age of Discovery it was the entire world’s westernmost point—la fin du monde.
Determining one’s north-to-south latitude on the globe is a relatively easy process and well-known by the ancients. In the Northern Hemisphere, the height of Polaris (a.k.a., the North Star) in the night sky gives a relatively accurate latitude. In addition the three cardinal, latitudinal reference points of the North Pole, the South Pole, and the Equator are real and fixed places on the globe. Conversely, determining east-to-west longitude is impossible without accurate timekeeping. While mechanical timekeeping is challenging on terra firma, it’s much more difficult on a rolling and pitching ship. Also, as opposed to the fixed Poles and Equator, there is no Earth-defined starting point for (or Prime Meridian) for measuring longitude—it is truly all relative, a human convention and nothing more.
With all that being said, during the “Age of Discovery” (a Euro-centric term describing the 1400s to 1600s), on many nautical charts El Hierro’s Punta Orchilla was the starting point for rough estimations of eastward-only longitude. I say “eastward-only,” because westward longitude didn’t matter. As some early-cartographers noted, “Thar be Dragons!” Prior to Columbus’s embarking from La Gomera, Punta Orchilla was la fin du monde, the end of the world and El Hierro was nicknamed Isla del Meridiano (Meridian Isle).
The primary road in and out of Punta Orchilla was along the northwest coast so I figured it would be simple business to continue driving anti-clockwise from El Golfo and I’d reach Punta Orchilla—easy peasy. However, poetic justice reared its lyric head and the road was blocked due to a “minor” landslide and wouldn’t reopen until after I was planning to embark on my way to the Cabo Verdes (another reminder of our terra not being so firma).
Undaunted, I thought I’d try driving back up to the rim of the crater and see if I could find an unpaved back-road to Punta Orchilla. (Let the art-car’s security deposit be damned!) Alas though, not only were there no open back roads to the point, but as I drove through the hinterland I was stopped by El Hierro’s version of a traffic jam.
It all happened as I gained altitude on my drive and the guardrails that had previously been spotty (even along the tortuous, small-radius switchbacks) became continuous on both sides of the narrow roads. It seemed like a bit of overkill to me until I drove into the first wisps of sea mist. As I drove higher-and-higher on my attempt to reach la fin du monde the mist became thicker-and-thicker. Eventually, although it was mid-afternoon on an otherwise sunny day, I was inching along, hunched over the wheel and happy for the frame of guardrails disappearing into the misty infinity. Without warning, the hypnosis of the guardrailian convergence was snapped by a woman materializing out of the gloom like some deus ex machina in a Greek play. If you imagine how an appropriately grizzled, wild haired, late career, out island female Spanish farmer might be dressed—that’s how she was dressed. However—and good for her and me—in addition to farmer’s duds she was draped in a semi-official looking yellow, reflective safety jacket. With her arm out and waving up and down, she signaled me to reduce speed further (although I was creeping along at that point). Soon after I passed her a low, variegated but all-natural colored, seething mass resolved itself out of the endless whiteness like a little plastic snowman resolving itself from a shaken snow globe. Dodging this mass would be a fool’s errand as it stretching from guardrail to guardrail. While I did the most natural thing and stopped completely, the surreality of the situation was compounded when the distance between me and the road blockage continued to close.
This was in early-December, and as my “what the flock?” moment passed, I hoped that on the night of Christmas Eve, this modern-day shepherding couple would behold a heavenly host of angels bringing them good tidings of great joy.
Although I never made it to Punta Orchilla—la find du monde—I was happy for the attempt. Maybe it was all for the better anyway, a poignant journey-versus-destination reminder that one generation’s end is another’s beginning. Later that evening, after returning my art-car and prepping Hazel for our passage to the Cabo Verdes archipelago, I reclined on one of Hazel’s settees, played a little music, and considered the day’s adventure and my life’s adventure. As Hazel’s oil lamp burned casting dancing shadows, I remembered back to July of 2022 when Rhett, Sunny, Hazel, and I sailed around Cabo São Vicente (the “chin” of the Iberian Peninsula).
Prior to El Hierro having the moniker of la fin du monde, Cabo São Vicente was known to Europeans as the end of the world. When I first acquired Hazel James in 2017, I’d “venture” out into the coastal Florida waters on a daysail and gaze eastward towards the Bahamas with a mixture of yearning and trepidation; at the time, the Bahamas were my fin du monde. Months after Colleen’s death in 2019 I’d sailed to the Bahamas (shattering my first end of the world myth), through the Bahamas and to its easternmost islands. In the nervous days before I set forth from the Bahamas on my first sail to the Caribbean, I’d walk the Bahamian beaches and look eastward at my next “end of the world.” At that time and to me, the concept of me crossing an ocean was inconceivable.
Back in Hazel’s saloon on El Hierro, I thought about the prime driver for my upcoming attempt to westward-sail the Atlantic: I wanted to be home to witness the birth of our first grandchild, for welcoming a new generation. What storms and adversities will he face? What ends of his world might he discern—only to discover for himself that those boundaries are illusory? I finished my final song, took one last look at the weather to make sure it was still good for our morning departure (it was), climbed into my berth and dreamt of putting another end of the world behind me.
As always enjoyed your writing- interesting and informative! We will be heading to Canariesthe end if this year so useful information as well.
Oh so glad you will be Canaries-bound Janice. We loved it. My one thought would be to avoid the busy season (as I understand from Sept-Dec). Very few anchorages and the marinas really fill up during the busy season. you were out in the open Atlantic so I don’t think it’s really a good idea to depart one Marina without a specific plan (and reservations) of where you’re going to end up next.