The weather for a direct passage from Lagos to Tangiers was not favorable with strong easterly winds that would be blowing almost directly on my bow. The distance was also not favorable, about 160 nm, more than a day’s voyage. I always plan the timing on passages to arrive at a new port, marina, or anchorage during daylight hours. This always it makes it easier to maneuver the boat but also, if it’s a marina, the office may have limited opening hours. A 160 nm passage is about 1.5 days so no assurance I would get to Tangiers when they were open (although they claim 24/7 access).
For these reasons I decided to break up the trip into 2 legs: the first a short leg of about 40 nm east to an anchorage in a bay at the beginning of the boat channel leading to Faro, Portugal. It was a secure anchorage with good holding in heavy sand. I needed that holding. The next day the wind blew at 20-25 knots most of the day, the edge of the stronger wind flow to the soutIh in the Strait of Gibraltar. There were other boats also taking shelter there for the same reason. I was treated to a great sunset at that anchorage.
There were fishermen in small boats working these waters. I’m always wary of where they drop their nets, concerned my boat might swing at anchor into one of their nets and foul the prop. However, they set the nets in the evening away from the boat, and picked them up in the morning before I got going so there were no issues. I’m sure they would not like to lose a net to my prop, either.
I spent 2 nights in this anchorage until the easterlies in the Strait abated, then set off in the morning for an overnight run that would get me to Tangiers during daylight hours. It was a long night with only occasional sleep as I avoided the heavy east-west ship traffic..
One possible consequence of the wind dying down with a high pressure system is fog, and that’s what I got, really dense fog. I passed fishing boats that marked as targets on the radar that were only a few hundred meters away yet I never saw them. I could barely make out the yellow channel marker near the entrance to Tangiers harbor, visibility only about 100 meters. The turning points around stone jetties to the marina entrance were equally obscured, but I finally got a bit of visibility as I turned to the marina entrance.
The Tanja marina reception pontoon where I needed to tie up the boat to clear-in to Morocco, which turned out to be a multi-hour process, was already full of boats waiting for the fog to lift. They didn’t allow boats to raft together on the reception pontoon so I had to anchor outside the marina entrance until they left, which turned out to be late in the afternoon. These boats appeared to have radar, and I assumed modern chartplotters, so I was puzzled they wouldn’t venture out in the fog, the fog I had just navigated for several hours getting into Tangiers. Everyone has their own personal safety criteria on the water, which is OK. I’m an instrumented-rated pilot accustomed to flying through clouds where I can’t see anything. That’s a 3-dimension navigation problem. A boat on the water driving though fog is a 2-dimension navigational problem – inherently easier – so I guess my criteria for safe navigation on water are different. Of course, when flying in the clouds a pilot has air traffic control watching and controlling flight paths so collisions with other planes are avoided. No comparable thing exists on the water; you’re on your own avoiding collisions in fog.
Morocco does not permit drones in their country so they confiscated one of my drones while I was there (the cheap one, a sacrificial drone I guess, I didn’t tell them about the expensive one). “Sacrificial” in the event they refused to return it, but they did return it when I left so it was not a problem. It just introduced more bureaucracy into the clearing-in, clearing-out process. The clearing-out process was also a multi-hour ordeal, with a search of everyone’s boat that was more thorough than the search on arrival. They even brought out a drug-sniffing dog that refused to get on my boat, even when they provided him with a ramp to walk up through the gate in the safety lines. The dog apparently spent 5 minutes inside another boat of a sailor I got to know while in the marina.
I only spent 4 nights in Tangiers, didn’t take any side trips – I’ve been to Morocco twice before. To get a break from the boat, and a long hot shower, I did spend one night in a little hotel in the old city near the Kasbah. I had a great dinner with lamb couscous at a nearby restaurant. The hotel was a classic setup with a narrow staircase winding its way up around a small inside courtyard to a handful of individualized guest rooms. My room, which had an outdoor terrace filled with plants, provided a great view overlooking the city and harbor. It was a nice break from sailing.
