Vulcanos

Oct. 28^th Today Rutger and I rented a car and explored the Island a bit.

We drove to the South and checked out the bay we'll be anchoring this weekend. It looked really nice and, for he first time we won't be the only boat anchoring...

We'll be staying over for the weekend and return to Puerto Calero on Monday to have the rigging of the genoa halliard fixed. Antonio in Lagos suggested to use the uphaul as a halliard for the genoa and that worked out very well. However, I can't use the originally halliard as a uphaul for the spinnaker pole. So when I went over to check on how to refill the gas canister, I saw this van with all this advertisement about rigging, electronics, fitting and stuff. I asked the guy if he could help me with the rigging. The boss was a German technician and came down to have a look. He suggested a better way so I didn't actually had to rig a new halliard and he could help me... only not before Monday. He also told me that with the ARC and stuff, I would not have a chance to get somebody at Grand Canaria to fix it. Anyway, if we leave Lanzarote Monday, we'll still be in time for Andy to catch his plane, so that's what we'll gonna do then.

Also, we can get together with Phil Sommervile and his partner. They happen to fly in on Sunday for a short holiday. Phil was our instructor at Cornish Cruising and was also in the picture to join us for the crossing of Bisquay, so that would be nice.

Anyway, after having checked out the bay, we drove up North to the national park with the vulcanos. The drive itself was along the coastline with the swell breaking spectacular on the rocks.

After a while we came at the national park where we did a 40 minutes bus tour through an amazing landscape. Just black lava stones and rumble with no vegetation at all. The rocks were even darker then the asphalt of the road.

We ended at the restaurant where there were several holes in the ground down to the still very hot lava. To show that, they poured water into one of them and a few seconds later it turned into a geyser. In another hole they threw a bunch of twigs that was set on fire a few seconds later. At one point you could see the reddish glow of the lava. Over it they had mounted a rack and used it for a barbeque. You couldn't really look into it because of the heat.

The whole Island is just one big lump of lava with none to very little vegetation. That's also because it hardly ever rains. Not even enough to provide drinking water for the inhabitants.

Anyway, it was a very interesting tour in a moonlike landscape :-)