Leaving Culatra

Culatra town, sand and concrete, little houses

As is so often the case, once expectations are set high they are often not met. Many people told us about the beauty and serenity of Culatra; it sounded like paradise in a wilderness with a small hippie community living in it.

Now, on the Eastern Atlantic! Nice day on the beach

Fishing boats, Culatra town

This is only 1/2 of it,  rest is under water still

I have already described some of the action in my previous post, and we did manage to have a day on the beautiful beach, but we were ready to move on. Our much anticipated next stop was Cadiz, Spain, and we were anxious to get there.

As I was raising the anchor, up came a terra cotta float on a rope that was wrapped around our chain. It struck me that now that we are in a land where people have lived and worked for thousands of years, there might be a lot of junk lying on bottom and we were going to pull some of it up. The windlass struggled and when it came to the surface there was a huge tangle of fishing net, rope, floats, and crab trap – all heavily coated in mud. What made it worse was that the rope led to something on the bottom and we were still attached to it. I got out my dive knife that has very small teeth and is ideal for cutting rope and started sawing at the mess as I hung over the end of the bowsprit. It took about 25 minutes and I had to rinse the mud off my hands and arm twice but eventually it fell away and we were free of the bottom. Sadly, the blob is still down there ready to snare the next hapless victim.

This was a huge mess - and dirty

We motored out of the estuary and into a nice breeze, and we raised our sail and slowed the engine to let it cool before shutting it off. It was then that I noticed a knocking sound that came from the hull near the prop. I surmised that it had to be a piece of rope wrapped around the shaft as the frequency of the knocking changed with the rpms. We have a “Spurs” line cutter installed on the shaft, so I was not worried about fouling the prop and damaging the engine, but I was concerned about the rope somehow damaging the cutllass bearing. I was going to have to dive under the boat to inspect and resolve the problem. The seas were too rough for me to do it right away and we were on an overnight passage to Cadiz. Either we would sail into the anchorage in Puerto Sherry or the wind and seas would die down by morning and I would dive under the boat.

After a rough night on the choppy sea, dawn broke and the wind died. The waves had turned into swells that I thought were manageable, so I donned by skin diving gear, tied myself to the boat, grabbed my, by now, trusty knife and jumped into the water. I have never jumped into the deep ocean before, and I admit that my imagination was hyperactive from lack of sleep and too much coffee, so I did a quick look around for any lurking sharks as I dove down under the boat.

Of course there were none. The boat was rising and falling about 3 or 4 feet with the waves and I had to time my dive so that the boat did not come down on top of me, but it was not too diffucult to see the short length of rope that was knotted around the propeller hub. I managed to easily cut it away on my second dive. The tricky part was getting my arm around the shaft so that I could rise and fall with the boat while I held my breath and cut the line. If it was a really big tangle, I have scuba gear on board that I could use for the job.

Puerto Sherry, Cadiz

With the prop free, we motored the rest of the way to our anchorage in Puerto Sherry, which is on the other side of Cadiz Bay. Going into it our expectations were low since the guide books did not have anything nice to say about the anchorage or the town. To the contrary, we would come to enjoy this stop greatly.