Rescue in Rabat 😅

Cami De Conto

Tangier was a great city. After 3 months in Spain I thought it couldn’t get any better with the food, but I was wrong. Moroccan food surprised us! Tajine, Couscous, Mrozia, fresh fish, olives, Moroccan bread… nhamnham 😋😋 everything is delicious here! So, after 5 days and extra 5kg 😂 we left the city. Our friend Dimitra joined us the night before. She is from Greece and she will be sailing with us for the coming 10 days. Our intention is to get to Madeira, but the weather is not looking the greatest for the coming days. We are considering abandoning the idea of Madeira, and sailing directly to the Canaries. But, because we would love to visit the island and because we had promised Dimitra to bring her to Madeira, we still want to give it a try. Our intention now is to go Rabat, and wait over there for a little front to pass in the Atlantic, and see what the weather will be looking like on Monday. We still have one little hope that we can make it to Madeira. Exiting the strait of Gibraltar was a little bit like when it’s very windy outside and you open the door of your house, and all the wind of the world goes through the door… hahaha! It was very intense. Until today we had only been in the strait in days without any wind and now we were there with 20-25kts of wind, from East. I’m glad we experienced this wind in the strait of Gibraltar only in the very less bit of it, and coming from our stern. And maybe it wasn’t much about the wind, but about the waves. They were huge, and choppy, and with a short interval. Not comfortable at all. A couple of nautical miles later we were completely out of the strait and we were already in much calmer conditions. The waves though, didn’t go away. They stay there welcoming us into the Atlantic Ocean. It didn’t take long for our friend to start feeding seasick. I was already expecting this to happen, as we were having such a wild ride. She started feeding the fishes before lunch, and didn’t stop until the evening, poor girl. Even the seasickness pills didn’t seem to work. But we knew it was for 24h, until we would arrive in Rabat. The trip itself was pretty fine. It was cold during the night, but there were no more waves. We had no wind at the beginning of the night, so we started the engine. The moon was full and bright in the sky, giving us that impression of ‘sailing during the day in black and white’. It was a great night, but not for Dimitra, who couldn’t get over the seasickness. Jurri did most of the night sailing, and I was inside with Christopher, who is having a lot of problems with sleeping lately 😅 Dimi slept outside, so she was helping with the night watch every now and then and she would feel better. By the morning we already had some wind, but it was coming from the nose. Also the waves arrived, so we figured it wouldn’t do any better to our friend if we would start sailing upwind now. So we kept on motoring towards Rabat. The estimated arrival was at 12pm, so I took the last shift from 8am and let Jurri sleep inside, in our warm cabin. There were a lot of fishing buoys and boats all over the place, as we were close to the Moroccan coast. So I did a lot of zigzag with Songster. The Bouregreg Marina in Rabat is located up a river, and the entrance to the river can be very tricky if there are too many waves breaking in the breakers, which was the case. We usually check the entrance of new harbour sim our Garmin plotter, as well as in our navigation app on the iPad, and sometimes even on google maps with the satellite view. For our surprise, this marina wasn’t in our plotter nor in our app, and to make things worse, we didn’t have internet connection to check google maps. We called the marina in the VHF radio multiple times but they didn’t respond, or at least we could not receive any reply back. But there were fishermen around us, many of them, on their little boats. And luckily we speak French and they also! We waved at them and they came over. Yee 🥳 At this moment, Jurri turned off the autopilot and asked me to steer while he was asking the fishermen to guide us inside the river towards the marina. I took the steering wheel and immediately I felt something was wrong. I even doubt if he actually had turned the autopilot off, because I was steering to one side and the boat was pushing to the other. The fishermen were very kind and escorted us inside the channel. Once inside, there was already a dinghy from the marina waiting for us, to sail up the river with us, until the entrance of the marina. We entered the river with the rising tide, so there was quite some current pushing us inside the river. As we approached the waiting pontoon and started our docking procedure, Jurri told me that we lost the steering!!!!! The steering wheel was moving freely and we didn’t have control over our rudder anymore. Oh no 😨 We shouted at the guys from the marina, who were now at the pontoon, so they were quick enough to jump back on their dinghy and come to rescue us. Our biggest fear was that the current was pushing us inside the river, and we were close to a bridge. If the current would have taken us there, our masts would have broken and would have been a very sad end 😰 maybe we would have avoid that with the anchor, but who knows. Anyway, now the guys were towing our 16 tonnes and trying to push us inside the marina, out of the current. At this point, Jurri also managed to use a control that we have in the autopilot, to trim a little bit the direction. Our autopilot and our mechanics of the steering are two independent systems, but the hand control of the autopilot is very sensible and we don’t really have experience using it, so we couldn’t rely much on this option. Anyway, this story had a happy end, we managed to enter in the marina and dock in the reception without any damage in our hull 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽