Sailing Through a Saharan Dust Storm (EP3)
When winds of up to 80mph whip up from the Saraha there are few safe places to be with a boat on The Canary Islands. The high winds, carrying fine particles of dust, are funneled and squeezed through passages of water between islands called acceleration zones.
The storm reached The Canaries far sooner than was forecast, whilst we were anchored between La Graciosa and Lanzarote. The wind raced between the two islands, fiercely blowing Elixir towards the rocky shore. It had caught us completely off guard with our swim shorts fully down.
At 6am, we awoke to Ian, our tender, trying to mount Elixir as the winds lifted him out of the sea. We acted fast, packing away Ian and changing light for heavy head sail whilst the winds continued to build.
The next challenge was to pull up the anchor by hand, this was extremely tense and difficult with 50 knots of wind on the nose, blowing Elixir towards the shore 50 meters away. We had to motor towards the anchor whilst two of us pulled it up and a third yelled directions at the helmsman. To add to the suspense the engine is extremely unreliable, as in, we could normally rely on it for 20 minutes before it cut out. 30 mins of heave-hoing later, she was up and we quickly unfurled a tiny scrap of head sail and began bounding towards Rubicon Harbour in Lanzarote.
From the frying pan into the fire; strengthening winds meant it became increasingly difficult to reach Rubicon which was just 15 miles SE of us. The winds were forecast to build tomorrow so we decided to run dead down wind to the next port which was in Tenerife, 180 miles west.
The light changed to a deep orange haze whilst dust, birds and dragonflies settled on the boat. It was all very apocalyptic and we felt a bit like Noah's Ark drifting completely at the winds mercy to wherever it wanted to take us.
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Max Campbell and a rotating crew of 'Phantom Shipmates' are navigating the globe on Elixir, a 1970 Swan 37. Explore their 2026 New Zealand refit and world voyage.
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