On Wednesday morning at 4am the wind died completely & we spent all Wednesday & till 12 noon on Thursday bobbing about in the Atlantic getting nowhere quickly! We decided to turn the motor on & head to an anchorage Harry (Plotter) showed us on the mainland. We had no idea if this was going to be suitable or if we could actually anchor there, but anything was better than sitting out wide doing nothing & going nowhere. No wind was forecast either. It took us 4 hours of motoring but we found a great spot to drop the anchor beside the harbour wall & close to the beach. The plotter said this was Mogador (sounds like something from Lord of the Rings!) but is better known as Essaouira. We were settled by about 5pm & cracked open a well deserved beer.
Friday we had a great sleep in after 3 days of interrupted or no sleep & then put Mr Slappy in the drink & went to explore the town. We were greeted in the harbour by a young bloke who promised to look after our tender (for a fee of course) & we then proceeded to the Port Police. They checked our passports & made a note of when we were planning to leave. Next it was to Customs who stamped our passports & took all our boat details. Walking through the port was amazing - most definitely the busiest, most crowded & dirtiest port/harbour we have seen so far on our trip. It ends up Essaouira is only about an hour from Marrakech so there were plenty of tourists about wandering through the Medina which was awesome. We found a Moroccan courtesy flag for Pannikin, bought a sim card for Steve's phone & internet which turned out to be another expensive waste of time as the sim card would not work in our phones (arggghhh!!) so we went for a good wander around the town. Ange had some henna done on her hand. Lunch was a kebab in a tiny street cafe as we people watched. Steve was starting to get a bit wild and woolly so he decided to get a local barber to give him a haircut - let's just say he won't be needing another for quite some time!!! We found an internet cafe & had a look at emails & checked the weather. Looks as though we will have some wind on Sunday to get us to Agadir which is a about 12 to 14 hours down the coast.