A couple of days after Terry & Sue left, our friend Rosemary arrived to stay with us on the boat for a week. Having already seen Tenerife, we headed over to the island of La Gomera, just 30 miles away. It is a small island with deep ravines, fertile green valleys with steep terraced slopes and dense forest leading up to the peak of Montana Garajanoy at 1,487m, surrounded by the Garajonay National Park. It was the last major island to have an airport, which was finished in 1999, but even now they only receive inter-island flights using small planes. Most visitors, like us, arrive by the sea. It is the only island in the archipelago that has not suffered any damage caused by volcanic eruptions over the last 2 million years and, like Tenerife, has two microclimates. The north’s stable climate, mild temperature and constant humidity is due to the trade wind effects that create a variety of vegetation. The south is downwind, has higher temperatures and the best beaches.

Though Rosemary has visited us many times, it has always been during the winter time when we’ve been in a marina, so this was her very first sailing trip aboard Deep Blue. We had some great down-wind sailing for the first part of the journey, followed by motor-sailing and then a kind of riptide just as we arrived, a result of a cross current/wind, but this didn’t affect us it just looked as though the sea was boiling. The marina is in a beautiful setting, right next to the small capital city of San Sebastian, with a colourful cliff backdrop, black sand beaches and green mountains behind.

As well as being the islands capital, San Sebastian is the main commercial harbour and every day ferries and cruise-ships bring (and thankfully take away) visitors to the island. It is also from here that in 1492 Christopher Columbus made a stop with his three caravels to re-supply with water and stores before heading off in search of the New World. He liked it so much here that he returned twice more (or did that have something to do with Beatriz de Bobadilla who lived in what is today the Town Hall?). The buildings and restaurants along the main street – Calle Real – are very colourful with carved wooden shutters at the windows to keep the hot sun out. The weekend of our arrival coincided with a festival in the main square with tradition music of drums and castanets being played while artisans displayed and sold their hand-made goods in tented stands.

We decided to hire a car for a day to get a feel for the island and what a day we had. We have never been anywhere before where we were so lost for words because of the natural beauty of the place itself. Every turn around a corner brought another breath-taking scene into view. In order to live in harmony with nature, the locals worked hard and a lot of the mountains are completely terraced from top to bottom, what a lot of hard work!

The visitors centre at the Garajonay National Park explained the history of the island, and its diversity, as well as offering some great views across the valleys. It is certainly an island for outdoor lovers with lots of hiking trails, mountain biking, diving and paragliding.

By the time Rosemary’s trip was coming to an end, we felt that we wanted to stay and see more of the island and the weather seemed to think the same as some high winds were forecasted for when we would have been at anchor off Gran Canaria. So, we decided to stay and Rosemary took the 1hr ferry ride back to Tenerife for the night before her crack-of-dawn flight back home. We are very happy that she was able to see this beautiful place with us.