Well, I arrived in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria on Sunday night, 21st Jan. After a day or two, I've now got my bearings and met a few other boat hitchers (thanks Julieta in Barcelona for Irhan from Lakiba's contact). From everything I've read online and the people I've met so far, I could be waiting for months, having arrived after most transatlantic boats have left. So now my main priorities are:
- find somewhere free/cheap to stay from Friday (make friends with boat owners, buy a tent, trawl couchsurfing)
- find cheap and free food
- make a poster in English and French - apparently 60% of the boat folks here are French.
- hang out at the Sailors Bay bar a lot.
I've decided to give it 5 weeks, because hanging out in the Canaries is really not the point of the journey, particularly if I don't actually meet any cooperators/ collectives/ social currency folks here. And if anyone knows anyone, do please introduce us!
I'm finding it quite difficult to stop thinking about the boat that I missed in December, due to not having the Certificate of Eligibility from UMass for my visa - a professional delivery of a 60' new build Catamaran from La Rochelle to Miami, with me along just for company. I would have arrived by now. Them's the breaks, it wasn't meant to be.
So if I have no luck by the end of February I'll head back to Spain and carry on with the plan in a European context - there's no shortage of exciting projects and potentially-useful-to-the-UK collaborators and I can more easily go from one friendly contact to another. In fact there are loads of ex-Cornerstoners I want to catch up with - at the ZAD occupied land in France, in an anarchist arts & economy collective in the Italian Alps, anarcho-academics in Greece, Slovenia, Switzerland - to be honest, I might not even wait 5 weeks!