A 3 hour tour

My sister and her family landed in Casablanca Tuesday morning. Once we cleaned up Salty Ginger a bit, we needed to figure out how to plan the day. Clearly, we should show them one of the medinas, either Sale or more likely Rabat. Ultimately, we decided to cook the leftover meat and fish, so that we can feed them, and then go out into the ocean for a swim during the hottest hours before venturing into the city.

I walked over to the marina office to let them know that we were going to do a short tour in the afternoon. Turned out that we couldn't do that without the authorization from the merchant marine since Salty Ginger is a foreign-flagged vessel. How do I get that? "Walk over to the customs to get a copy of the admission form and bring it back to us, we will then do the inquiry, but it should be fast."

The customs office is on the opposite side of the harbor, and while it's not a bit marina, a 10 minute walk is required to go all the way around. The customs was staffed by a woman officer, who asked me how the passage was, whether or not we tried to fish. She was quite impressed by the photo of Peter holding the mahi mahi. By the time I got 2 copies of the document from her, the guy from Capitainerie came to this side as well and took one of them. The other one should stay on the boat. OK... "I will let you know when we get the Authorisation Temporaire."

After lunch I walked over to Capitainerie. "Here are 4 copies of the authorization. One for you, one customs, one for the police and one for gendarmerie." All of them had the official stamp and the authorization was through the end of August! "Oh, and before you go, you have to pay the marina fee, and you need to fill out the passenger list." The new arrivals were entered into the system with photos of their passports.

We were told to motor across to tie up at the fuel dock, from which the offices are easily accessible, and check out. Motoring was easy enough, but tying up was quite a different affair. The jetskis pulling in and out presented an unpleasant obstacle and the guys running the whole show were sure that I could maneuver Salty Ginger into a parallel dock with 2 meters clearance. I wavered at first, but in this part of the world this is a clear sign of weakness. You have to mark your presence and show no fear. We managed to tie up without hitting anything, even if it was not entirely graceful.

When I stepped off, a marina person handed me 2 copies of the passenger list: one for the police, one for gendarmerie. But the woman at the customs wanted a copy of that too. Fine. The officer at the gendarmerie asked me why he was getting the original: shouldn't that stay on the boat? "But they are all identical", I said. I thought I was done, but the police chief asked for all passports of the new arrivals. Back to the boat, bring the passports to the police. He made photocopies of each passport and on each photocopy wrote the Moroccan admission number from the stamped visa. Great! We were finally done with the formalities! "Pull up to the dock when you come back and check in with us," said the police chief.

Getting out of the harbor involved retracing the steps that we took to get in, which feels like playing a computer game. Level 1: go through the field of kayakers who stop suddenly and then start pedaling in a totally new direction. Level 2: the manually operated "ferry boats". Level 3: the swimmers while a jetski is making circles around us (presumably trying to spray us). We made it out!

Curiously, the water temperature outside of the river was 3C warmer than inside! Anton was mentioning that when he went swimming in the morning the water was quite refreshing. A difference between 22C and 25C is indeed noticeable. The major inconvenience was the swell. With no sails set the boat was rolling to the right, to the left. Pause and repeat. Swimming in the water it was very pleasant as the waveslifted and dropped us.

Once my youngest niece started to get seasick, we cleaned up the floaties and dragged the 3 oldest kids through the water on the inflatable until we go to the mouth of the river.

Docking at the police dock was almost impossible for the same reason: jetskis all around. On top of that all the kayakers were being dragged in. I decided not to wait for an opportunity and instead "violated" the requested protocol by docking first and visiting the police later. The lone guy at the police station just asked if everything went well and showed no more interest in generating more paper trails. Thank god! We already spent almost as much time doing that as swimming.