Full moon, vernal equinox and Good Friday. We decided to make our next move before several days of strong winds built in.  We motored in calm weather the short distance around the point to Rota, Spain in the Bahia de Cadiz and ended up there for a week, including Easter weekend and the culmination of the Santa Semana (Holy week) holiday.  We enjoyed walks through the historic town and seeing the elaborate processions through the streets.  Being so close to the Sherry wine-making region, we decided to rent a car and visit Jerez again.  We went for lunch and then stocked up on some of our favorite wines at the Hipermarche nearby.  On Sunday, we drove to Cadiz and spent the day walking in the park and sampling tapas.

Rota has just about everything a cruising sailor needs, except as it turns out, a Camping Gaz bottle exchange.  After having gone through the trouble to switch our cooking gas system over to the European system (See Logbook Entry: Cruising Sailor's Thanksgiving, Portuguese Style), we are dismayed to learn that this system is not as easy as we thought it would be. Like all new ports, it takes a few days to figure out where everything is.  After several scouting missions and shopping excursions, Lisa located the library with free internet service just a block away.  It took two visits to get the post office hours sorted out properly.  By the end of the week, she completed her research with a provisioning circuit to the best bakery for bread, the pastelaria for treats, the public market for fresh fish and produce and the small supermercado for everything else.

Rota is home to a huge U.S. Navy base which occupies a big chunk of real estate along the Bay of Cadiz.  The military presence here reminded David of a news item which was kept fairly quiet at the time.  He recalled that in 1968 a U.S. Air Force bomber based in Rota accidentally dropped two unexploded hydrogen bombs, one of  which was never found and the other broke open, contaminating a local area with radioactive material.  Although the U.S. Military claims to have cleaned the area up, we read more recent reports indicating that it was still contaminated.  The bomb that was never found is believed to have ended up in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere near here, but not much has been heard about it then or since.