How to check out of EES in Gibraltar.

Gibraltar has long been a useful stop for sailors. Somewhere to leave Schengen or reset VAT, or just get a little taste of home.

But things have changed this year with the new treaty coming into effect, and during our visit it became apparent that few people if any had the correct understanding of what those changes meant. What started as a routine enquiry about leaving for Morocco became rather more involved than expected.

We’ve spent the past few months travelling down from the UK, working towards what we hope will be an Atlantic crossing. Part of planning that trip was working out how to manage our Schengen allowance: 90/180 day rule.

We arrived with our full allowance available and planned to spend some time in Morocco before continuing to the Canaries. That would leave us roughly two weeks available for the islands before heading to Cape Verde. We only intend to spend a week in the Canaries. But best-laid plans and all that.

Getting our departure recorded properly matters. We don’t want to arrive in the Canaries and discover that, according to the immigration records, we never left the Schengen area.

Does Gibraltar use your Schengen days?

For British visitors like us, the practical answer is yes. The new UK–EU arrangements for Gibraltar began applying provisionally on 15 July 2026. Gibraltar remains outside the EU and is not formally part of Schengen, but time spent there now counts alongside time in the Schengen Area towards the same short-stay allowance.

So sailing from Spain to Gibraltar doesn’t stop that clock. Being somewhere with British road signs and familiar shops doesn’t change it either. That distinction is easy to miss, particularly if you’ve visited before and are working on the basis that things still operate as they did then.

Checking the boat out and checking ourselves out

This was the part that took some unpicking. There are several things happening when you leave a country by boat. You have the marina’s departure process, the boat’s port and customs formalities, and the immigration requirements for the people aboard. You need to know which of those has actually been completed.

In conversations with other sailors, including through NoForeignLand and the Cruising Association, we came across the assumption that the marina’s check-out process would also record everyone’s departure in the Entry/Exit System, or EES.

It does not.

Gibraltar’s port regulations include departure notifications and a requirement to pass relevant information to the Schengen authorities. That makes it particularly important to establish who is handling each part of your departure, rather than treating a marina clearance document as confirmation that everything is done.

EES is the system used to record the entry and exit of travellers to whom it applies. It is separate from the marina’s own records, and replaces the old reliance on passport stamps. Asking to be “stamped out” may be familiar shorthand, but what matters is that your immigration exit is properly recorded.

What we were told to do

For our planned departure from Gibraltar to Morocco, the advice we eventually received was to take everyone aboard, not just the skipper. take their passports and the marina’s customs paperwork to the Policía Nacional in La Línea.

That meant heading along Winston Churchill Avenue, across the runway and over the land boundary into Spain, to explain that we were departing by yacht from Gibraltar and needed our immigration exit dealt with.

We could then return to the boat and just leave.

That ended up being considerably simpler than some of the other explanations we’d been given, which had included being escorted out and visits to additional border officials.

Our experience in Gibraltar has been that the information reaching visiting sailors is still inconsistent at best and often plain incorrect. We’ve had different answers from different places of authority, and getting a clear understanding has required more persistence than we anticipated.

Hopefully, by the time we return, the process will be clearer for everyone involved. For now, we’d rather spend a morning asking questions than discover a problem when we reach the Canaries.