We left Alcudia, Majorca on 19th July and headed over to Mahon in Menorca. The first few hours we had to motor as there was very little wind but by midday the wind was about 10 knots or so and now a south easterly gave us enough wind to be able to switch off the engine and sail. After 10 and a half hours we dropped the anchor in the small and only anchorage in Mahon.

All great, out the way in the very shallow water, which we can do as we only need 1.1metres to float. The wind had got up and was blowing about 25 knots but that is not normally a problem. All OK until 3.30am and then an alarm rings out. S**t it’s the anchor alarm, we must be dragging. Oh boy, yes we were. We hit the boat behind with our bowsprit and managed to pull his anchor out and so he was now dragging too and then there were three of us all together. Ian sprung into action and managed to get us out the way quickly and so we dropped the anchor again. We waited to see if all was ok but after 15 minutes we were dragging again. Up the anchor comes and then dropped it again, it still would not set, this is a Rocna anchor (we only bought it in Gibraltar in October) that everyone raves about. We have another anchor, an aluminium Spade, which we have for occasions when you want an anchor to hold you in one direction so it’s dropped off the back of the boat. So out this came but we dropped it over the bow as this was going to be our primary anchor for the night. The Spade set with no problem whatsoever. All this in the pitch black. Ian and I took a turn to sit on anchor watch we weren’t taking any chances.

Before the excitement of the night before we had already decided to go into one of the marinas in Mahon for the following night as we wanted to do a final stock up, fill up with water and fuel before our trip across to Sardinia. We’d been told it was not so easy to get provisions and water plus the diesel was a lot more expensive at €1.75 a litre. The marina was a few pontoons with one electric supply and one water supply on each of the pontoons so it was a bit of a fight to get use of them, all this for the princely sum of €83! We met up with our Mahe Mates, Karen and Ronnie on CopyCat who we’d last seen 9 months before in Faro, Portugal. It was great to see them after all this time. It was also reassuring being moored up after the antics of the previous night.

We’d had rain which had lots of red sand in it so the boat was looking the dirtiest it had for a long time. Before we left the marina we gave the boat a clean and she was looking lovely again. We left shortly after to go back to the anchorage. A couple of hours later the clouds started building and yes you’ve guessed it rained and not just a little it was torrential and whilst raining the sun had the cheek to show its face, like it was smirking at us. Thankfully no red sand, so at least she stayed clean and we did get a rainbow.

The guy, Ingmar, whose boat we had hit, was still there so we invited him and his partner, Elvyra over for a drink. Ingmar had been very understanding about our dragging and he had managed to polish the mark out of his boat and there was no other damage. We discovered they will also be in Licata for the winter so we will see them again.

Bye Bye Balearics

The time had come to say Adios to Espana and head off to Sardinia. We’d seen a lot of different parts of Spain and it’s a fabulous country, we will look back fondly at our time there.

We left at 6am on Monday 23rd July 2018 with Copy Cat. We anticipated the trip would take between 30-35 hours, so this meant sailing overnight, my favourite pastime ….. NOT! So far, of our friends who had already done the trip no-one had managed much sailing. Well there has to be a first and yes it was us! By 7.30am the Asymmetric was up and it came down at 7.30pm. I didn’t want it flying at night, if there are problems it’s not a sail you want to be dealing with in the middle of the night in the dark. We had a full 12 hours. We were flying, we were getting regular speeds of between nine and ten knots for quite a lot of hours. There was quite a swell though 2 metres across our beam. We did a 100 nautical miles in 11 hours and 47 minutes, averaging 8.5 knots, hitting a top speed of 13.4 knots. Ian was in his element, and I quote

 “one of the best sails in years”.

We continued to sail through the night. Eventually by 5.30am we had to switch on the engine as the wind had died so much. We’d been under sail for 22 hours. We finally arrived in Alghero at 8am on Tuesday 24th July after 26 hours, so a pretty speedy crossing and we only burnt 8 litres of diesel. We averaged 7.5 knots and covered 190 miles. We dropped the anchor outside the harbour wall and hopped into bed to catch up on some sleep.

BTW I FORGOT TO MENTION ….. in my last blog the mini tsunami. This occurred during our time in Alcudia. We did notice the strong winds, so much so that we didn’t leave the boat that day, in particular because we had had problems setting our anchor. Anyhow we didn’t actually notice it, the only thing that was odd was that the boat at one stage didn’t swing into the wind, which is the norm. It transpired that some of the restaurants on the beach front were flooded and there was a boat in the harbour that we saw on YouTube looked like it was on an ice rink as it skidded sideways on the water, but a bit of a non event for us, thankfully.

July 2018