Ibiza, here we come!

Friday night in Almerimar, davits fitted, boat ready to set sail the following day, we disappeared off for a well earned drink or 3! Interesting we met another couple, Charlie & Maggie on their yacht Alkira whose plans were identical to ours, including wintering their yacht in the same marina in Sicily, would you believe!  Numbers, emails and blogs exchanged, in the hope we can meet up somewhere along the way.

Saturday afternoon arrived and we hoisted our new dingy on the new davits, special thanks to Stuart for all his hard work and patience with us, we finally set sail around 3pm, huge smiles on our faces as our trip was finally underway.

Big Smiles all round!

Our original intention was to stop near Mar Menor, on the mainland, around Sunday lunchtime .To start with, the wind was not quite in our favour but within a few hours it, or perhaps we turned, to have it pushing us along, sails set to goose wing, for the best part of 8 hours, until it died down to nothing around 2 am.

We passed a fabulous schooner, boring old farts though, even thought the winds were great for them, they didnt have a single sail out!

Early dinner of Tracy’s homemade pork and leek sausages, the best sausages we have ever had in Spain, I might add (thank you to Tracy), and a brief citing of dolphins, brief as we decided they can’t have liked the Pete Tong album we had blaring out, until finally I crashed at 1am leaving David to start his lonely nightshift. Bless his cotton socks, he persevered until 5.30am when tiredness defeated him and he woke me for my turn, an hour and a half later than he should have. If only all nightshifts could work that way (at least from my point of view!)

A very quiet night overall, nothing much to report, except we waved to Garrucha and all its dust as we sailed past at around 5-6am in the morning.

We then had a change of plan and decided to kick on to Formentera as the forecast looked favourable the further across we went. Calm for the rest of the day, we then donned our wet weather gear, which we should have done the night before because of the amount of dew that fell overnight, we settled done for the evening, still waiting for the wind.

Trendy, in our wet weather gear!

However never trust a forecast as that didn’t happen until 30 mins after my nightshift began. Donned in our wet weather gear, as the night before we realised how much dew there was. Poor David,  no sooner had he dropped off, than I had no choice but to put the sails up and alter course as the Force 4 was bang on our nose which dropped our boat speed to below 4 knots! Sails up, we were speeding along at 6-7 knots, however the wind direction was pushing us further southwards and on that course we were likely to miss Formentera altogether. So once again, no doubt David being the light sleeper he is, would have only had about 30 mins sleep by that time, I decided to put a tack in. Little did I know that when I had shut the forward hatch earlier on in the evening, it had pinched the genoa sheet so having left the sail fly on our starboard side, I then couldn’t pull it in on the port side… safely strapped on, I ventured onto the foredeck and managed to yank it free, to then safely set the sail!. I wish I hadn’t bothered, within 30 minutes the wind dropped and I had to pull the sail in, once again to David’s already much disturbed sleep. We motored on until 8am when the wind decided to bless us with its presence and we could sail again.

By midday we were close enough to Formentera, so contacted them for a berth for the night, so we could do some provisioning. However having been told the fees were €87 + IVA, we decided to continue onto Santa Eulalia on Ibiza, where we could moor 2 nights for the price of 1 in Formentera, and catch up on some well needed shuteye, after a few V&T’s!.

Today has been a busy day, having started to clean the decks we realised just how minging they were after spending a winter in Garrucha so spent the next 5 hours cleaning her from top to bottom. She is now spick & span.

The plan tomorrow is to kick off early over to Mallorca and then spend a few days bay hopping to  Palma, perhaps not stopping in the fabulous Puerto Portals marina as I suspect the price will be greater than Formentera!

Next update is likely to be when we are in Palma, just before setting off on the next stage of the trip to Sardinia..