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Tuesday, May 1st, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
We
are getting ready to take off today from the bustling
city of Palma back into a more isolated anchorage at
Isla de Cabrera. It is a 28 mile trip to the
southeast corner of the island. The entire area is a
national park and we had to get a special permit in
order to go there. It sounds a little heavy on the
rules and regulations side of things, but it also looks
spectacularly beautiful, so hopefully it is worth while.
We will let you know!
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After three or four nights in Cabrera, we will head for
Menorca, before looking for a good opportunity to sail
over to Sardinia. It actually looks like some
pretty heavy weather is heading our way towards the end
of the week. It might even be our first experience
with one of the infamous mistrals! We will keep a
close eye on things as we do have a deadline to be in
Sardinia on May 12th.
First, I'll catch you up on the happenings since our
last update. We wound up staying in Cala Vadella
until Wednesday. It is a beautiful little spot,
quiet and isolated, with not a whole lot to offer
onshore. We did find a pretty decent pizza restaurant,
and a small grocery store for bread and a few basics.
We enjoyed being the only cruising boat in the harbor
amongst all the fishing boats. During high season,
the place gets pretty packed, as do most places in the
Balearics. We are happy to have the chance to
explore these islands in the off season. Many
people we have met tell us that they are the best
cruising grounds in the Med. I have a feeling we
will be hearing that about a lot of places, though!
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Unfortunately, after
our first night at anchor, some locals came over to ask
us to move. They were setting up the swimming area
off of the beach and we were right in the middle of it.
I hope they weren't prompted to do so earlier in the
season than usual because of our arrival. At any
rate, they were laying down a bunch of mooring balls in
addition to stringing up the line of buoys to cordon off
the area closest to the beach, so we decided to ask if
we could just take one of the moorings. Most of
the calas in the area are pretty deep with a weed bottom
until right up close to shore. We hoped to save a
little hassle trying to secure our anchor by grabbing a
mooring. After a short hesitation, they decided to
permit it, and even told us which mooring to grab,
making sure it was well anchored.
The girls and I started
our Spanish lessons. I bought several different
programs for teaching Spanish to children so we have
plenty of materials. Cassie winds up correcting my
pronunciation, while I'm teaching the grammar. It
will take a little while before it all goes smoothly,
but I am hopeful that it will at least help us all keep
up what we have learned and possibly even improve our
speaking ability.
On Wednesday, we
decided it was time to move on. Ibiza is famous
for its raucous nightlife, bars and discotheques, of
which we had seen zero. We decided to check out
Puerto de Ibiza, the main city on the island. It
was a short four hour trip and we took off around 1pm.
The coast was beautiful, although the trip was a motor,
and when we pulled into the harbor, we saw a big sign
stenciled on the seawall: "No Anchoring!" Well,
that was a bummer. Although we wanted to explore
the city, we definitely weren't ready to tie up to
another dock quite yet. We investigated the little
cove right next door, but it was shallow and not
particularly attractive. We had three more hours
until sunset so we decided to head back through the cut
between Ibiza and Formentera and find ourselves a
mooring at the beach on Espalmador. Our guide
books rave about it, and the kids wanted more beach
anyway.
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We
were not disappointed. It really was a little
Bahamas-like, as everyone claims. The only
difference was the relative lack of sea life. The
rocky reefs and white sand beaches, the low island
covered in shrubbery and the beautiful blue waters were
there, but the rays and huge variety of fish, the sharks
and the coral were nowhere to be seen.
Nonetheless, we enjoyed a beautiful sunny day on the
beach, exploring the island and flying the kite in the
nice steady breeze. Both the girls are getting
pretty good at it! There were only a couple of
other boats there, so we had a huge section of the beach
to ourselves.
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On
the east shore of the island, which is mostly rocky we
found the body of a whale that had apparently been
dragged onto the shore. It had a line tied around
its tale and lots of wounds in its body. We
couldn't quite figure out what had happened but we had a
lot of fun making up stories. We decided it would
be a great idea to dig out a couple of teeth from the
mouth, and volunteered Joe for the grisly job.
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Although our fantastic new wi-fi antenna was picking up
the signal from the Marina in Formentera, their sign up
system for obtaining a user name and password wasn't
working so we decided to head into town on Friday to see
if we could get online and to have a meal off the boat
for a change. We found a perfect place for
breakfast, willing to make us omelets to order. We
hit the little grocery store in town which was
surprisingly well stocked. These islands get very
busy during high season and you can see that they are
well equipped to make the most out of the opportunity to
relieve the many tourists of some of their euros.
We
also managed to get a username and password from the
Marina. We tooled back to our spot on Espalmador a
few hours later, ready to enjoy the rest of the sunny
day. Checking the weather, we realized that we
were in for a few days of clouds and rain.
Although the conditions didn't look great for heading to
Palma, we decided to go for it. Light headwinds
and a few thunderstorms weren't anything we couldn't
handle! The rain stayed away until about 5am, and
the wind even cooperated enough for us to sail about
half the time. All in all, it wasn't a bad passage.
We were meeting up with a friend from Barcelona for
dinner on Saturday night and we were happy to make that
appointment.
We
spent Sunday taking the 100 year old electric train from
Palma to the mountain town of Soller. It was a
beautiful trip and the perfect excursion for a rainy
Sunday.
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A
little shopping at the local CarreFour supermarket, an
extremely spicy Indian meal for dinner, and we are ready
to go! We are taking off as soon as I update this
for our visit to the National Park. Our permit
gives us until Friday there. Hopefully we'll have
internet access there so we can stay on top of the
developing weather situation. We would like to
stop in Menorca for a week or so before jumping off to
Sardinia, but we might have to leave sooner to make sure
we are there in time to meet Larson and Gav on May 12th.
We
hope all is well with all of you. We look forward
to hearing from you soon!
Next Entry
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Many thanks to our friend Craig Homenko for his assistance in setting up the website.
We also would like
to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who has been kind
enough to host the website on his server.
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