The new addition to our family
We thought that you’d like to see the new dinghy.
Please note the large, firm tubes and pert aluminium bottom. Also note the
superb lettering on the sponsons – I had to do this in a hurry with an indelible
marker pen, sitting in the dinghy in the water (so it was upside down for
me).
Firm tubes and superb lettering.
Cala en Porter
We left Mallorca behind and headed for Menorca,
where our first stop was Cala en Porter – a place David knows quite well as he
worked a season here (as a charter boat driver/bum/bar tender) when he was (a
lot!) younger.
Cala en Porter.
We stayed in Cala en Porter for a few days,
meeting up with Richard and his new wife, Franchesca, and family, Barby, Michael
and Betty on the Sunday evening for a BBQ.
The snorkelling here in Menorca has been amazing –
we've seen small stingrays, octopus, a moray eel, lots of wrasse, painted
combers, dabs, lots of different sorts of bream and damselfish – in clear
turquoise water over sand. The children take great delight in diving in once the
anchor is down and watching it set.
“Mummy can we have a ladder? Mummy can we have a
ladder? Mummy can we have a ladder? Mummy can we have…”
Mahon
Ruby (David’s mum) flew out to see us (at very
short notice), to stay in Es Castell near Mahon. We tried to anchor in the designated
anchorage within the port, but the port police moved all the boats on, and we
ended up on an island pontoon.
The view of Mahon from Isla Christina (island
pontoon).
While convenient for the city, Isla Christina was
the boatie equivalent of camping on the central reservation of the M6, and
required a dash in the dinghy across the fairway (dodging cruise ships, glass
bottomed trip boats, sailing and motor boats, and their resultant
wake/mini-Tsunamis) to get to the quayside.
The 6 am ferry passing Isla
Christina.
There were other (Italian and Spanish) children
marooned on Isla Christina too, and they joined up with Beth and Bryn to play
well into the night. When tag on a very small pontoon became dangerous, Bethany
and Bryn introduced them to:
·
silly
walk races (the penguin walk is my favourite)
·
the
eating-chocolate-with-a-knife-and-fork game (complete with dice, gloves, hat and
scarf)
·
that
game you used to play as a kid where each person draws a head then folds the
paper and passes it to the next person to draw the body, etc.
Eventually the game boys came out and peace
reigned for a while – until one little girl stepped from the passarel into the
water, missing her boat completely. David was quick off the mark in pulling her
out, but it was scary how quickly and quietly she went in…
Mahon is home to some
stunning boats. We dread to think how much this little Wally number in
metallic-peachy-bronzy-sort-of-colour (spell-check won’t like that)
cost.
Where’s Wally?
TICKETY TOO’s bottom (complete with one-way
mirrored panels for the Wallys to watch the riff-raff
through).
Unfortunately, this is the Balearics and it is
August and mooring fees are at their highest (€74 per night on Isla Christina),
and we rapidly started to run out of money. Our outboard then died and went off
to the outboard hospital by taxi. This meant that we could no longer safely
cross from the island pontoon to the quayside, so we went off to anchor in Cala
Taulera. To see Ruby, she (or we) then had to get a taxi to the beach (€40 round
trip), or we had to row about a mile, which we did a couple of times (begging a
tow from likely looking boats as they passed – the kids are good at this – I die
with embarrassment).
Ruby testing the firmness of our tubes on the
beach at Cala Tuelera.
Being stranded in Cala Tuelera wasn’t all bad. We
swam and snorkelled.
Cala Tuelera is bounded on one side by Isla del
Lazareto (former Leper colony) adjacent to Isla Cuarntena (former quarantine
island).
And has Fortalesa de Isabel II (the easternmost
point of Spain, so the guidebook says) on the other side.
The children practiced their raft-building skills
and paddle co-ordination with Neptuno (WISHBONE).
Was it left over right and under, or right over
left and under?
Follow my lead, boys!
We did some more Wally watching…
A baby Wally – a cool million pounds worth of
sports boat for towing donuts (gold-plated, one has to
assume).
…and learned the French technique for getting
afloat after going aground.
If you are cocky enough to sail to anchor, make
sure that you have enough water under the keel… (I really must stop doing
this…!)
We collected the outboard and it ran beautifully
for one trip, so we were able to see Ruby on her last night, when we met up for
a meal in Es Castell.
Food and merriment in Es Castell on Ruby’s last
night.
The technical hitch
bit
The next run out, the outboard died, stranding us
almost in the path of the Barcelona ferry.
Every yottie’s nightmare… particularly if you are
rowing your dinghy across the fairway.
We phoned the outboard hospital and explained what
had happened, they basically told us to pi** o**! (despite us having spent €115
with them the day before, supposedly getting the problem fixed). B, B and I
begged a lift from someone who worked in the Fairline boat sales office who
lived near the anchorage and she dropped us off at the beach to wait for David.
David on the other hand had to row back to the anchorage (about an hour) to
retrieve us from the beach. All this rowing is doing wonders for his pecs and
his 6-pack!
The next drama occurred when we tried to take on
water. None of the marinas supposedly had a vacant berth so they refused to let
us alongside to take water – not even if we paid for the time by the hour and
the water by the litre! At one point, Bethany was on the pontoon to take our ropes
and the marinero rushed up and threw the ropes back on the boat – trying to get
us to move off without her! You can imagine my panic and David's language! We
eventually tied up against the quay wall in front of the Barcelona Ro-Ro (shades
of David and Goliath) and David went off to make an official complaint to the
Port Office. They made a few phone calls and arranged for us to take water at
another marina. That little lot took 4 hours to sort.
On the way back to the anchorage after taking on
water, I went below (to lie down and recover from the experience – only joking!)
and the engine sounded funny. David checked and the alternator had fallen off
(the one that charges the batteries). When we got to the anchorage, he
disconnected the wiring, then checked the other alternator and found that the
tensioning bracket (supporting the alternator supplying the famous water pump)
had also broken. So we basically couldn’t start the engine. David begged a lift
from the anchorage back up to Mahon to get a new alternator bracket. The
French guy anchored next door kindly gave him the lift, but the floor of HIS
dinghy came adrift on the way up, and he had to motor a floorless dinghy 1 mile
back to the anchorage (see, it’s not just us!). After 11 hours down the engine
hole at 33ºC, David had taken the original alternator off, made a new bracket
and fitted the newest alternator in place of the original one, fitted different
belts and got everything working again – charging the batteries and driving all
the requisite pumps etc., with power to spare.
Cala en Porter
again
As we could now start the engine again, we
scurried away from Mahon, back to the calm of Cala en Porter. We
even had enough WIND from the right direction to be able to SAIL – averaging 8
knots under a partly furled genoa!
To celebrate our safe arrival back in Cala en
Porter, Bryn made American pancakes.
We were once told that long-term cruising was
actually 'boat
maintenance in exotic locations'. How true that is! Still, being
at anchor with a dodgy alternator in Menorca is
infinitely better than being at anchor with a dodgy alternator in
Aberystwyth!
We haven't fixed the outboard yet, but we need to
be somewhere that we can get backwards and forwards easily to a reliable
outboard engineering shop (which in Mahon we cannot). At least in some of the
smaller places like Cala en Porter we can row to shore and walk to a small
supermarket, so the lack of an outboard isn't a problem.
