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.