Cartagena provided a wonderful opportunity for some site seeing in the ancient city, enjoyed by everyone, and there was a convenient local airport for dropping Sally off for her flight home and picking Liz up from her inbound flight.  

Everyone had the chance to look over the amphitheatre, museum and the extraordinary excavation and semi reconstruction of the place; well worth the visit if anyone else is visiting the area.

Nigel and I managed to stock up with some food in the city to prepare meals ahead of the first leg of our journey up to Barcelona with Liz; we cooked up three good sized meals on Friday that will do us probably two servings each (six dinners) over the first week.

Watching the forecast over the last few days, Nigel and I decided that we’d most likely get a following wind or broad reach from Cartagena to Formentera, an island just south of it’s more famous neighbour, Ibiza if we left early on Sunday morning. It’s not the usual and prevailing direction for the wind so we decided to take it.

For a change, the forecast was actually right! We covered 100 or so of the 138 miles of the journey, either directly downwind with our main sail and twin headsails out, or on a broad reach with main sail and full headsail. 

Champagne sailing and setting new records for miles covered over three-hour watch. At about 3am though, things started to change a bit as the wind came around almost 180 degrees onto our bow over the space of 30 minutes, and gradually increased from a gentle 10knots to high twenties. We spent the next few hours beating into the wind and reefing down to the maximum three in the main sail and a reefed staysail to make our destination.  

It’s a lovely wide bay where we are, with many ‘shack-style’ restaurants and bars along the front, and a beautifully unspoilt and nature-preserved piece of coastline – not a high-rise hotel to be seen.   

The sea bed here is a mix of lovely big sandy patches and very large boulders around them. Our first two attempts at anchoring found the boulders, the third, sand. Nicely secured overnight we enjoyed a full English breakfast and a lazy day onboard. We enjoyed Nigel’s pork tagine with couscous for dinner and an early night. I managed only about two hours sleep on the journey here after all the sail changes after 3am and slept like a log; up at dawn for a lovely golden sunrise.

Today Liz and I went ashore for shopping (just keeping our fresh food/ tonic water topped up). The first thing (almost) that we actually noticed as we dinghied ashore, was a lot of people enjoying the sunshine, but a lack of swimming costumes! Not sure I’ve been anywhere in Europe yet where so little is left to the imagination – some of which really should be! Hope they had plenty of sun cream on is all we can say! 

After some lunch and library time today, we went back ashore to test one of the local bars (with some super cold glasses of Spain’s favourite Estrella beer) we came back aboard for a late supper – second portion of chicken in risotto – one of my favourites.

Simon