Alicante and Calpe 38 38.239N 000 04.680E

Persephone... Cruiser/Racer
Nigel & Karen Goodhew...
Mon 30 Jul 2018 07:16
It’s been some time since I updated these pages. Since then, we have had 3 weeks back in the sun scorched UK and much has happened.

We returned to Persephone on 19th July, arriving on the boat in the marina after dark. It was only in the morning that we started to notice that things were not quite as we had left them. Mooring lines were configured differently, and our beloved P had somehow sustained some damage to the port side and to the starboard side of the transom. It seemed that our boat had been moved, or that the large motor yacht in the space next to us had bumped her somehow.

I went up to discuss the matter with the marina staff in their splendid and air conditioned office. My spanish is next to non existent, but after a few minutes I managed to glean that something had happened, that the marina knew about it and that they had a competent yard with a good painter who could sort everything out for us. And, that the repairs, or most of them, would be carried out at the marinas expense. But not until the following week!

An appointment was arranged. The appointed time came and went. I feared the onset of the dreaded “manana” culture, but it turned out to be a minor bout of food poisoning which delayed our painter, Miguel, for 24 hours. The repairs took place on the water, requiring us to turn the boat round after part 1, to allow access to the other side, and then, to move to the marina waiting pontoon for the paint and finishing. Despite the extraordinary heat, a positively Saharan 35 plus degrees in the sun, the process went relatively smoothly and the resulting repairs are attractively invisible. But the process cost us a week, and we finally managed to tear ourselves away from Alicante on Saturday 28th. The lovely people at Marina Alicante covered the full cost of the repairs in the end, for which I thanked them and praised the straightforward, no nonsense professionalism of the management.

Our first sail for a month was a light wind reach along the developed coastline, edging north east, past Benidorm, towards Calpe, a distance of some 35 miles.

By the mid afternoon, it became clear that the anchorage at Calpe proper, would be a rolly lee shore, so we elected to slip around the headland, a huge granite and sandstone edifice, and anchor in it’s lee to the north east of the town. And it is here that we have spent the weekend, while sporting derring do has been fulfilled elsewhere;

Tim won his first windy offshore race in Cora, sailing double handed with Nick Blevins in the RORC Channel race, Geraint Thomas won the Tour de France and Lewis Hamilton, the Hungarian Grand Prix. Congrats to all, especially Tim and Nick.

Sent from my iPad