Torrevieja to Marina de las Dunas
Minka of Southampton - Cruising Log
Edmund Wigan
Fri 21 Oct 2011 18:56
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Position 38:06.495N 0:38.669W Marina de las
Dunas
First a bit about Torrevieja where I stayed two
nights at 32 euros a night. I only stayed because of a strong unfavourable wind.
I was moored next to an old wooden project.
 The strange symbol on the back is just
that..........strange. Notice the special paint effects.......some of it rubbed
off on Minka's fenders during the night.
 I think I should offer a prize to the best caption
explaining what this is about. A great opportunity missed for the green grocer's
apostrophe
 I think the new windlass on the pointy end is worth
more than the boat. You have to admire anyone taking on a project like
this........I just hope he has a long life expectancy. There are also some very
posh boats
 This is a very large aluminium built yacht with an
aerorig. The bow and stern booms look like they are made of very expensive
scaffolding. The winches on the mast are bigger than Minka's engine. This was
easily the largest yacht in Marina Salinas.
I had an early start this morning and went to fill
up with diesel before the marineros got up at noon. We then set off aiming to go
to about 15nm to Santa Pola. Can that place having anything to do with Father
Christmas, his toy factory and reindeer farm at the North Pole (no children
they don't eat the ones with red noses). Anyway I had a disaster soon after
leaving ...........it rained. Proof below
 Some explanation. This is a picture of the chart
plotter with a radar overlay. Minka is bottom left just below where it says
Torrevieja. The straight line pointing from her north with a little east is her
predicted track and to starboard (ok the right) is the rain and two fishing
boats in there somewhere. At this point the sky looked black ahead with a little
lightning and quite a lot of thunder. Then it rained on us and we weren't amused
so we came into this place which was interesting. It is a marina off a river and
that creates a problem in that it silts up. The depth sounder kept going off
coming in and the alarm is set when there is less than 1 metre under the keel.
It got down to 0.7nm which is a water depth of 2.3mts.
The good bit is with the unsettled weather in the
ten miles we covered we did sail a good bit of it with winds varying from 335
veering to 190 degrees and strengths from 4 to 16kts. So plenty of sail
trimming.
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