Sailing to mainland spain (WL 20)

NEW:

From now on I will put together a small video at the beginning to show the most important photos of that week. Below you find the description of events.

It was really difficult to wait for a good weather window to escape the Balears. Originally we would have loved to also stay some time on Ibiza and explore that island but in reality it turned out that the window we had, lasted only 2 days.

So we had to keep going and do a long trip!

The Route to mainland Spain

We started easy and just crossed the bay of Palma to anchor on the other side. That helped us to get into boat life again, to get used to the movement and to keep us going.

Next stop was Port Andratx, a very nice habour in the south of Mallorca. We had a place at the marina and took some time to stroll around and have coffee for our bigger passage.

As days are quite short these time of the year, we started our crossing to Ibizia 4 am in the morning. The sea state was ok, just a little bit bumpy of the wind of the last days. The wind was there and we could sail for quite a while.

In the late afternoon we arrived to a very pituresque anchorage at Formentera. We took Ronja to the beach and had a very good dinner. Acutally everything tastes like a 5 star meal after a long sailing day! 🙂 On the next day we planned to start at 4 am again, but the weather looked bad – again. I came to a „now or never“ decision. IF we won’t start now, we would have been trapped another week or two! So change of plans! We decided to start the trip around lunchtime and to relax in the morning. Then the wind was also heading in our direction.

We were fleeing big, black clouds that were ready to bring another low pressure system in. Luckily we could sneak through and made it to Calpe just shortly before midnight!

Arriving at Calpe

The big rock of Calpe welcomed us, a very stunning view!

What’s really interesting when you are on a longer passage: you can smell land! And every piece of land smells differently. It was so clear when we came closer to shore, mainland Spain is full of flavours! As there was no space in the port of Calpe (many fishermen!), we just anchored next to it.

It was a rocky and short night. On the next morning we continued to Alicante, where we planned to do a break to get some rest. But that’s another story!