Exploring Majorca – late June 2023
The end of June saw us return to Offbeat in Palma. We’d had the boat exterior completed valeted for our arrival as the drought and hosepipe bans in France and Spain had meant that we’d been unable to clean her properly since she was handed over. Imagine our horror on arrival to find Majorca shrouded in a dense red cloud of Saharan dust and our boat covered a thick layer only a day after being cleaned! Boats!!
My sister Hilary and Rob joined us, neither are normally enthusiastic sailors but we’d seduced them with stories of the comfort and stability of the catamaran. We chose the Majorca leg of our trip for them as we’d always be able to find some shelter. In the end we all had a great week. We explored Palma then set off on a series of short cruises and nights at anchor around the coast. We were fortunate to coincide with the Superyacht Cup and were in close company with the beautiful J-Class yachts. We finally left Offbeat on a mooring at Porto Pedro on the east coast. A beautiful harbour and cheap location to leave Offbeat for a short while.
Majorca – Calpe July 2023 – Battery challenges and the ARC+ team assembles
A couple of weeks later we flew back out to Majorca. Anne-Laure and I returned a couple of days earlier than planned as we’d had an alarm from the boat saying the batteries were completely flat. We already knew we had issues with the battery charging which turned out after a long diagnostic process to be a single dead cell in one of the brand new batteries. Unfortunately Lithium batteries can’t be shipped by air so we’d arranged for them to be fixed in Cartegena on the Spanish coast in late July and we were only operating on 2 of our three batteries. It turned out that we’d left the fridges and freezers on and being on a mooring the solar alone wasn’t able to keep up with the power and the batteries were indeed dead. Fortunately no harm done, the generator started first time and within a couple of hours we were fully charged.
Adrian, Lyn and Lucy (our crew for the Atlantic crossing) all flew out to join us. We then sailed back round to Port Andratz where we met my old boss John and his wife Liz for dinner and the following morning set off for Ibiza.
Once again we had light airs but did get to play with the Parasailor for the first time and the Code 65 before motoring the last bit into Portinax. Anne-Laure spent the evening doing her evening class taking advantage of our Starlink system whilst we ate ashore. The following morning we sailed back around the North then East side of Ibiza all the way to the beautiful anchorage on the west coast of Formentera. A great opportunity to play with the two inflatable kayaks we’d brought out with us on this leg.
The final leg for the Atlantic team as another long 65nm sail from Formentera back to the Spanish coast at Calpe where we were going to change crews and continue south. Once again we were lucky with the wind and after a gentle start just after dawn we had a strengthening breeze on a quick reach and even had to put a reef in for the first time which was good practice.
The arrival in Calpe is spectacular with its famous rock Peñon de Ifach.
Calpe to Cartegena – a Sequent reunion
On arrival in Calpe it was like an old work reunion. A dear friend Michelle was on holiday nearby. Trevor and Joy were arriving to join us for the next leg as Adrian, Lyn and Lucy were leaving. David, Anne-Laure, Adrian, Trevor, Joy and Michelle had all worked together at Sequent in the 1980s and 1990s so we had a great evening together.
The following day we were keen to get going and sailed down to Torrevieja. At this point the temperature was rising as the region was beset with a heatwave so the focus was on swimming to cool down whenever possible. Unfortunately the hot water was perfect for jellyfish as well and David was lightly stung by one when jumping in. We had a careful lookout before venturing in for the next few days.
We had a fantastic trip with Trevor and Joy and finally left the boat in Cartegena.
Cartegena to Motril – August 2023 – the prodigal son returns and engine problems!
We’d left the boat in Cartegena for a couple of weeks whilst the new battery was delivered and the boatyard made a minor modification to the routing of a fuel line to sort out a fuel temperature warning message from the port engine. A day or two before we flew out our son Jamie let us know that he was going to join us together with his friend Gloria. Jamie has been living in Australia for the last three years and had just returned to Europe but had been travelling seeing friends so this was great news and the opportunity to spend some time with him.
The temperature was still scorching to it was great to arrive and after a day supervising the battery swap and other work we were back up to full electric capacity and able to set sail. Unfortunately there was little wind and we mostly motored down the coast and anchored near Cabo de Gata by Almeria. This is a nearly deserted but very long beach with a few houses but little else. It looks like a perfect beach for smuggling and apparently had a reputation for landing illegal immigrants to work in the nearby farms. This bit of the coast is incredible, with the Sierra Nevada mountains just behind there is plenty of water and with the heat its a perfect place for growing fruit and veg. The whole coastline is covered greenhouses, amazing.
Setting off the following morning in another flat calm, we immediately started getting the temperature fuel warning errors again – this time from both engines. Shortly afterwards the port engine stopped completely. This was potentially serious, we’d already made arrangements to meet the Yanmar engineers in Motril but this was another 40 nm along the coast. We diverted in to the port Almerimar which was only 7nm away and amazingly the Yanmar dealer in Motril sent an engineer along the coast (60 miles by car) to see us first thing in the morning. The problem we quickly diagnosed as a blocked fuel filter, plastic debris was in the tanks from the manufacturing process. He cleared the filters and we then set off again for Motril, arriving late in the afternoon where Jamie and Gloria left for Malaga. We were super impressed by both Marina Motril and Nautica Triton, the Yanmar dealers, the following morning they had emptied out fuel tanks, cleaned out all traces of further debris and then refilled the tanks all before Paul and Steph arrived for the next leg.
Motril and Malaga to Gibraltar – August 2023
Paul and Steph are another part of the former Sequent gang and now live just round the corner from us in Parkstone. Paul retired a couple of years ago and they previously owned a 46′ yacht in the Med. We set off from Motril and had a breeze for about an hour, enough time to hoist the sails and get about 5nm down the coast. At this point the wind switched off for the next week!
We motored 40nm down the coast to Malaga and berthed in the superyacht marina. We thought that we’d be the small boat in the marina but on arrival there were only 2 other visiting yachts our size and a couple of party day trip boats. The festival was on in town and we had a couple of good nights ashore. On the second day a superyacht finally appeared. It was Tatoosh, the former yacht of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. It was one of the largest in the world when it was built. We watched with a crowd as the owners or charterers where getting ready to leave into a convoy of black Mercedes limos and vans, but eventually got fed up waiting and went for lunch on the beach instead!
Malaga was also an opportunity to get our topping lift replaced. This one was user error, I’d got it on the wrong side of the mainsail and it had chafed through a couple of days before. Lesson learned! The owner of the rig shop is a very experienced lady in her fifties but usually she’d have one of her lads go up the mast. Unfortunately as it was a holiday weekend they were all off so she went up herself. I felt guilty, it’s a long way to the top of the mast (25 metres)!
We headed off down the coast and anchored off Benalmadena. This was an opportunity to try out my DiveBlue Nemo, this is a small and compact dive system that supports one diver to a maximum depth of ten feet powered by a battery. It means that we can scrub the bottom of the boat and investigate any issues with the rudders, saildrives, propellors or through hulls. As Paul is an experienced diver he went first to show me the ropes. It was a great success and I was able to spend a happy half hour underwater scrubbing the slime of the bottom of the boat and removing the first signs of barnacles from the rudders and propellers.
We dropped Paul and Steph off in the marina for the short taxi ride to the airport.
Final leg to Gibraltar – August 2023
With just the two of us for the final leg to Gibraltar we had fixed most of our problems and had worked out mostly how to run the boat. The final challenge was dodging the Orcas which had been plaguing the yachting community down the Portuguese and Spanish coast for the last two years. In early August a couple of Orcas had been seen between Gibraltar and Malaga for the first time and one boat had been attacked at Gibraltar itself. Fortunately we had an uneventful trip down with very clear conditions approaching the Rock. We could clearly see the hills on the Moroccan coast only 7nm south of the rock as we approached.
We finally concluded our Mediterranean cruise by berthing in Alcaidesa Marina in La Linea on the Spanish side of the Gibraltar border. First phase of our journey concluded. Next leg to the Canaries!!
