Spain

The hop from Sardinia to Majorca, one of the Balearic Islands, was pretty easy, mostly a lot of motoring. The Balearics seem to exist in an almost permanent high-pressure zone which makes for nice, sunny weather even when it's blowing gales to the NE.

We arrived on the SE coast of Majorca. We skipped Menorca because of info that suggested it was not yacht-friendly, at least the kind that seeks to avoid marinas. We did attempt to visit a "yacht club" but was put off by the 120 euro/night cost. John always has me call ahead and ask the price, mind you this was on the vhf and everyone could hear our conversation. The banter went like this,"120 Euros, silence, ughhh. 120 Euros? Yacht club, 'Yes, Me: 'for two nights? club.... 'No, one night" Me: silence.....oh..... I'll get back with you." Ten minutes later I called back and said, Thanks, but no Thanks.

The east coast of Majorca is limestone riddled with large caves and contains many small bays or "calas". Unfortunately, many only hold a couple of boats and we have never gotten comfortable with Med-style coziness.

One harbor of a reasonable size was Porto Colom. Amazingly, this seems to be our only picture of it as we tried to shoot a parade of VW-powered motor trikes. We spent a couple of days there hiding from weather (it's not always nice) and taking a bus adventure to Palmas in search of SIM cards for the phone and Internet.

This is something you don't see everyday, a French ketch sporting 2 spinnakers. These islands are just full of fancy boats. The French know how to do yachts.

Speaking of fancy, this is the Nahlin, a 300' steam yacht built in 1934 and used by Edward VIII. We looked it up on the internet and was flabbergasted to find the new owner only paid 25000.oo U.S. for this gem. Resale for it would bring millions.

We pressed on to Ibiza. The admiral was enamored by this lovely Dutch boat. Note the crew cleaning the sides; they probably do it every day...

Somebody had a very bad boat day. This anchorage was an open to the West and obviously there was a squall. On the second day the harbor began to get some wave action and it was time to move on.

Our last sight of Ibiza, an island at the entrance of Puerto San Antonio. For various reasons we never went ashore here.

We pressed on to Gibraltar. We finally closed with the coast. Much of it is uninviting. This didn't come out all that well, but there is a huge fortress on the top of this cliff.

We finally arrived in Gibraltar at 10:30 PM, i.e. very dark. The bay between Gibraltar and Algeciras is packed with ships. We picked our way between huge ships to La Linea, a marina just north of Gibraltar.

After spending the night outside the marina, we took a berth for a few days. While it's very nice and not expensive, it's mostly inhabited by sea gulls. We would have preferred to stay here before jumping off to Morocco but we were still in the EU and our visa was running out. We would have really liked to spend more time in Spain, especially the mainland. Since we speak passable Spanish it might have been fun. But, unlike a stupid country we know the EU tracks people who overstay their visas and the fines are substantial. Schengen Rules are Schengen Rules...

La Linea is not very pretty, but is blessed with a nice, big Carrefour grocery store. On our walks into town we ran across this "pillbox", probably built during WWII and facing Gibraltar just a few miles to the south. No doubt this redoubt was too massive to demolish.

Speaking of redoubts, here's a world-famous one, just past the sea gulls. Join us we we make the 100-yard passage to Gibraltar!

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