9.20.06

And It Drags On And On. . .

We made it to the Balearic islands of Formentera, Ibiza, Mallorca and are now in the safe Menorca anchorage of Mahon. The sails, save the last one, were beautiful, unexpected and redeemed the Med a bit in my eyes. The Balearic islands were supposed to be our next cruising ground for a month or two, but that is not to be. Even though we have friends flying in from the US to meet us in Mallorca we have decided to go through here quickly and make it to France.

Perhaps it's what I call the "cruiser's gauntlet" back in southern Spain that has burned us out combined with the nights in unsafe anchorages in Ibiza. In any case, we made the decision to take the first solid weather window to France.

The nights and days in Ibiza were eventful. One night a massive thunderstorm brought the the wind around to our open side and put us on a lee shore. It brought swells in that lasted all night. I found out that thunderstorms in the Med can bring winds from every quadrant. The next night, in the harbor of Ibiza, in 10 to 15 knots of wind (light winds), a brand new and unattended Oyster 53 dragged on to us. It became lodged between our bows. The Oyster's sides hit our starboard bow with every swell. Luckily my voice of anger carries out a ways and three boats came to help quickly. With their dinghies they pulled and pushed while I released chain and spun Cénou. The Oyster would have ended up on the rocks had it not been for these guys jumping on and re-anchoring the boat.

The next day it was our turn to save, an also unattended, Lagoon 41(catamaran) which our neighbors and I pulled off the rocks (hopefully my last time at the helm of a Lagoon). These same neighbors were the first ones to answer my call the night before. The good side of all this of course is that we got to meet our neighbors and that brought about some fun socializing which we all were in need of.

For those of you reading this and who are cruisers you may wonder why we are not simply taking a slip at a marina. The reasons are simple, cost and availability. If the slips are available for us they come at 200 dollars a night or more. The four days we spent at anchor in Ibiza, when the weather to go to Mallorca was against us, would have cost us 800 dollars. It's simply ridiculous. Neither does Ibiza have any all weather anchorages. On a side note about cost, we obtained a quote from a yard in Valencia Spain to get hauled out and stored for the winter. The quote came in at 28,000 USD. I am not sure why they even bothered sending it.

As we meet other cruisers leaving the Med we are trying to define from their experiences what we will do next year. Our plans are changing fast and constantly. We have heard from everyone that while Croatia may be beautiful it is also expensive and the people unfriendly. Italy is beset by theft in the south but otherwise very nice, France expensive and very crowded. Greece is a nice place to go through on your way to what most people say is a very nice and cheap destination: Turkey. So, the question is whether we travel the 1300 miles to Turkey or hang out in Elba, Corsica, Sicily and Sardinia so that we can get a feel for the places. As it stands now we are not even scraping the surface of the areas we have visited. The last plan is that we will start with small plans and expand our planning as the weather allows us to plan or not. In other words we are not planning.

Tomorrow, however, we do plan on leaving Mahon at 3 AM with established moderate easterlies. The trip to France is around 200 miles and so far it looks like it should be a nice one. I use several sources for forecast in the Med. www.swell-forecast.com, www.windfinder.com, www.windguru.com and for this trip I also
relied on our routers at Commander's.

In sum, this trip is dragging on for us. We are anxious to make it to the south of France so that when we want to haul out we will be able to just do it without having to worry about any crossing late in the season. While the past year has been great for us, the past two months through "the cruiser's gauntlet" have been less so. The weather worries, lack of safe anchorage and out of control expenses take their toll after a while. We are tired and ready to chill out and do home schooling which we are very late to start on.

All the best to everyone

Claude, Rike, (who always proof reads what I write, so all the mistakes are hers), Anouck and Celine.