madrid

a beautiful journey by train across most of spain revealed the most surprising sites: very rural and some very poor places; certainly something not expected of Europe. at the end of the line we arrived in the beautiful city of madrid. because we are now so accustomed to more quiet places, a city this big and busy is a bit overwhelming. our sightseeing here is not the most conventional. we enjoy things like the AC in the hotel room a nice big dry bed, or the nice long showers with the rarity of hot water. and believe it or not what we fancy the most is to go to the movies. all things that are not so common on board. but more than for tourism we came to madrid to renew a passport which not so unbelievable is already full of stamps and also to take my flight back home for a couple of months for now. a short stay with mixed feelings of course.

gibraltar

back in palma we found out that argentineans can come without a visa to europe and stay up to 3 months consecutive and 6 per year if they go out of europe for 3 months. some complicated rule which in simple terms meant that we could not stay in Europe after august 31. big problem considering we decided to cross the atlantic in november. so we changed plan from the originally intended stay in the south of spain to another place outside the European union. That only gave us two options. morocco or gibraltar. after making inquiries of marinas and chandleries we decided on gibraltar and headed there.



so from ibiza we had the last sail of the med. approximately 300 miles south west on what were the most perfect weather conditions of the last couple of months.
favorable winds and currents followed by no wind some times and flat seas and many many dolphins swimming around. No clouds, beautiful skies… etc. we really had all one imagines on a passage. It was rather emotional, at least for me; as I will be getting off the boat for several months; so it felt like a perfect farewell and close of a chapter.


The only complicated part of this leg came when we had to round the rock of Gibraltar. This was a race against time. There is a constant easterly current from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean of 2 knots. That means we already had current against. In addition, this current can be reversed or increased depending on the wind and the tides. to have favorable tide we looked at the charts and figured out we hat to arrive in Gibraltar, at the marina at 7:20 PM that is one hour before high tide. The calculations gave us the best favorable times to sail around from 3:20 PM until 7:20PM. We could not stay out one minute after because the current would start to play against us. In addition we had strong winds against (20 knots) which would make it impossible to advance with both current and wind against. We force the engine, motor sailed and generally tried to get the best speed for the last 4 hours of our sail, having the last hour a speed of even only 1.5 knots… but finally unbelievably enough we made it into the marina at 7:19PM . we could not believe it when we made the entry in the blog. Exactly on time. A bit stressful but we made it.




once in the marina we relaxed, cleaned as usual and started packing for our trip to madrid and for me my departure. we also went to the immigration authorities and were pleased to have confirmed that, being a British territory, argentineans could stay here without problems and without the 3 month cap that we had in spain. so we found the place that would become home for esteban and puerto seguro until november. a perfect spot with a good and comfortable marina, chandleries, many restaurants shops, and just a walk (and a cross of a live runway) away from spain. a very interesting place indeed.




after so many miles our boat needs serious maintenance. its over 32 years are really showing, not to mention the thousands of miles that we have covered already. There is nothing really wrong except that every item on board needs to be looked at, inspected and in some cases some parts replaced. so esteban will do just that in the next three moths to come. Puerto seguro will be like new again and ready to cross the atlantic at the end of the year.

ibiza

ibiza is in the south of the balearic group and the most western island, very close to mainland spain. we had heard about this island but really did not know much about it. when we arrived we realized that the place is famous for the clubs, the music and the parties. the port of san antonio, where we anchored is not very pretty. it has tall ugly buildings from them 80s and the shops and restaurants are not stylish at all . everything is tailored for the tourist that visits this place which must average around 18 years of age. it is like cancun on spring break. little activity in the day and lots of parties at night. young europeans, mostly british, come here in the summer to party hard. Walking around the streets of san antonio confirmed to us that we are definitely getting old.


besides the craziness of the town, we found the port to be conformable and we enjoyed the company of other sailor friends we met here. in fact this island was particularly special for that. we met wonderful people from spain whom we went with to the famous café del mar bar and had some drinks. We also met a great couple from Ukraine and another from south africa. With all of them we spent some quality time.







we also did the typical touring around by bus this time and discovered some pretty and interesting parts of the town of Ibiza on the other side of the island. at the end we had a wonderful time here; not the typical party time but some more quiet and relaxing one!

valldemosa

after visiting palma on the cost we went up the mountains of the north of mallorca to soller. we actually never made it there but instead visited many other smaller towns and one particularly beautiful called valldemosa; small and quiet! definitely more of our type of place. in this town we saw that the back tire of the scooter had two big lumps. this made us choose smaller roads to get back to porto colom. driving at high speeds in the fast highway would have been very dangerous. we were actually lucky we did not have an accident on the way there. imagine that… having sailed safely through pirate waters and end up in an accident in a motorbike in the highway… rather pathetic. But nothing happened and we had a not so urban route back to port. small towns and countryside views.

palma really has it all: beaches, great ports, big cities and small, historical sites and architecture and even their own language which is not like Spanish; at least we could not understand. thankfully everyone also spoke spanish, so communicating was not a problem at all.