It was 65 miles down to the next island in the group, so on September 1st we got up really early and set off. Late that afternoon we were sailing along the coast of Mallorca looking for a suitable spot to land. Unfortunately there was a strange swell that made all of the anchorages within a reasonable distance a bit sporty. We know because we checked them all. After sailing up and down the coast for a couple of hours, we ended up back at the spot we had originally landed at just before sunset. This time we were a little hungrier, a little hotter, and a little bitchier. A drink and a swim restored the mood though, and soon we were settled in, rolling away next to a beautiful beach.
It was a pity that we had the wrong weather for this coast, it was stunning, but by the next morning we had had enough of the swell and carried on to the most sheltered bay we could find on the chart, which turned out to be Porto Colom, a 25 mile sail down the east coast.
Porto Colom was as sheltered as it looked on our chart, which in our state of mind more than made up for the crowded anchorage and dirty water. The town itself was very charming though with sidewalk cafes running along the water front to explore, and traditional old fisherman’s houses with built in boat garages crowding the shore at the end of the bay.
At some point we had expected a potential surprise visit from someone we hadn’t seen since our Kauhale Kai days back in the Pacific. We didn’t realize that it would be here, and we didn’t realize that it would be today. Seonagh the master partier and legendary chef (or is that the other way around?) and Justin surprised Jaime at the dock when she was getting into the dinghy. Then they all came back to the boat and surprised me. Somewhere along the way day turned into night, there must have been a visit to shore because I remember discovering that ordering drinks in Porto Colom meant bottle service. The server delivers glasses, a bucket of ice and your requested mixer along with a bottle of spirit so that you can finish the pour yourself. I’m not sure how they stay in business but it definitely cut down on the workload of the service staff, which was good because Seonagh had her busy going back and forth all night treating the table to a never ending plate of local delicacies, the only one I can remember was the Xoriguer Mahon Gin dangerously served over ice with fresh lemon juice. Did I mention that they leave the bottle on the table?
Much to the delight of the other boats in the anchorage we made it back to the Slapdash at some point, I know this because I woke up there. Judging by the state of the boat the next day, and the dirty looks from our neighbours our party had been centered around the cockpit. Fortunately when you live in a boat you get to change neighbours, and neighbourhoods whenever you want. This limited our sheepish skulking about to just one day, since Seonagh had to get back to the big boat she was working on in Palma. We dropped them off after coffees on the opposite end of the strip we had terrorized the night before and headed back to Slapdash in need of a nap, but celebrating the random nature of our lifestyle. You truly never know how a day will end.
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We carried on down the coast line and stopped in some of the most stunning little pocket coves (cala’s) that we have seen in the whole world. In one of them we had the anchor down for a few minutes before someone with a familiar accent was treading water beside us. He introduced himself as Wayne from Saltspring island. He was staying with family and friends in one of the villas overlooking the anchorage when he noticed the Canadian flag and swam over. Canada is a very big country, and Saltspring island is a very tiny little island but it’s surprisingly close to the island I grew up on. If this wasn’t coincidence enough, later on when I was up at their villa I met his wife who grew up in Errington. Errington? Even people from Vancouver Island have never heard of it, but I grew up there on Grafton road just a few hundred meters away from her. Same school, same swimming holes, same everything. It’s hard to describe how ridiculous of a coincidence this is. There might be a few hundred people living in Errington, and its biggest claim to fame may be that it’s next to another tiny town called Coombs and their ‘world famous’ country market with goats on the roof.
In Cala d’or we also had some neighbours in a beautiful new Fountaine Pajot named Katmazu who invited us over for crepes. This was meant to be a lunch stop but the social calendar was filling up, the weather was stunning and the water was clean, clear and warm. We ended up spending four great days swimming, beaching and visiting new friends.
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The island had a magnetic pull over us and we wanted to stay longer but we had to keep moving. Our two weeks in Mallorca were nothing but stunning calas filled with decadence and coincidence but turned out to be nothing more than a warm up for our next Balearic islands; Ibiza and Formentara.
On September 11th we pointed Slapdash at Punta Castavi on Formentara island (well, Espalmador actually), it was 96 miles away so we made the trip overnight. This is meant to be a really nice stop, but we had a terrible experience. The anchorage was huge but so crowded that we had difficulty finding a spot. The water was murky and full of jellyfish. The beach was long but narrow, the few feet of sand between the water and the high tide line was full of naked Germans. We had three choices; sit around on the rocking and rolling boat, lay around on the disappointing beach with the kind of naked people that really shouldn’t be, or go find the legendary mud baths. It was a no brainer. We hiked through the low beach scrub for a few hundred meters following the path created by our mud seeking predecessors. This isn’t surprising considering that the mud had been highlighted anecdotally by every visitor we met, on every guide, brochure, and website. I realize now that this isn’t because they were anything special, but because there is very little else worth talking about on the island.
What did surprise us was that once we found them they were surrounded by signs telling you in three languages that it is not permitted to enter the mud baths. I should note that using the word ‘baths’ is a misnomer, it’s more of a marshy looking duck pond surrounded by mud flats that smell like decaying vegetation (or farts if you aren’t trying to be polite).
We wondered if we had the right place. It must have been, the trail was splattered with mud and at the beach end of the trail were a bunch of naked mud covered Germans. This was the end of the trail and there was nowhere else to go, but instead of finding whatever it was we had expected to find there were just these roped off fart smelling (I’m not trying to be polite) marshy flats with a bunch of signs telling you not to go in, which hardly seemed necessary given the smell.
We did what anyone faced with this disgusting scenario would have done; we turned around and left… right after we geared down, jumping into a pool of squishy foul muck and snapping a bunch of stupid pictures of course.
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Finishing the ritual means sitting in the sun and baking your slimy new sludge suit into a hard crust and then scrubbing it off in the ocean. I’m happy to report that despite our original reservations our silky new epidermal layers were quite radiant and smooth. Too bad we smelled like duck farts.
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I’m sure that you will be surprised to find out that even after this glowing review we high tailed it out of there early the next morning and took on a grueling 15 mile sail northwest to Ibiza. We arrived in time for lunch and stayed on somebody’s mooring in the nicely protected Cala Vedella. Getting a free mooring turned out to be far easier and happened more frequently than we ever expected in the Med, and this was just another example. We took advantage of the sheltered cala to fix a nagging problem. We ‘broke’ our halyard on the way from Sardinia to Mahon almost a month previously. I disconnected the topping lift and used it to run the ‘broken’ halyard up through the top of the mast and back down to the mainsail. We had been using this improvised setup ever since which worked fine when the main was up, but when the sail was down we had to put a fender under the boom since there was no topping lift to keep it off the dodger. Not a big deal, but a scenario lacking a certain amount of class expected of elite sailors likes us. I’m also not going to explain the terminology here because if you don’t understand any of it you probably don’t care about this bit of the story anyway, not that I blame you so I’ll get on to the point:
Jaime needed to go up the mast to fix this. Jaime is not fond of heights and somewhat unreasonably doesn’t like to spend much time dangling from a rope at the highest point of our boat. You might wonder why I don’t do it then, which would be a fair thing to wonder since I had been lying about the ‘broken’ halyard thing all along (more on that later). If only we lived in a fair world, or at least on a boat with a power winch. In our world I weigh a substantial amount, and we have no power winch. Cranking a normal person or even a tiny person up our mast is a substantial amount of physical work. Jaime cranking my 230 pound carcass up the mast is nearly impossible (nearly because on September 17th 2009 we did actually manage to accomplish this once on Santa Hana for an emergency repair and both swore never to do it again). Long story short, smallest crew goes up the mast on Slapdash.
You may be wondering about the broken halyard lie. Well, the halyard did in fact detach itself from the sail, but when I pulled it out of the mast and inspected it lacked the fray that one would expect to find on a broken line. You would also expect to find a knot with a broken piece of line dangling off on the main sail but there wasn’t one. This could only mean that the knot somehow untied itself; a scenario with approximately the same unfathomable odds as being struck by lightning, meeting someone from Errington in Cala d’or, and having your pecker nipped by an unknown beast while dragging along behind a sailboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Since all of these things have in fact happened, then a reasonable person should accept that it is possible for a knot to untie itself as well. Right?
I guess one could be forgiven for immediately suspecting the level of attention the person tying the knot gave to his (or her, but in this case his) task. I didn’t want to distract Jaime with these trivial details just before her death defying terrifying trip up the mast so found it prudent to go with the simplified non-functioning/broken version.
So Jaime found herself at the top of the mast yet again. My 10 minute estimate turned into 45 as the project revealed itself to be far more complicated than expected but in the end she got some great photos and saved the day. Thanks to her we left Cala Vedella with a functioning halyard and topping lift. Now I owe her big time. I’m thinking our next boat will have at least one power winch.
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This excitement all preceded yet another epic sail; the next day we fought our way through 8 demanding miles of warm weather and fair winds to San Antoni, home of the original and now legendary Cafe Del Mar. We would also find out that although unmentioned in the guidebooks that this was the temporary residence of the original and now legendary Kerry Boe. Kerry was a guy we met back in Bali who was crewing on a boat called Son of the Sun with his (and now our) friend Franz. We hadn’t seen him since they sailed off towards the sunset (and the Cape of Good Hope) a couple of years ago. It took us half of a moment to recognize the shaggy looking Scot waving to us from the bow of a 32 foot Bavaria as Kerry, but once we did we realized the other half of that moment later that this planned 2 day provisioning stop would likely lead to much more. We were right.
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We caught up with Kerry that night on his boat over a Sicily level of good lasagne that he had whipped up and plenty of Kerry’s house favourite vinto tinto. We heard about the rest of their trip, which included African adventures and a particularly gnarly bash sailing north from Cape Verde, through the Canaries and back to Germany. So in the time since we had seen Kerry last he had earned a prestigious new label; successful circumnavigator. We were also happy to see that he had retained his previous label that he had picked up during our biker gang days in Indonesia (Rambut) by successfully avoiding any sneaky haircuts. At first we thought the girls were calling him ‘Rambo’, a myth Kerry tried to perpetuate before the ah-ha moment when we all learned that rambut was the Indonesian word for hair.
By the end of the night Kerry had us convinced that our tasks were trivial and our itinerary was arbitrary, maybe we were a willing audience but I prefer to blame Kerry. We were here on this beautiful island with a local cala savvy Spanish speaking guide at the perfect time; the tail end of high season. It meant gorgeous weather and a thinning crowd of moronic charter boats. If you think that sounds harsh, spend a few weeks here observing the habits of these strange mammals and then we’ll talk; amusing anecdote coming soon.
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It came as no surprise to anyone that our two days stretched into two weeks. It was a blur of anchorage hopping between secluded calas, impossibly beautiful sunsets, beach barbeques on totally deserted beaches and picking giant fat delicious black ripened figs right off the trees. I had never seen a fig tree before and now we were literally gorging on their fruit. We were anchored in a secret Cala on the top of Ibiza when we found the first trees. Kerry and I had explored an ancient trail that led up the side of a big cliff while Jaime, the little white dot hundreds of feet below, paddled around exploring the bay in her recently replaced kayak. The trail led us to a centuries old ruined village. It was being reclaimed by the forest but stone walls, archways, trails cut through the stone and even a bread oven were all clearly visible. It was such a surprise since not long before the discovery we had lost the trail and almost turned around before deciding to go just a little further. If this wasn’t interesting enough a little ways past the village we found the fig trees. Kerry turned into a fig fiend and before long I was converted. We stuffed our mouths, bellies and pockets (for Jaime) and then made our way back down the cliff to the anchorage. We returned to an abandoned fisherman’s shack on the shore in time to build a little fire in a carved out pothole in the stone that had undoubtedly served this same purpose a thousand times before. We grilled our dinner over the hot coals, sipped our rum and sat dumb struck as the cliffs surrounding us were turned a million different shades of color by the setting sun, sublime. We were undoubtedly the luckiest three people in the world that day.
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The owner of the boat Kerry was taking care of, his friend David, flew in from Barcelona and we all cruised around at least a half dozen more calas like this. None were anything like the others and each had their special offering; a beautiful beach, perfect water, stunning sunsets, total seclusion, a nice beach bar etc. There was always something and only a few miles to the next one. This worked particularly well because if the weather changed we would just pop around the corner to find a change of scenery and a nice calm anchorage. Great company, isolation and free moorings; was this really the Med?
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Just north of Playa De Comte off the west side of the main island of Ibiza lies Isla Conejera and Isla del Bosque. To find deep water on your way into San Antonio you need to pass around the outside of both of them. If you are careful or follow a local you can pass between them in the right spot and keep 12 feet under you hull. If its calm, the water is clear, the sun is high, you are in a Gemini and feel like showing off you can even pass to the South of Isla del Bosque in 4-5 feet of water. If you are a brain dead moron you could also try this at dusk, motoring at 6 knots, inexplicably aiming at a section of exposed rocks. I would like to say that again, exposed rock! We sat sipping sundowners and watched that exact scenario unfold. We had just been telling Kerry and David about our tricky little shortcut south of Isla del Bosque when a big chartered Lagoon came screaming around the corner motoring flat out. They altered course and headed straight for these rocks. It was obvious that at this time of day they wouldn’t be able to visually navigate their way over the reef, that combined with the speed and purpose with which they made that course change could only mean that the captain had done this so many times that he could do it with his eyes shut. We all stopped talking and were shocked by what we were seeing waiting for the last second skilful maneuvering which would save this catamaran from meeting what appeared to be an inevitable conclusion. Sometimes appearances are not deceiving. There was no last second maneuvering and with an audible crunch this massive catamaran went from six knots to zero as it impaled itself on the exposed rocks that it had been charging towards. It’s a sickening site to see the bow of a boat that size dip and the stern lift from the force of impact and immediately stop. The ricochet action of diverted force combined with the props chewing into rock in reverse spun them off the rocks and they bobbled around for a bit as people scurried around on deck. We watched them disappear around the next corner, so we know they made it at least that far without sinking. In all likelihood they had dropped the keys off with the charter company and were probably on a flight home while the boat slowly sank at the dock. Even Kerry and David, locals accustomed to the idiotic charter boat antics you see every day in the Med ranked this one pretty high on the ‘oh my god did that just happen?’ list.
We finally left on the very last day of September. We had a brilliant weather window and made the decision to keep sailing instead of stopping on the mainland as we had originally planned. This cost us a visit to one of the most happening cities in the world (Barcelona) but as compensation we rode following wind and seas for 348 miles.
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On October 1st we crossed off a very significant trip milestone; for the first time since May 21st 2009 we were sailing in the Western hemisphere.
On Tuesday morning, October 4th we were staring up at a massive rock, The Rock. Hello Gibraltar!
I can’t wait for experiences like that.
Posted by Lorry Reynish | 10. Dec, 2011, 8:51 amWell then get out here you crazy! It’s as awesome as it looks.
Posted by theslapdash | 11. Dec, 2011, 11:39 pmYou should not have dumped Formentera for the first anchorage. The south on Formentera has nice beaches, young and old hippies (granted some of them naked, and some of them even naked Germans), nice bars on long natural beaches.
Posted by rainer | 10. Dec, 2011, 4:47 amYeah we heard that too…about a week after we’d left. D’oh! Next time around. And we’ve sort of taken a liking to hippies; young and old. Even the naked ones eventually wear us conservative-minded Canadians down. Although we’ll never understand the butt floss. That’s just showing off. Lol.
Posted by theslapdash | 11. Dec, 2011, 11:42 pmWHAT ? for sale ..Why would you do such a thing ? So you can go home and work 9 to 5 in a boring work your life away cycle like most of us .Just kidding ,,,enjoy reading about your fantastic adventures ..sad to see them come to an end..Good lick
Posted by james | 10. Dec, 2011, 4:46 amOh don’t you worry James. We have ZERO intention of going back to a responsible job. We’re just selling the boat…so that we can go on another adventure! See how that works? You trade one in for another when you’re done. Cool huh? Well, except for the emotional part of selling our first beloved boat. Heart says owch. You’ll have to keep reading to find out what the next phase of the trip will be after the boat phase…
Posted by theslapdash | 11. Dec, 2011, 11:44 pmMotorcycles down the length of the tree Americas??
Posted by Ken Page | 12. Dec, 2011, 12:24 amOooo good one. But we can’t tell you yet Ken, or we’d have to kill you. And we really like you so that would be uncomfortable.
Posted by theslapdash | 17. Dec, 2011, 11:32 pmNice to read more as always guys!!!
Posted by Rob Pennington | 10. Dec, 2011, 2:20 amGawww shucks Rob. Thanks bro.
Posted by theslapdash | 11. Dec, 2011, 11:45 pmI always love reading your updates. Great pics too!
Mike
Posted by Mike | 09. Dec, 2011, 9:39 pmThanks Mike. Hey looking fwd to finally meeting you guys in the Carib. Consider this your 3 weeks warning…
Posted by theslapdash | 11. Dec, 2011, 11:46 pmI don’t believe a word of this, your probably making it all up just to make the rest of us feel like we live a completely sucky life.
Posted by Ken Page | 09. Dec, 2011, 5:52 amBut I know this not to be true!
Barbados? What do they have for cheap beer?
Posted by Ken Page | 09. Dec, 2011, 7:40 amWhich part’s not true? The beer prices? My hair color?
Not sure what Barbados offers by way of reasonably priced cervesas but I think it’s the home of Mount Gay rum. I mean rummmmmm.
Posted by theslapdash | 11. Dec, 2011, 11:47 pmOooohhhh I get it. Yes, you’re right. It’s terrible awful horrendous stuff this Med business. Get back to work all of you!
Posted by theslapdash | 11. Dec, 2011, 11:49 pmAhhhhhhh heaven. You guys have mastered the knack of finding little pieces of paradise almost everywhere you go!
Posted by Pamela Bayntun | 09. Dec, 2011, 4:17 amHeaven indeed. You and Dad’ll get your turn when you come out to see us in the Carib. Lobster anyone?
Posted by theslapdash | 11. Dec, 2011, 11:49 pm