San Antonio - Ibiza

Hello Everyone, 

I have been very slack with contact and you must be wondering what has happened to us. Yes, we are still OK with no mishaps. 

Over the last two months, we slowly worked our way up the Spanish coast, stopping off in Cartagena and Valencia and several small anchorages in between. We have spent quite a lot of time in Barcelona which we really got to like. It is very bike friendly and we did quite a bit of cycling around the place to all the sights. When H and her family arrived, we took a cruise on a BIG ship, to Corfu, Santorini and Mykonos. We really enjoyed the week with the kids and a ship that did not rock. H and the boys joined us on the yacht in Mallorca for two weeks but as two of them got very sea-sick, they checked into a beachside hotel and we anchored just offshore. That way we still got to spend the days together. 

Mallorca is a very pretty island, with some mountains in the north. We enjoyed sailing the coast and looking up at the sheer cliffs. We spent a few days in the lovely village of Soller on the north coast. It is a fishing village, surrounded by an amphitheatre of high mountains. From there, it was back to Barcelona to do a repair on our forestay which had started coming apart and also to pick up our next lot of guests, T and H. 

We sailed back to Mallorca with them and spent an enjoyable time sightseeing and sailing to various quieter spots. I say quieter as the whole of France and Spain seem to have their boats in the Balearic Islands. From there we came to Ibiza and spent two days sightseeing before T and H left. Ibiza is a very pretty little island with some high-rise hotels on the coast, but not nearly as many as the Spanish mainland coast which is spoilt by wall- to- wall 10 storey hotels for package tourists along every beach. The interior of Ibiza is mostly empty with only a few very small villages and is covered in pine forest. There are some high hills but not high mountains like the north coast of Mallorca. The disappointing thing about Spain for me is that it does not LOOK Spanish! Funnily enough, Ibiza looks more like a Greek island than anything else. The architecture in Portugal and especially the houses in Madeira looked much more Spanish than Spain does! Anyway, the people here are lovely (especially the young guys with their six-packs! )

We are looking forward to seeing the next lot of guests in two weeks and also our next trip to Morocco. We will be going further south so will not retrace our steps in the north that we saw with Jan and Nick, which is good. Before then, we plan on a lot of work on the boat. I am finally going to get the sander out and re-do the woodwork. We are in San Antonio on the west coast of Ibiza at the moment. Unfortunately it is a lower-class version of our Kings Cross and is very tacky. It is full of English package tourists and the riff-raff of Europe, complete with regulation tattoos, nose rings and face and body paint to match their extremely skimpy outfits. 

We plan to move on to the island of Formentara where, we are told, it is quiet and the water is crystal clear. Did I mention our change of plan with the boat? We have found a shipyard in Barcelona, where we had our repair done, who will put our boat on the hard for the same price as the place in France. That will save us marina fees while we are in Morocco and also save us the two day trip to France. As I had already booked our return to Sydney via Marseilles and Paris we will stick to that. So now I have booked us a flight from Barcelona to Marseilles and we get to spend a few days there which will be good as neither of us have been to Marseilles before. 

We will be home on 22nd September so we look forward to seeing you all (our Australian friends, that is), then.

Cheers for now.

Dimitri and Arti.

Dinner on the neighbors boat

Dimitri having dinner on the beach in San Antonio