From Cartagena to the Baleares

At last we are done with wintering! It’s been long, boring, painful and depressing but now we are on the move again. We leave Cartagena for the Mar Menor, 30Miles up north, after the Palos Cape. The Mar Menor is like a giant swimming pool of 10 by 5 Miles and with a maximum depth of 6m. We arrive there at twilight and almost without wind left. We miss the 8pm entrance (it’s a bridge that opens every even hours), and we have to wait till 10pm. Then we pass the Tomas Maestre Harbor and we drop the anchor when we fill like it and we enjoy a good night sleep. It’s funny to think that we can anchor anywhere here, even right in the middle of this inner sea, and some people do it to fish at ease.

The next day we sail to one of the islands, Isla Perdiguera, where we meet again Marjolaine and Fabien on their sailboat Quasar. We first met few days before in Cartagena, they had left their boat in Almerimar for the winter and went back to Bordeaux for few months. The Mar Menor is a great place to practice kitesurfing but as Ludo just sent the Naish kite in the air, its tube bursts out…so now our two kites are down and need to get repaired. Luckily there’s a surf shop in the south of the Mar Menor where we get it fixed in only 24 hours, just enough time to endure a nice little gale and we move again. All in all, this inner sea is not that nice, certainly not the lagoon we imagined, we won’t stay for long. The horizon is blocked by ugly 70’s style buildings, and it’s really a shame because this site has been extraordinary before this concrete tsunami: a 15 kilometer isthmus, a long sandy beach with dunes between the Med and this pool with high mountains and the Palos Cape as background.
On March 22, we leave and sail straight to Moraira, 71Miles up north along the coast to shorten the distance to cross to the Baleares. We have to do it this way because there’s no reliable weather window. We spend two nights in Moraira harbor, do some serious food shopping, and clothes washing. Quasar arrives on the same day, they took their time and called at different places along the Costa Blanca and they also wait for favorable conditions to cross to Ibiza. On March 25 at 2pm we leave for the islands, we’ll sail through the night. The wind is good, S-SE force 4 but the sea is awful for a couple of hours, the remaining swell from the previous windy days. No problem to negotiate the cargo traffic off Cabo de la Nao before the night. Our old good wind pilot will steer almost all night until the wind falls flat at dawn and forces us to enjoy the head-aching noise of the motor. And then surprise, surprise, just at sunrise, about 5Miles from the coast, we see a whale, a fin whale precisely. Since we searched the web and we learnt it can be up to 22m long and weight up to 50t and it was right there, 50 meters from the boat, easy and quiet, having its breakfast. In spring, these whales can be spotted around the Baleares on their migration way to North. Of course, we didn’t manage to take any proper picture; it was plunging and reappearing where you can’t expect it. So you have to trust us ;-)
After so much excitement, we finally reach Espalmador anchorage: pristine clear water, white sandy beach, dunes… but what the F…! Mooring buoys everywhere! Can we drop the anchor or do we have to use these buoys? We read so many warnings about the ridiculous tariff of moorings in the Balearics. We called the number printed on the stickers on buoys and learnt from a nice guy that booking is compulsory only from June to September, now it’s free and we can stay a week!
We will stay anchored there 5 days, Marjo and Fabien rapidly joined us there. We share the same concern about getting fat because of the so good cooking we allow us and the lack of exercise. We took the opportunity of going ashore for long walks around the island and discover its salty lake, dunes, turquoise bays, cliffs and amazing mounts of dry sea weed (posidonia that grow in submarine prairies), from the boat we thought they were rocks. Then the weather got bad, rain, clouds, freshening wind, so we decided to indulge ourselves a short stay in Formentera marina (2Miles away, hard!). Happily in this low low season, the harbor is deserted and the tariff is acceptable (20 Euros per night, in July it’s rather 110 Euros, but forget it you need to book a good year in advance). Again food shopping, web surfing, and alternatively dinner on Quasar or Ata Jata. On April 2 we‘re back at Espalmador anchorage, again a long sailing day ;-) We’ll lazy there two more days and say bye bye to Marjo and Fabien who are going to party in Ibiza.
Against the most basic logic, we decide to go to the Calla Badella on the West Coast of Ibiza, which is exactly the sector where the wind is coming from! We struggle one full day to cover 10Miles, great… We give up and we have the bright idea to go to the Cala Llentrisca to spend the night. It can be described simply by the following: the Cala Llentrisca is very small, narrow, with fishing nets on one side, buoys on the other, moored local fishing boats and rocks right in the middle…! We spot a “deep” sandy pool and drop two anchors one at the stern and one at the bow to avoid swinging as we are literally anchored in between two rocks. The night will be perfectly windless! Lucky us. The next day we weigh anchor at 9:30am, firmly decided to rally Cala Badella (6M away) where we arrive around 1pm. It’s a little holiday place at the end of a nice cala which had been surely beautiful before the Spanish resort builders took care of it. We stay only one night and we feel like going straight to Ibiza town, of course again with a weak wind on the nose. And it’s gonna be slow, long, boring, all day against the wind to sail 16M and finally we end up again in Espalmador. We would have struggled all night long to reach Ibiza. This time the anchorage zone is almost full, again the weather turns bad, rain, clouds, thunderstorms, we don’t even go ashore. Finally, on April 9 we arrive at Marina Botafoch on Ibiza (Eivissa), again don’t even think about it in summer time, it’s overpriced and anyway full. We took the opportunity to walk a lot in the steep streets of the fortress and we’ll buy some food if shops are open, Eastern is serious here, and nope, we are not gonna go dancing at the Pacha!