Day 1 

We woke up and went for a swim before we even thought about hoisting sails. We are getting the most out of the Mediterranean Sea! It is finally warm :)
We left our anchorage sailing, but soon enough we had the engine on already. The wind was too little and almost died completely. 
We saw dolphins nearby so we decided to make an extra loop and go following them. They were different dolphins than the common Atlantic dolphins that we were used to. These were completely dark grey and didn’t have that white belly that our old friends have.
They were definitely shyer than their Atlantic brothers, so didn’t come close to us. We even saw they had babies swimming with them 😍

At the afternoon the wind got stronger (5kts now 😂😂) and we decided to hoist the spinnaker to see if we could get something out of it. Wow, what a great idea! We are cruising at 5kts boat speed now! We even hit 7kts boat speed at some point.
It was decided than that we won’t sail along the coast anymore, but we will open towards Algeria until we have good angle with the wind to jibe to the Baleares.

The night was also very calm. Starry night, constant wind, great boat speed. Thiago was lucky on his first night watch, nothing exceptional happened.

Day 2

I woke up at 7am, Jurri hadn’t call me for my shift yet. Chris was still sleeping, so I left him in peace and went to join Jurri at the cockpit. We were sailing in a curtain of fog. Visibility was maybe 100m. That’s why he didn’t call me, he wanted to be alert as we couldn’t see what was in front of us.
But it got better quickly, so he went to bed and I took over.

I heard a Pan Pan call in the radio to be alert for several refugees boats drifting away between Algeria and the Spanish coast between Cabo de la Gata and Cartagena. I check the map and we are in crossing the line between Algeria and Cabo de la Gata. We have 90miles to go until we are in the same height as Cartagena, so I guess the coming 24h will be in the lookout for rafts with people onboard :( so sad.

We ended up motor sailing most of the day, as the wind didn’t blow as we expected from the forecast. We saw whales in the afternoon ❤️ pilot whales, and they came quite close to the boat. We were curious about them, and they were curious about us. It was a beautiful encounter!

We also had the Spanish Immigration police visiting us onboard. Jurri was sleeping, I was inside breastfeeding Chris and Thiago was outside on his shift, and suddenly he was surprised by the Spanish tender coming at full speed towards Songster. At first he got shocked, thinking that they were pirates of even immigrants trying to board on our boat. He relaxed when he saw it was actually the police 😅 before we knew they were already onboard, inside the boat and searching for any suspicious activity. They checked the boat papers, asked us some questions and laughed at Chris, that at this point was really curious about the four guys with dark clothes, helmets and guns in our boat 😅

Nothing else really happened today, so we finished the day with a nice vegetable soup and got ready for a noisy evening, motoring towards the Balearic Islands.

Day 3:

The hotest day ever. I would risk saying we reached 40 degrees Celsius this afternoon. Not enough wind for sailing, and just a warm oven like day. We had clouds in the sky the whole time, so it was one of these days that the clouds keep the heat in the air, and there was no wind to give us any breeze. To complete the package, we got a 1-2m swell, so we were feeling hot and a bit uncomfortable also. 

I can say it was a long sweaty day, but as the sun started going down, we finally got wind!
Oh god, Thiago was saying the whole day that he wanted só adventurous weather. He asked for it, he got it! We went from 3 kts of wind to 20 kts, and heeell yes, we were sailing again!!!!

It reminded me so much of sailing between Curaçao and Bonaire. I missed those Caribbean rough sailing days. We were galloping the waves, at 45 degrees angle, healing and splashing, and feeling alive! Chris found it to be a great adventure also, he was laughing in our cabine, trying to stand up with the boat almost sideways 😂😂😂

We hit 7.6 kts of boat speed!! Whopwhopwhop!
With that great speed, we made it into Formentera with the sunrise, and we had breakfast at our anchorage. 

I can’t believe we arrived where the water is as blue as the Caribbean. Mama, I’m home!

We’re going to Ibiza (Part 2)

Crew

Crew Logs

Comments (0)