Monday 8th June – At anchor in Cala Cabrita, Formentera

Soundtrack: Stan Getz and Astrid Gilberto on the CD player, accompanied by the smell of chickpeas and chorizo cooking for supper.

High Point: A family of four large dolphins came to visit us some 15 miles from Ibiza. They darted from side to side under the bow and swam alongside for some minutes. We stood in the bow watching them watch us. We’re amused by their evident curiosity about us. Leighton got some good photos.

Low Point: The anchorage off the beach at Altea was dire. The first night we rolled in a persistent swell, and we toyed with leaving, but there are few anchorages here sheltered from the south and southwest. The second night the wind blew up 30 knots off the land for three hours, forcing us to keep an anchor watch. The only good thing about it was discovering that our Bugel is really up to the job of keeping us well hooked.

We cross the zero meridian shortly after leaving the anchorage on Sunday 7th June. We’re now east of the line! After an uncomfortable two hours motoring across a lumpy swell left over from the strong southwesterlies in Alboran and Palos, we find the wind. A broad reach in a southerly F4 for most of the passage goes a long way to restoring our spirits which have been dampened by two disturbed nights at the anchorage. It’s rough, but we make good progress.

It is a milestone for us to be leaving the Spanish mainland behind. Our first landfall in Spain was in June 2006 at La Coruna, and we’ve been cruising in the Iberian peninsular ever since. It is good to be moving on now with our sights set on the eastern Med. The visibility is crystal clear, and we can see the peaks of Ibiza well before we lose sight of the mainland. Closing the island of Formentera, we have to keep checking our distance as the coast looks much closer than it actually is. Towards evening a westerly F5 piped up giving us a fast downwind finish to get us in and anchored before nightfall. 73 miles in 14 hours is good going for us. It’s heaven to get out of the wind and swell. We sleep well.

How to get good weather forecasts without Internet access has been a worry for us. We can get Navtex but we find it unreliable and the bulletins are inconveniently timed so we often miss them. We realise now that we already have the solution to hand onboard. It’s called the HF radio. The P3 upgrade we got for the Pactor modem has been a great investment, giving us the lightning speed of 1400 bytes/minute! The catalogue of weather info that we can request from Winlink includes grib files; Aemet’s Spanish coastal waters forecasts and MetArea III forecasts. We’re getting to know Jean-Claude in Lausanne (HB9MM) very well. He is the station we’re connecting to at the moment to download this stuff every day.