Sailing to Ibiza – Formentera

Formentera is the smallest inhabited Balearic Islands. I had never been there and, since I had seen Lucia y el sexo (Sex and Lucia), a wonderful movie from Julio Medem I was willing to visit.

I saw this movie in a small cinema in countryside France, when I was living there. I was alone in the cinema room. First time alone in a cinema. I was about to ask the girl that was selling pop-corn to join me. Luckily, I didn’t. She would have seen me as a pervert after seeing the movie.

Anyways, it was mid-autumn in that gray and rainy place. Seeing such a bright (photography is consciously over-exposed) movie in such an environment (clearly a Mediterranean Island) moved me to tears. After all, as the Serrat song says, yo nací en el Mediterráneo (I was born in the Mediterranean).

Well, Formentera is so close to Ibiza that to get there, we had to circumnavigate a bit of Ibiza. Thisrock is called Es Vedrà and is part of Ibiza:

Again, I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to get the 4am shift. Jeez, at least, I could see the sunrise over Ibiza:

We spent the day in Espalmador, an islet between Formentera and Ibiza which has a good sheltered beach. Did I say that nudity in Formentera is well spread ? I loved the island.

We swam to the shore and walked towards a sulfurous mud lake (see the movie and you’ll see how sexy it can become). I decided to dive there (photo has been censored for decency – don’t wanna see make naked and muddy). Since then, my skin is soft as a baby’s bum. I’ll have to do that more often.

Thru one of the guys in the crew, we secured place to moor in Formentera’s harbour. Really nice boats:

That afternoon (I remind you my day had started at 4am) we spent the day touring the island which has some amazing views:

I’ve named this last picture Sex and Marc. You’ll see why when you see the movie. Sunset at Cap Barbària is said to be beatiful, but we were sort of late. Instead, I had the moon:

That night, we had a wonderful dinner (paella, fideuà and some nice starters) in a place called La Pequeña Isla. Advisable. Xavi and Gerard Barracus decided to explore the nightlife there (Italian-invaded) with terrific success it seems. At least they woke me up when chatting to some girls.

Sailing to Ibiza – Valencia

Wednesday saw me waking up at 4am (again, the 4am shift). Pitch black. First time I had to really use the GPS, the radar and my intuition not to hit a rock. Luckily, we were the only ones moored there, so chances of crashing into another boat were negligible.

I was hungry. The first tuna we had fished was already way down my stomach.This is Xavi showing the tuna we stewed with rice:

After a while sailing (I tried to sail as much as I could, but my boat-mates were sort of hurried: they switched the engine on as soon as the wind was under 13 knots), we arrived at the wonderfully destroyed town of Fanals, an example of what development in coastal areas in Spain has become:

There, we saw the first kiwi boat:

Yes ! There we were. Match 4 of the America’s Cup was to be held there in a couple of hours ! Let me summarize it easily: you better watch it in the boat TV. It’s anyways very exciting to be there, in the middle of the craze (the skipper was really stressed). The umpires push you back as you can’t go in the regatta field, huge boats push you forward as they don’t stop, Team New Zealand and Alinghi are just playing around you (they use the spectators’ boats to annoy each other)… a real chaos.

Well, we could see the race. The start:

2nd buoy windward:

and with the spinnaker’s on to the finish line!

After all this craze, lunch and a cruise towards Formentera. In the meatime, Xavi (the guy above) had secured 5 more tuna. I think nobody of us had ever been half as lucky when fishing: 6 tuna in 2 days.

That night we dined really fresh fish. Unsurprisingly, at the very end of the trip, the boat had some blood stains.

Sailing to Ibiza – Day 1

Well, as I wrote in the last post, this last week I was sailing in the Mediterranean. Thru a sailing website (buscotripulantes.com) a guy contacted me and said he had to take a boat to Ibiza and he was looking for a crew to share costs and night-shifts.

I hesitated quite a lot. After all, a boat is a very small closed space where if something goes wrong, one does not have an easy escape way. Well, finally on Monday morning I got the green light from my managers (thanks, mate !) and got a go.

It was very interesting to see the reaction of the people I told what I was about to do. They were clearly polarized: the ones who were horrified (how can you trust a guy you have met in the Internet???) and the ones who said I was mad if I didn’t take the chance. Few years ago I was part of this latter ones, but it seems that I am becoming a bourgeois. I am hesitating more and more.

Anyway, Monday night we sailed thru to the Columbretes Islands (hey, I did most of the article in the Catalan wikipedia but has since then been edited quite a lot). The main island is a volcano crater, so it provides good shelter for a night. There had been a storm in the Gulf of Lion and, after a night were we had to nail ourselves to the beds, we needed some rest. Man, I even woke up at 4am to fed the fish (guess what did they eat).

Next day we intended to sail to Valencia. Wanted to see America’s Cup. Again, I had the 4am shift. I don’t know why, but I managed to get all the 4am shifts. It was cloudy, so everything was pitch black and foggy. We even struggled to see the lighthouse.

Reactivamos

En 1 hora y media, me embarco para Ibiza. Una cosa rara: no conozco a la gente con quien voy. Un tal Arnau Pérez me mandó un mail a través de buscotripulantes.com el viernes por la noche diciendome que se iban para allí a llevar un chárter que entregan el sábado y si me apuntaba a la travesía. Vamos, que quieren compartir gastos.

Y hoy mis jefes me han dado luz verde para largarme. A ver qué sale. Quizá aparezco despedazado en el fondo de las Columbretes. Ya contaré. También intentaré poner fotos de las otras salidas. Este año me estoy hinchando a navegar.