Mayon towards The Rock via Hippyland

We made an attempt to depart Mayon harbour, when we got to the southern corner of Minorca the wind had shifted and was blowing from where we wanted to go so we turned back for Mayon and caught a nice small tuna for tea just as the rain set in. It cleared up later in trhe afternoon and we shot ashore in the great little RIB (rigid hulled inflatable boat – or dinghy in this case) to tour the 1830 Spanish built Fortress Isle De Molo. This fortress is immense but it’s funny how you get a different first impression of things when travelling by boat. When we arrived at the protected anchorage in the Mayon Harbour on the Balearic Island of Minorca, we had been immediately impressed with the “fortress” walls on the south side of the bay, we had noticed the buildings on the hill to the north and a few of the cannon casemates but hadn’t taken to much notice. We spent much of our second evening in the bay staging a siege and trying to scale the vertical stone walls of the “fortress” on the south side to no avail, they were impenetrable. It wasn’t until we went on the organised tour of the real fortress that we realised the other walls were actually the remains of a leper colony and the walls had been designed to keep the lepers in not to keep us out! The real fortress was incredible. There was literally 100’s of cannon casemates and thousands of loopholes for rifle men. The fortress was built as a bolt hole for all of the forces and important people of Minorca in the event of an invasion, most likely from either the French or British forces. It succeeded as a deterrent and was never fired upon. One of the later instalments, following the dawn of armoured battle ships was a ginormous 380mm Vickers cannon situated with commanding views of the sea and the approach to Mayon harbour. The gun has a range of 35km, although has not been fired since 1996, not bad for a not rocket powered projectile I reckon.

We have had nice quiet trip west broken up with a 36 hour stop over at Formentera, a friendly laid back island just south of the uber nightclub scene on Ibeza. In fact Formentera could quite easily have been the birthplace of the hippie and true to this scene the bathing costumes were few and
far between on the beach, and what beaches, Formentera is also known as the Caribbean of the Med and the colour of the water was spectacular. During the day there was around 50 boats (mostly Miami Vice style) in the bay with us and then at an hour B4 sunset they were all gone, leaving us to enjoy our wine on the now deserted beach. We have been traveling since Minorca with Brits Mark and Jean and their 6 yo daughter Marisa. Their home for a years sabbatical away from the corporate strain of IBM is a motor boat, a Grand Banks 45 called Mr Toad. After sundowners on the beach Patti slapped together a fine meal for all on PC.

In the middle of the Mediterranean sea as we plodded along in the light winds we hooked up the new HF radio modem and tried it out. Low and behold it works wonderfully and we can now send and receive emails over the (free) radio waves albeit at baud rates that wouldn’t have impressed computer nerds 20 years ago. Using this system, known collectively as sailmail, we can access awesome weather info, we can subscribe with out cost to series of up to 10 day forecasts of winds, surface pressures, swell etc for customisable areas and we can request any of over 700 weather web pages which sailmail converts to plaintext (small files)and delivers to us.
As I write this we are 45 miles due East of the rock of Gibralter with sound effects of thunder booming and dolphins wheezing out of the dark silvery water in front of the bow. Night is falling on our third night at sea on this passage and we are due to arrive at the iconic Atlantic/Med gateway port at around 0100hrs, hopefully the rain that has been lurking around will hold of so that we can have enough visibility to enter he harbour in the dark. If not we might have to slow down a lot and wait until daylight.

Nick