In just four days, in fact, life has become primitive. It is also tiring. But at least we have the water we need on tap. As I walk my slop bucket daily I reflect on how even more tiring it must be for those millions who have to walk miles each day to fetch their water in the first place. On the way to dispose of our dirty water I also dispose of our poly bag of domestic rubbish and contemplate the amount of non-biodegradable waste we advanced nations inflict upon the planet daily.
As I lie in bed awaiting sleep before another pre-dawn start, eyes screwed up tight against the glare of the boatyard’s arc lights through uncurtained windows, I ponder once more that great existential question: how does a mosquito know the very moment when you’re about to drop off? You can keep very still for ages, ready to swat it, and it simply lies doggo somewhere out of sight but the moment blessèd sleep begins to wash over you … nyahhhh, right against your ear.
At last we are able to jettison the slop bucket and turn on the hose. When a large ladybird lands on our immaculate cockpit sole I ask it if it has wiped its feet. It seems unable to take off again from the wet surface and sooner or later one of us will forget it is there and tread on it. So I lift it onto the life raft, where it stands for a while, opening and closing its delicate red and white spotted casing and exposing transparent and surprisingly-creased wings before shuffling its waterlogged feet and flying away. Watching it, you wonder how anything so small and fragile manages to survive on a planet that has us crashing about on it.
La Señora’s woodwork, glowing in the late evening sun, is a lovely sight, although I might have been tempted to use a matt varnish on the steps and hand rails. One careless move on that high-gloss finish could send you spinning overboard. David winces and says he would hate to be the bloke who tries to put it back in the water without scratching anything.
‘Bet they’re all planning to be ill that day,’ he says.
With all the scraping and polishing, my own right arm, shoulder and neck feel as if they have been off on their own somewhere and then come back to recuperate after being involved in some terrible accident. However, everything that needs to be done while Voyager is out of the water has now been done and Sven can finish resealing the windows back on the pontoon. We arrange to go back in the water next morning.
‘Force 7,’ says Sven gloomily when we tell him. ‘Next three days. And it’ll get worse.’
We enjoy a perfect re-launch, probably the most stress-free ever, and sail back down the harbour to our old berth. The arrival of a near-gale-force wind does, for once, actually justify Sven’s Jonah-like prediction, but not until we are safely tied up.
Sunset is at five minutes past nine tonight. At the naval base opposite they play the national anthem and someone makes a brief speech before The Last Post. I wake at 1am. Despite my locking the gate before going to bed dozens of youths are running up and down the pontoon although, with typical Spanish politeness, they do not board any of the boats. The quay beyond is also full of them. Hundreds of them.
David stirs. ‘Wassamatter?’
‘Must be a fiesta or something.’
‘Um?’
‘It can’t be up to much if they’re running about down here on a deserted pontoon.’
‘Um.’ He turns over and goes back to sleep.
The terrible injuries the upper right side of my body sustained while AWOL are throbbing piteously. I fall back on my pillow convinced I shall not close my eyes again this night, but within minutes I am comatose, apparently; at least I am aware of nothing more until daylight streams in through the hatch above my head and there is the sound of knocking on our hull. On the one occasion I could really have done without him, Sven has come early to reseal the last of the windows.
11
Cala Grao
We leave Mahon in mid-June. The plan is to visit a few bays around Menorca; partly for pure enjoyment, but also to ensure that everything on board works properly before undertaking any long hauls. Our plan for the summer is to head for Sardinia and then round Sicily to the Greek islands before returning to Gibraltar prior to heading out into the Atlantic. As if to confirm the wisdom of our trip around the bays, the GPS on its first outing in seven months says the distance to our first destination, Cala Grao, is 515 miles, but finally settles on the actual six.
Cala Grao is a quiet bay with a small fishing village of white-walled houses and red bougainvillea. In a beautiful, tranquil evening, pink and shiny from the sunset, we paddle over to the waterside Bar de Moll for a beer. On the edge of the little quay half a dozen mallard ducks stand in a line, their jewelled green heads bobbing up and down like piano hammers, determined not to be moved from their chosen spot as they enjoy the last of the day’s sunshine. Ultimately the dinghy gets too close for comfort, their nerve cracks, and they throw themselves into the water protesting noisily and paddling away single file, indignant at losing face.
The only other customers are two English couples. The two women turn out to be former nurses at our local hospital at home. When we return to the boat, the people now anchored in front of us are from the area in Wales where we sailed Voyager before setting out. It suddenly seems to be quite a small world.
Around 6.30 next morning a fisherman ties a small open boat to the quay. He fetches an icebox from his lock-up and sets about sorting and cleaning the best of his catch. The cleaned fish he throws into the icebox, the rest he tosses to the patiently waiting seagulls.
After our own breakfast we set off for the lagoon to visit the famous Albufera des Gran nature reserve. You used to be able to dinghy right into its lagoon from the harbour but the stream that provided access silted up during last autumn’s storms, so we have to walk across the beach. It is filled with hundreds of school children, brought here by coaches. The noise is horrendous, but as you continue walking the sound diminishes from a howl to a hum and by the time you reach the lagoon there is only the hum of an insect. We see a small lizard, a dozen seagulls and a couple of wading birds, but otherwise the reserve’s wildlife eludes us. It is a magical walk through the woods, however, among wild olive trees, tree spurge and Aleppo pines.
One of the advantages of our way of travelling is that some of the quietest beaches are accessible only, or most easily, by boat. In the afternoon we take the dinghy down a shallow channel to Isla Longa for a swim. We have the beach to ourselves. Behind it there is a large deserted house, white with green shutters. It has a large well for domestic water and terraced gardens sheltered by rows of mature pines. It is cool and shady and looks a lovely place to live. And as you wander its deserted gardens under its shady pines inevitably you begin to wonder about the people who used to live here and why nobody does any more.
12
Addaya
Next morning we leave for another bay. Cala de Addaya. It gets windy and almost on the nose which makes for an uncomfortable trip with waves hitting the starboard bow. The foredeck is soon awash but we are happy to see that despite this none of the windows leak.
Addaya is a long, narrow, beautifully-protected bay, the far end of which the chart shows to be very shallow. The top end is crowded with anchored boats that have a much deeper draught than ours, so we carry on down, over a sand bar leaving only half a metre of clear water beneath us, and anchor towards the end of the bay in one and a half metres. Voyager draws only a metre and, with two hulls, even if we do touch bottom it just means the crockery rattles a bit and we have to go into reverse a bit sharpish. She won’t fall over on her side like a monohull with a deep keel tends to do. Once settled down the end of the bay, we put up the awning and mix some Sangria.
This cala resembles a Scottish loch, apart from the cicadas. Apparently, during the last British incursion of Menorca, in 1798, the Navy couldn’t get its ships into nearby Fornells because of bad weather and came here instead. The men of a Scottish battalion, waking to its low hills and heather, thought for a moment they were home again. As if to reinforce the comparison for us, our Navtex, the international weather forecast
ing and navigational warning system above our chart table, provides a gale warning for the Scottish Hebrides.
The bay is bliss. So are the glorious sunny days and the starry nights with their bright slender moon. We potter around the bay in the dinghy and take the odd trip into the village for fresh bread and fruit, then back to sangria and shady seclusion. The only other person we see for several days is a tall, spare, stooped man in dark shorts and singlet who wades out to some distinctive rocks quite some distance below us early one morning and seems to be inspecting seaweed.
And it is so quiet you could hear a pin drop; except for one morning when we are shot awake at dawn by an exploding duck under the bed. At least, that is what it sounds like. Raucous at the best of times, the demands of a hungry young duck are magnified many times in the natural echo chamber created by a catamaran’s two hulls. When I stick my head out of the hatch there are eight of them milling about waiting for breakfast. Once fed, they bob away towards the village in a tight little group looking particularly vulnerable and small. In the late afternoons the cicadas rest and the woodpigeons take over. Between 6pm and 8pm a donkey brays.
At the weekend an occasional small boat ventures down. A traditional sailing dinghy with a family of four in it tacks a little too close to the wind to get around us. The man’s face passes level with our stern, grimacing at his efforts and waggling a hand in embarrassment. He soon gets it together, however, and fairly hurtles back up to the village. A motor launch – an open boat generally used for river trips, of varnished wood and immaculate seating – takes a stately pootle down, but before I can tidy up in case its captain pops over with a visiting card it pootles away again. A young couple in a small open power boat, with the name of a water sports company on its side, anchor as far down the bay and as far from us as they can get. Then they become invisible for five hours. At dusk the boat chugs past with the man looking smug and the girl glancing a little furtively at our boat. We are below, so it is we who are invisible now, and she looks relieved at not seeing anyone.
The evenings are glorious with every tint and hue of crimson, scarlet and gold. I have foresworn any more photographs of sunsets, though. You are surrounded by this mesmerising explosion of colour, of refracted light and shimmering water; an elemental assault on the senses making you one with all nature, with the universe, even. Then you get your prints back from the developer and there’s this reddish blob with a needle-thin reflection on rather murky-looking water.
We are still struggling to get regular weather forecasts. Monaco Radio puts one out first in French and then in English. Unfortunately, sometimes they forget to do the English version. When they remember, being on short wave and from such a distance, it is often barely audible. Even when we can hear it, it is sometimes confusing. For instance, when a British shipping forecast says, ‘gale later’ you know that means later in the second half of the 24-hour period covered by this particular forecast. The French will say, ‘gale next night,’ and you sit there mulling over whether they mean, ‘tonight’, ‘later as in the second half of this 24-hour period’ or maybe even ‘tomorrow night’.
Our radio is not only capable of tuning into short wave transmissions, such as Monaco Radio, but can also pick up single side band (SSB) transmissions. SSB is a ham radio frequency for mariners and some people transmit forecasts which they have received from other sources. David tunes in and picks up the UK Maritime Net which is a group of British cruisers in the Mediterranean who chat to one another at a regular time on a designated channel and often put out a weather forecast, although not consistently or at a specific time. So you have to listen to the whole broadcast.
Unfortunately, the channel used by the Maritime Net is subject to a very determined saboteur who whistles, howls and plays music, so that the Net’s broadcast becomes incomprehensible. When the Net changes channels, so does the saboteur. On one day the only forecast available is for Portugal because that is the only request the Net has received, but today, happily, we do get a forecast for where we are. There is a weather front crossing the Mediterranean, bringing winds of up to 40 knots, or Gale Force 8.
We had been planning to move on to Fornells, that superbly-protected bay which the Scottish battalion had been unable to enter because of bad weather and had sequestered among the heather here at Addaya instead. We decide to remain here also, for the couple of days it will take the front to pass over. We do a few chores while we wait and I volunteer to clean the salt and dirt off our radar dome, half way up the mast, to improve the quality of the signal. I prepare a sponge with soapy water and climb aloft with it in a poly bag attached to my belt.
Heights send me peculiar, so I get up to the dome by not looking down, but once there my arm muscles are too puny to support my body weight with one hand long enough to sponge the dome with the other. Then my supporting hand begins to sweat with the effort and very soon holding on even with both hands becomes a problem. So I come down and David goes up and washes the radar dome, only I’ve added too much washing-up liquid to the sponge and the equipment is deluged in soap suds and so is he.
Tonight cloud hides the moon and stars. The wind gets up, as the forecast promised, and we take in the awning to stop it flapping through the night. But we still find it too rough to sleep after the former tranquillity of our private lake and get up for a game of cards. As the wind increases one of the genoa shackles in the cockpit begins to rattle frenetically and David goes out to silence it.
‘I think we may be dragging,’ he calls down to me.
I join him in the cockpit. It is difficult to see immediately, going into a dark night from a lighted saloon.
‘We weren’t so close to this outcrop, were we?’ he asks pointing.
Each person’s eyes adjust differently. Some people can take half an hour to get their night vision and then lose it in seconds. Some adjust fast and keep it regardless, even with torches being flashed in their faces. My spatial awareness may be rubbish, but my night vision is fast. I can see immediately that the outcrop David is pointing at is not the one opposite which we have been anchored for some days, but a similar one further down the bay.
I can also see that directly beyond our stern and only a short way away are those once-distant jagged rocks where the tall, spare man in the dark shorts and singlet appeared to be inspecting seaweed. The wind, currently roaring straight down through the bay’s entrance, is driving us towards them.
Suddenly it is headless chicken time as we run down into the hulls, switch on the engine batteries, rush back up, start the engines, and raise our anchor with its half ton of mud and weed which has to be scraped off before we can attempt to put it down again. We try several times to re-anchor, even using two anchors, but both drag. So much mud and weed comes up on the second anchor that David is unable to lift it back on deck again. We decide to go up and join all the other boats where we assume the holding must be better.
I find it a struggle to steer up the narrow stretch of bay in pitch darkness into a Force 7. A rocky outcrop looms suddenly out of the blackness. I over-steer and accelerate to avoid it and end up heading for another on the opposite side. With such an erratic, zigzag course it is a miracle I don’t hurl David overboard, hanging as he is, head-first over the bow trying to prise glutinous mud off the anchors.
To unsettle the nerves even more, the windmill of our wind generator begins howling like a banshee. We will discover subsequently that in winds up to Force 6, and from Gale Force 8 and above, it behaves perfectly normally, but in a Force 7 it goes into overdrive and screams like something from the nether regions. There is no way to stop it now though, not without losing fingers, even if we were able to leave what we are doing to go and restrain it.
When we finally reach the top of the narrow channel and approach the wider, deeper section of water of the main anchorage we are confronted by a Maltese boat. It is directly ahead of us and charging back and forth. It is one of those boats, familiar in any anchorage, that constantly shunts, even in the li
ghtest airs: up over its anchor, yank; back out on the full extent of its chain, yank; up over the anchor again, yank; endlessly. In the present conditions it has become hyper-active. We judge our time carefully to avoid a collision and make our way round it into the anchorage.
It is bedlam. Most of the boats are dragging. Those few still attached to the bottom are swinging violently, but each one is out of sync with its neighbour so that they are effectively charging at one another. Some people are letting out more chain and compounding the problem; others flash torches and shout at each other in French, English, Swedish and Spanish. And all around us the night roars, everybody’s wind generator whines and ours screams.
We motor around in the noise and flashing lights looking for a space to anchor. We find somewhere, not quite large enough but it will do if the anchor bites immediately. It doesn’t. We try again and fail again but this time a wind gust drives us rapidly towards rocks. We motor away quickly and search for another spot, but without success and decide finally that our only option is to go back and try the area behind the Maltese boat.
We drag once more, rushing backwards into the narrow, rock-strewn channel. We are about to haul the anchor up again when Voyager comes suddenly to a halt with her stern in this channel a few yards from rocks. We hold our breath and wait. After a few minutes of staring at the rocks in the darkness, we feel confident enough to leave off watching and address the screaming banshee on our afterdeck. David snares it with the boathook and I tie a rope around it.
The improvement in your mental state when intolerable noise suddenly stops is enormous. I make us a hot drink and we sit and discuss what we should do. We have two problems. The first is that if we drag again we should have very little time to respond. The second is that if the wind changes direction we will swing into jagged rocks on the other side of the channel.
Turtles in Our Wake Page 5