Harriette - Costa Del Sol

Hello World,

Harriette has a slight change of timetable, but before I come to that I'll update you with what we've been doing since we left Gibraltar on 6th June.

Rounding Europa point (the tip of Gibraltar) at 1pm the winds got up very strongly, and with wind against tide it was very choppy indeed, but we nevertheless managed to get round with 2 reefs without resorting to the engine.

Then we were called up on the VHF and asked to consider if we were not coming too close to another boat. As we were nowhere near any other boats we queried this and the call turned out to be for another boat with a similar name to Harriette. By 4pm the wind dropped to force 2 and we resorted to the engine.

Sotogrande was our first marina in the Med proper. It was very pleasant, upmarket and hence very expensive (over 6,000 ptas per night) so we only stayed one night.

We moved on to Duquesa, where they were noisily dredging the entrance, then to Estepona, then Fuengirola, where it was so full that we had to spend the night on the waiting pontoon and move on to Benalmadena.

Benalmadena is a massive marina with hundreds of restaurants, ice cream booths and tourist shops in the heart of the Costa del Sol. Unfortunately they were nearly full so we had to berth (stern-to as usual) near the south-facing entrance.

I had started to build a pasarela (Spanish name for a fancy gang-plank) so that we could easily get on and off in all these stern-to berths that we were encountering. It had to be finished in time for my parents' arrival on Friday afternoon, 15th June. I managed to fit the wheels for the shore end AND the pivot for the boat end and just had time to try it before shooting off to Malaga airport.

Unfortunately the swell had got up during the day (from the south of course) and Harriette was tossing around and trying to kiss the quayside with her bathing platform with every wave. I managed to jam the pasarela against a kerb on my first attempt to try it, just as Harriette came back for another run at the quay. The compression force broke the planking a foot from the end. In a frenzy of drill and saw I reinforced and repaired the planking. On the second trial the shore end dropped down a few inches, off the edge of the quay, as Harriette lunged away, then back again, this time breaking the wheels clean off. Miraculously nothing was lost into the water.

Too late to do anything except ask Jo to stay and keep moving the fenders as necessary, while I sped off to the airport. Mum and Dad had to use the pasarela without wheels. Just when I thought things couldn't get worse Harriette rammed the darn pasarela against the water/electricity supply pillar and broke the pivot mechanism off the inboard end. Not a good start for a parental visit, but worse was to come.

After we'd said goodnight at midnight, the swell caught Dad off balance in the dorway to the heads and he gently slid to the floor slicing the palm of one hand very deeply on the sharp edge of the catch of the door. We patched this up and, after 2 subsequent visits to the doctor the hand is healing well, although perhaps it should have been stitched straight away.

In spite of this inauspicious start Mum & Dad coped well.

We drove to Gibraltar (monkeys, St Michael's cave, etc) on Saturday. We got lost in a rabbit warren of a housing estate on the way back, and were escorted out by a police car!

Then a perfect, gentle sailing day during which we sailed out 4 miles and back to give my parents a taste of sailing (and to empty the holding tanks), since they had never sailed on the open sea before. No problems.

On Monday we toured the sierras between Antequera, Ronda and the Cost del Sol, looking for the famous White Villages (in the wrong place as it happens).

By Tuesday the swell was too bad to even get off the boat, even with the pasarela repaired, so we stayed and played Rumikub in the cockpit instead!

On Wednesday we sailed, or rather motored in 5 knots of wind, past Malaga to Puerto Caleta de Velez, where the weather was much kinder to us and the jetty so  low that we didn't need the pasarela. On this trip we overheard on the VHF radio a frigate on a UN excercise firing 3 warning shots across the bows of a Spanish boat which would not answer his questions, but I can't tell you about that becasue it's against the rules to relate stuff heard on the VHF. Not sure if the frigate carried out its threat to fire AT the Spanish boat because the radio reception went bad at that time.

A visit to the Alhambra in Granada completed my parents' visit.

Next Jo & I moved on to the tiny, and very pretty Marina del Este. We happened to arrive the day after a drama there. Apparently the chap running it had been salting away most of the takings (allegedly) for a couple of years and the Guardia Civil had come down the day before and closed the place down, but not before the dodgy boss had taken away most of the useful and valuable items, including the records, and cut off the electricity. By the time we arrived the next day they had called in staff from a company  that runs a chain of marinas, to take over the running of this one. The staff were tearing their hair out trying to cope with the ensuing chaos, not knowing which berths were vacant for visiting yachts and which ones the owners would be returning to soon.

We met Richard here, who is buying an appartment, and he took us to Nerja to see the caves - full of stalactites, etc.

We are now in Aguadulce, 4 miles before Almeria. Yesterday we visited the Alcazaba (Moorish castle) in Almeria and a mini theme park called Mini Hollywood, based on an American outback village set, where parts of several westerns were filmed. They also have a zoo.

Tomorrow we plan to move on towards Cartegena, where we will spend about a week and see some more Spanish friends.

We'll probably leave Cartagena on about Monday, 9th July, do a few day hops northwards, then cross to Formentera or Ibiza - a long day crossing. Then we'll do Mallorca and Menorca.

We want to cross back to the mainland (Tarragona or Barcelona) by about 6th August, to meet up with some friends in Barcelona over the weekend of 9th to
13th August.

After Barcelona we'll make our way along the south coast of France. After that we're not sure. Maybe Corsica and Sardinia or maybe Italy. In any case we need to find a good harbour for the winter. Tunisia is still a possibility.

Fair winds & On-On,