Week 18: Ajaccio, FR to Mallorca, ES (365 nm)

After a great week with Alec’s parents exploring Sardinia and Corsica, we cast lines and headed for the Balaeric island of Mallorca. Our passage threw us a few curve balls in the form of a leak and some wild weather fronts, but within three and half days we joined the fray in the Palma de Mallorca harbour. After a hasty check in, we retreated to nearby El Arenal, where it was much quieter, to do a few projects while waiting for our next guests to arrive.

Barry and Sarah left us early on the Sunday morning to head back to the UK, and shortly thereafter we cast lines ourselves. Alec’s sister Liv and her fiancé Elliott were due to meet us in Palma de Mallorca at the end of the week, so we needed to get ourselves there. When we’d first ballparked it, we’d estimated the hop from Corsica to Mallorca to be a 2.5-day journey, but when Alec sat down to make the passage plan he realised it was 3.5… we just hadn’t measured right the first time! This, coupled with a declining wind forecast, meant we definitely needed to get a move on, hence the prompt departure.

We were fortunate to have great wind on an uneventful first day out and flew along at a comfortable 6 knots. So we went into our first night at sea feeling relaxed and hoping for more of the same the rest of the way. Passages always seem to have a few surprises up their sleeves though, and the second and third days brought some unusual challenges!

The Leak

We were somewhat alarmed to discover we had a leak on our second day out, when Alec’s routine morning checks uncovered a very full bilge (not dramatically so; it was a very manageable amount of water – just a lot more than we usually see!). Initially we couldn’t understand how it could have come on so suddenly, as the checks the night before hadn’t revealed anything out of the ordinary and nothing had really changed since then. Ah – except we had tacked! This meant we were leaning over the other way, and from that we deduced it must be an issue with something on the starboard side of the boat. We checked all the most likely culprits, looking for leaky seacocks or some sort of crack in an engine hose or other fitting. These all looked normal though! We settled into our night watches still scratching our heads. Alec went to bed and was immediately inspired – it must be the Hydrovane! It is mounted on the starboard side of the boat, and the bolts for the bottom bracket are low enough that they are regularly awash in big seas (which we had) on that tack. If they weren’t well sealed then they’d be the source of the leak. Changeable winds meant I had to focus on sailing during my watch, but when Alec took over he immediately wedged himself into the lazarette to have a look. Turns out it wasn’t the Hydrovane, but he’d been in the right area! The exhaust outlet for the engine is right next to where the Hydrovane is mounted, and when Alec got his head in there it was clear this was the culprit. We’d fairly recently replaced the exhaust hose and had apparently not fully tightened up the hose clamps fixing it to the outlet. On port tack (which is when the starboard side of the boat is leaning down) when we are heeled over a lot, the exhaust outlet is underwater most of the time, so it was letting in a steady trickle. We both breathed a HUGE sigh of relief – the boat hadn’t developed some crack or hole and none of the seacocks or engine fittings had broken. It was an easy fix, only requiring a screwdriver to tighten the clamps up. Then, with just a few minutes pumping out the bilge, we were dry again. YAY!!

The Weather

As we got within striking distance of Menorca on our second night (about 100 miles from Mallorca), the weather started to go very strange. During Alec’s first watch the wind built quickly from a force 3 to nearly a force 5 before suddenly dying away to nothing. When I got up to take over for my watch, we looked at our barometer and saw that over the previous hour the pressure had dropped 3 mBar before rapidly increasing back to its starting place. Alec’s weather studies came in handy here as we now knew this indicated a cold front had passed. But then looking back we’re not as sure quite what was going on. Throughout my watch that followed, the pressure jumped around several more times – plummeting before soaring up again repeatedly in very quick succession.

The wind was confused as well. We went from a SE wind to W, N, S, then SE again and W before settling S. It jumped around from 5 kts to 20 kts and everywhere in between.  Needless to say, this made sailing impossible, so I hunkered below while Mick did his best to get us out of this crazy weather! Alec has reviewed his weather books, but we remain somewhat flummoxed. Our best guess is that we went through the centre of a localised low pressure system and so were effectively crossing the associated cold and warm fronts repeatedly. Maybe?

Projects in Palma

After a long stretch of motoring on the final morning, we joined the traffic into Palma. It is difficult to convey the scale of the harbour in Palma – it is HUGE. There are at least 8 marinas, several ship yards, and a monstrous commercial port all crammed into the head of the bay. All of which are jam packed full of boats. We’d heard Palma was carnage, so had always intended to anchor further down the bay at El Arenal (where Liv and Elliott would meet us), but wanted to stop in first to ensure we were properly checked into Spain (and also ideally fill up our water tanks). Various cruising websites insisted that the port authority kept some spaces available around the harbour where a yacht could freely berth for such purposes, so we nosed around the pontoons looking for anything that fit this description. Adjacent to a shipyard on the large mole where the coast guard and other authorities were housed, we found a small pontoon that had a number of liveaboard boats parked on it. That is usually a sign of a good parking place, so we organised our lines and came alongside it. Alec set to work filling our tanks from the tap on the quay and giving the boat a quick wash while I headed off to visit the authorities. Spain has limited check in procedures for vessels already in the Schengen area, so I was back in half an hour (win!). This turned out to be a doubly good thing, because I was stopped on my way back to the pontoon as we’d apparently parked on a quay owned by the shipyard. Oops. I smiled and batted my eyelashes, promising to move the boat immediately, and they waved me through with just a warning. Mission accomplished – checked in and tanks full, without having to pay for a berth (perhaps a bit cheeky stealing a spot, but we were only there for an hour!). We shortly cast off and headed for our anchorage just south of the marina in El Arenal, where we dropped the hook in lovely, clear shallow water and settled in under a beautiful sunset.

We’d made it to Mallorca a couple of days ahead of Liv and Elliott’s arrival, so we set about catching up on a few boat projects in the interim. Alec had a long laundry list of electrical checks and upgrades he wanted to get to, while I’d been long meaning to install a seawater tap by the sink and to inspect the fuel tank.

While Alec rewired the bow thruster, I pulled up all the floorboards to get to the fuel tank. Although I had to call in reinforcements to help me pry the inspection hatch off and to get a line in so we could pump out a sample. This was one of those jobs where the actual inspecting bit probably took all of 20 minutes, but the prep and clean up was a good 3 hours! It was worth it though, because the tank sample showed only a tiny bit of water and sediment, meaning we didn’t need to do any major clean out. Hooray!

I returned the favour by helping Alec remove all the boat’s batteries so that he could give them a good once over and refill them. This was very much a two-person job, each with our heads in the bilge under the beds in the aft cabins alternatively pushing and pulling to wedge them out and then back in again.

My final project was to install a seawater pump. This probably doesn’t sound that exciting, but it should allow us to significantly reduce our fresh water usage on board. That means we can cruise for longer and to more remote areas, and takes the pressure of our water supplies on our upcoming ocean passages. This is a new tap at the kitchen sink (we’re now up to three kitchen sink taps: one for unfiltered fresh water, one for filtered drinking water, and one for seawater!), which is connected to a foot pump that in turn links to one of the seawater inlets under the boat. It allows us to pump seawater into the kitchen sink, which we can use to do the bulk of our dish washing (with just a bit of fresh water to rinse at the end). It has instantly become a hit! This makes the work very much worth it, especially as it was pretty nerve-racking cutting into one of the sea water inlet hoses to install the line split!!

Projects done and boat clean, we awaited the arrival of Liv and Elliott on Friday evening. Alec buzzed over to the nearby marina in the dinghy to collect them, while I got rose in the fridge and gin and tonics on ice. Next week, Alec will regale our adventures with them around Mallorca and Valencia!