Having left the very expensive marina in Palma we ended up after a few stops at Santa Ponsa. This turned out to be a great place to anchor with a good dinghy dock and plenty of opportunities for hilarious people watching on shore. Poms on all you can eat and drink package tours! All shapes and sizes. with varieties of all over tattoos, hens and bucks parties, footie support groups etc you can imagine. Luckily the anchorage was far enough from the actual beach to only hear murmurs of all the jollity.
We decided to stay here while my brother is here and also to have our new gennaker delivered which after a few “the dog ate my homework” days arrived and was installed.
We had 4 great days with Mark on a much needed break from working his beer canning machine in Luxembourg. He’d been having frustrating mechanical breakdowns etc. So a few days of swims. lying around and beers helped out.
Joe and Janice in “Babycakes” from Torrevieja turned up just behind us and it was nice to catch up with them. Unfortunately they had to head back with a few boat type problems to sort out.
We stayed on at Santa Ponsa for a while longer for Pete to get over a swimmers ear infection. Because we hadn’t been swimming for so long he forgot to put in his ear plugs – instant aqua ear for him! We even had to go to the Medical Centre – twice.
One day we experimented with getting the e.scooters into the dinghy and ashore. We’d had some carry bags made which worked really well so we went for a long ride to a chandlery , hardware and big supermarket. Most of the beachfront areas have quite good little grocery stores for day to day bits and pieces but it’s good to get to a big one occasionally.
“Katarina” anchored just a little away from us just before we left Santa Ponsa. they had been in Trinidad with us and again in Cartagena. Definitely catch up drinks there a couple of times. We also said hello to an Aussie flagged boat called “Adventurous”. David and Mary had bought their boat in the States and had sailed to here. They are heading for Menorca so we’ll probably see them there.
Porto Petro was our next stay, on a buoy. we had been here with Terry and Liz a while back. There was an interesting event one day. We had come back from taking the rubbish ashore and I went to get the salt water rinse hose out as there had been more red rain (thank you Africa) and Pete yelled that a rat had run out from behind the crate! it ran into the water and we thought it might drown, but no, it tried to swim to the other back steps to climb back on. I shooed it away from there and it swam back to Pete’s side. I grabbed our fishing net (that has not actually been used for fishing ever) and we caught it and bashed it dead with a meat cleaver on the chopping board. We think it may have been swimming by and either came up the back steps or the buoy line and smelled the rubbish that we had hanging on the back rail waiting to go ashore. There are hundreds of holes in the rocks around this bay and they may well live in them and opportunistically swim around the boats looking for food. They probably also frequent the somewhat smelly marina skip bins. There was no evidence of it being on board for more than a few hours as there were only two droppings. However, we were very careful about shutting doors after that I can tell you! No photos, sorry – too busy rat catching.