If
the weather forecast holds, we will be leaving Ibiza tomorrow for the
54 mile trek to Mallorca. Because the winds have been easterly all
but 2 days in the last 20, we never made it over to the east coast of
the island except by bus to visit the old town of Ibiza. Neither of
us is too sad to leave, though. I’m sure there are other
spectacular calas and coves to explore but we’ve seen enough of
them to have a good idea of the place.
Here
are some of our impressions and things we’ve learned this month in
Ibiza:
There
is, in fact, very little boom-boom techno noise around, even in the
calas the most exposed to mass tourism. We worried about that. In
the San Antonio bay, we heard music from the surrounding nightclubs
but it ended at a reasonable hour and was never too loud.
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| Ibiza fort and ramparts |
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| View of Punic Necropolis from Ibiza ramparts |
Anchoring
in calas: people arrive en masse at 2 pm to swim, lunch, and
spend the day, and then they all depart at 7 pm, leaving the cala to
a few foreign sailboats. This means that if you want to have a good
spot, you have to arrive before 2 pm or after 7pm.
Once
you are anchored in one of the prized sand patches in the mooring
area, your job for the day is to defend your patch. Idiots will try
to put their anchor on top of yours or will try to anchor too close.
We have chased off numerous would-be neighbors, and if we hadn’t
been on the boat, there would have been big problems. We always
leave a full rail of fenders out.
There
are only 3 marina areas in Ibiza and only 1 (San Antonio) with a
municipal port and relatively cheap rates. This means that when bad
weather comes, you either need to get to a good cala before the
others or reserve your spot in port well in advance.
Holding
is poor and space is limited in the San Antonio bay. Do yourself a
favor and don’t even try. (See our earlier post about the guy who
dragged into us…). The Club Nautico has buoys for rent (30 euros
including water taxi and use of showers and facilities).
All
of this adds up to stressful cruising, in fact. The calas are
gorgeous, the waters warm and turquoise, the surrounding hillsides
spectacular, but you spend most of your time fending off idiots or
worrying over whether the next cala will have room. We have only
left the boat at anchor on a few occasions to go ashore because you
just never know.
The
weather prediction with Windfinder has been amazingly accurate, only
getting it wrong once in awhile and only by a few knots. We use a
combination of Windfinder, windguru, and grib files.
The
saying “in the Med, there are 9 days of calm followed by a gale”
is fairly accurate, but you can still sail in the calm days if you
don’t mind sliding along at 3 knots.
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| Isla Conejera |
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| Isla Conejera with dinghy tied up next to sign saying "no debarquing". |
We
have had a couple of occasions to test our parahoule flopper stopper
and so far we have not had much success. In fact, this morning after
a very rolly night, Patrick discovered that the vanes of one of the
flopper stoppers were missing. I dove around and got them back, but
I’m none-too-keen to put them out again. We’ll keep trying with
different configurations. The problem is that we keep swinging in
circles, never pointing in the same direction, so the swell hits us
from different sides every 15 minutes.
Tomorrow
we will head to Mallorca. We decided even before we left for this
year’s cruise that we would keep the boat in marinas or on buoys
Time
to go survey the neighbors, who, I discovered while diving this
morning, have only gingerly set their anchor in the sand with NO
chain out. As we swing around our 35 meters for 6 meters of depth,
we risk backing into them.
Anchorages
in Ibiza and Formentera visited: Cala Hort, San Antonio Port, Cala
Bassa, Cala Gracio, Cala Tarida, Cala Cubells, Isla Conejera, Cala
San Miquel, Formentera just north of Port Salvina inside the channel
markers.
Addendum: Owing to a bum computer battery, the above post was written over 10 days ago but was locked away in my computer until I could get shore power. We made it to Mallorca a few days ago, half sailing, half motoring. We went to the
Santa Ponca mooring area, described as a large well-protected bay
with ample mooring space. Evidently everyone else read the same
thing. It was unbelievably crowded. We anchored
too-close-for-comfort to the shoals the night we arrived but managed
to move up into the cala the next morning. And then we had to start
the whole business of chasing people away all day long. The next day
we moved 3 miles north near Cala Blanca. In between Blanca and Cala
Camp de Mar is a large sand patch with almost no one around ! There
is no beach and no restaurant, so that eliminates a lot of the crowd.
We had a gorgeous setting and watched wild goats ramble along the
cliffs as the sun set. Why did we go to Santa Ponca? We are now in
Port Andraxt (enjoying the town and the Fete de Carmen) and will be
here on a mooring buoy for a week to visit friends and the
surrounding area. Our experience with overcrowded calas has
confirmed our plan to stay on buoys or in ports for the next few
weeks while all the charter boats enjoy their vacations. We will be
in Soller and then Pollenca over the next 3 weeks with a few cala
days in between each, hoping to find those rare unspoiled and
not-too-crowded spots. They DO exist, but finding them where/when
you want is tricky.
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| San Miquel |
