Spain and France

2 May 2002


At anchor in Porto Colom harbour. If you look closely you can see this is the Rhodesian flag hanging off the back of our boat. Later we got a British one.

After four months of getting to know our boat, testing ourselves and our capabilities as cruisers, and satisfied so far, I now felt ready and allowed Mike to take me further afield. Stopping in Palma for a brief visit, we sailed over to Andraitx on the east coast and spent three pleasant days there though there were no facilities for yachts not staying in a marina. In early May we set off on our longest sail yet, my first overnighter actually, to Barcelona on the Spanish mainland, in what we believed to be a good weather window with 10 to 15 knots of wind forecast. We have learned since then to take almost no notice whatsoever of weather forecasts. A few hours out of Andraitx, we hit a truly awful storm, very short lived, but quite shocking in its severity. The boat lay almost flat over, and being a bit new to this sailing lark I seriously thought we were going to flip right over. We didn’t, of course, but Mike nearly amputated his fingers in the foresail outhaul trying to reduce sail. A few hours later, there was no wind at all and we had to motor for a while – something Mike really hates – and then a few hours later another hefty storm blew up. It also poured with rain a lot of the way and was an exhausting trip all in all. I didn’t enjoy the night watches but didn’t get the opportunity to be bored as there was always too much going on. However, we had a large group of dolphins (who seemed to love the bad weather) swimming with us a lot of the way which cheered us up no end. We had discovered that storms in the Med can be vicious and very sudden.

Barcelona is a gorgeous city with loads of atmosphere, and I can understand why so many boats make it their wintering spot. There were loads of liveaboards there and we had a good time socially. The marina is set in the basin right in the centre of the city which is fantastic for the sailing community. Some marinas are set in extremely inconvenient locations and cruisers have to walk for miles to find any facilities.

After a week we left Barcelona and cruised north up the Spanish coast, perfecting the art of goose winging in between various pleasant anchorages until we reached the Bay of Roses, near the French border. In the Bay of Roses we went into a lovely place called Santa Marguerita which was like a mini Venice with lots of very shallow canals where we scraped our bottom for the first time. Mike accelerated the motor furiously and we churned up this huge brown muddy cloud around us. Nasty. We couldn’t find any sort of marina or official public area and realised we probably oughtn’t to be there, but it was getting dark and we really didn’t fancy trying to get out of there again. All the docks seemed to be private so we just parked on one and hoped for the best. Luckily for us, no one complained and we spent a quiet and peaceful night.

We got out early the next morning before anyone woke up and immediately set sail across the notorious Gulf de Lion. I’d heard many scary stories about storms, but we had a pleasant, uneventful overnight sail to Frioul Island, France. After a couple of days there we moved into the vieux port at Marseille. Having enquired prices from the private marinas, which were horribly high, and been refused by the municipal marina, we just tied up on a spare bit of dock.

Later that evening the port captain came by in his dinghy and asked what we were doing there. I explained in my best pidgin French that we couldn’t afford the private marinas and needed somewhere to stay. He was very nice. He said he was the night captain and we could remain there that night, but he would be back early in the morning and move us to a proper berth (at the very reasonable municipal prices) before the day captain came on duty, who he advised was a lot less obliging than himself. He didn’t ask for a bribe and we didn’t offer one, but were very grateful. True to his word, he moved us the next morning and we remained in the cheap municipal marina for a number of days getting various jobs done on Forever.

We had a couple of major problems with the main sheet traveller and the boom traveller. We met a charming and wonderfully helpful Frenchman called Josef at a sail loft who spent days with us and assisted in the repair of both. He took almost no payment from us and when we asked why he said that English sailors had been very good to him once and this was his turn to pay back. Weren’t we the lucky ones? Marseille was a nice lively city, and like Barcelona, is built round the harbour making it very convenient.

The entrance to Marseille Vieux Port.

Once all our repairs were done we went off cruising. The French coastline between Toulon and Marseille is dotted with calanques – long thin bays gouged into the coast – where one can anchor with a stern rope tied to the side. They were very picturesque and perfect at night once the endless round of tourist boats left. We took long walks in the hills above the calanques.

Summer had arrived by now and the weather was perfect. We loved France. Contrary to popular belief, the marinas were cheap (both Frioul Island and Marseille charged only E10 per night), and the anchoring was good (free of course). The people were friendly and the food, well – enough said.

24 June

Mike's daughter, my beautiful step-daughter, then 10 years old, came to join us for a two week holiday from South Africa. We anchored in the calanque Port Miou, a long (sometimes hot and tiring) walk to the picture perfect town of Cassis. We were lucky enough to make friends with a French boat Bigoudi IV with a daughter of a similar age and the two girls got along well. We cruised around that part of the coast and travelled with our French friends to Porquerolles in the Isle d'Hyeres, which is a fabulous cruising area near Toulon.

Melanie in the head - she was
delighted with the video camera.

A budding sailor!

After tearful goodbyes to Melanie, and Bigoudi IV, who were going on to Greece, we continued eastwards and stopped in the town of La Ciotat where we splashed out and bought ourselves a 2 h.p. Honda outboard for the dinghy (though Mike still preferred to row everywhere), a 1000 watt Honda generator (to charge the batteries and provide power when we wanted to watch videos), and a hand held GPS.

Going for a snorkel in the bay of Cassis. Spot the new outboard.

The French are a keen sailing nation. Children are taught to sail at a very young age.

We returned to Port d’Hyeres and met a French catamaran whose skipper introduced us to the electronic chart software “Maxsea”. Very impressed, we bought it for the frightening cost (for us) of E1000 including one chart of western Mediterranean and a nifty little connector so we could plug the GPS in. We discovered that individual charts thereafter were prohibitively expensive, so it seemed we had wasted our money somewhat. We most certainly could not afford to keep buying charts. However, the software was exciting and we were able to use the chart we had for our current cruise. Next stop Corsica.