Mon 11 Jun

This morning I got up relatively early, while Camilla was having a little snooze. A quick look at the weather forecast showed scary winds coming through on Tuesday night, so we thought we’d try to make our way down to Palma on Tuesday. Finding a berth in a marina is not easy around here, and it took a couple of calls before we found a spot.

We had a slow morning, sitting around and drinking coffee, until Camilla started to work on some savvy navy stuff. I was sitting in the cockpit reading a book, when from the corner of my eye I saw a boat pop right next to us. I swear a second ago there was no boat there. As my slow morning brain was still processing and trying to figure out what’s going on, I heard Camilla shout from down below “What the hell? What are these guys up to?” The boat came dangerously close to us, and nobody was on deck.

A quick look around revealed a rather stressed looking Englishman trying to peel another anchor of his anchor which he’d just lifted. Turns out that as he lifted up his anchor, he picked up the anchor of a boat anchored next to him, and that boat was now drifting. It was clear that the English guy wouldn’t be able to let go of the extra anchor by himself, so I went over to help him peel of the anchor, while Camilla fended of the intruder. We managed to drop the anchor of the other boat and then quickly pick up ours to get a safe distance between us and the drifter. With ours set, and the English guy still circling were all at a bit of a loss as to what to do next? We thought we could at least dive on the drifter’s anchor and make sure it was set properly. They had a shitty delta anchor which was laying on its side, and Camilla managed to dive down and put it on its tip – not an easy feat in 8 meters of deep water! I think she’s developing gills, I’ll have to take a closer look later.

After that there was nothing more we could do other than hang out and wait for the drifters owner to come back and reset the boat. It was a couple of hours before somebody from the marina came around and was able to contact the owner. I’ve never seen anybody row as fast through an anchorage as poor panicked Kenneth on his way towards the slowly drifting boat.

In the afternoon we went for a walk up through the town and into the mountains to check out the lighthouse we saw as we came into Soller. It was a really pretty walk up through the hilly woods, and we were rewarded with spectacular views of the bay and spectacular orange juice from a fairy living in the woods who, together with his dog, has set up a little orange stall along the path.

On the way back we stopped off for a drink in one of the bars overlooking the anchorage. There were boats coming in every 5 minutes and we learnt a lot from watching how they settled in for the night.

It’s our fourth night and the first without a thunderstorm. We watched a beautiful sunset, packed away Bob, the dinghy (ready for our trip tomorrow) and had dinner. Palma is about a 10 hour sail so we’ll be up nice and early to started. Let’s hope we sleep as there’s a serious swell in the marina tonight making life on board a little uncomfortable. We reckon it’s being caused by the strong winds to the West of us which are due to hit tomorrow evening.