Zooming out of the Mediterranean

13 May 2024 – Ria Formosa, Portugal

We are now on back on the Atlantic! We basically sailed straight to Portugal from the Balearic Islands, with a few stops along the way to get some sleep and walk the dog.

After leaving Mahón, we sailed to Cala Figuera on Majorca. We had only planned to stay the night but it was such a beautiful place that we decided to spend the next day there as well. It is a little bay mostly exposed to the Mediterranean, with rocky cliffs all around, a beach, and a trail through the forest. I spent the day reading on shore.

We then sailed all day to the town of Sollér where, again, we were only planning to stay the afternoon and continue sailing through the night while the wind was favourable, but since there was a thunderstorm forecasted for later we decided to stay the night there instead.

The next day, we sailed to Espalmador, arriving just in time before dusk. The sea floor of the anchorage has patches of sand and patches of weed, and in order for the anchor to hold we needed to drop it in sand. This wouldn’t usually be a problem, as the sandy patches are much lighter than the seaweed and easy to spot, except that the light was rapidly fading and soon we wouldn’t be able to see beyond the surface of the water. The anchorage was pretty full, with boats on moorings over the sandy areas, meaning that we couldn’t anchor too close or else we would swing into them when the wind switched. There were only a few small patches of sand further away from them so we managed to drop the anchor in one, except that it must have actually been rock because we dragged and had to pull the anchor back up twice. The light was almost all gone so we tried a third time and the anchor tentatively held. Luckily there wasn’t much wind that night and we left the early next morning, so it got the job done.

From Espalmador, we basically sailed straight to Gibraltar, a fifty-eight hour trip, with one early morning pit stop on the outskirts of Cartagena to walk the dog. We needed to make it to the Straits before the 11th, because that was when the east wind ended. The prevailing wind is from the west, and there isn’t another east wind coming in the foreseeable future, so unless we wanted to wait in Gibraltar for a few weeks, we needed to leave the Mediterranean on Saturday.

The wind was light from behind us, so we put up the spinnaker and were sailing along as normal when Jonas ran into the cockpit shouting that we needed to take the spinnaker down right away because there was a rip in it. We dropped it to the deck and pulled it out of its sock, and there was a tear at the top as though it had been pinched. The rip might have happened when we were sailing to Fiskardo in Greece and the sock tore slightly on the rig, though we didn’t think the sail had gotten ripped. Luckily we happened to have some bright pink sail tape so my dad repaired it and we put it back up again and continued sailing along. Then the wind started to come up from the beam and we were reaching in thirteen knots of wind, which is right on the edge of what the spinnaker can handle, and my dad noticed that the tape was starting to peel off from the pressure. We took it down again, pulled it out of its sock, and slapped some more tape on it and that seemed to hold things together, at least temporarily.

We arrived in La Linea, the Spanish city right next to Gibraltar, on Friday evening and spent the night there. Because the Straits of Gibraltar are such a relatively small opening between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the current gets quite strong and when it flows against the wind, the waves can be treacherous, so we had to time exiting the Straits for slack water. The timing of this worked out quite well, because slack water was at noon on Saturday and it would take us about three hours to get there. This meant we had to leave La Linea at nine, giving us just enough time to refuel.

It is basically always windy at Gibraltar because the opening acts as a funnel between two large bodies of water, so even on a day when there supposedly wasn’t much wind, we still zoomed out of there. We thankfully timed the current correctly, as it was slightly against us getting there and then flipped around to give us a boost along the Atlantic coast of Spain.

Captain sleeping on the job – Atlantic Ocean

The wind is forecasted to come from the north for at least a week, so our goal was to make it to Ria Formosa in Portugal before then. We had spent a few weeks there in the fall while waiting for good weather to enter the Mediterranean, and we would much rather spend a week or two anchored there rather than in a marina in Spain. Ria Formosa is about a hundred and fifty nautical miles beyond Gibraltar, and once we had begun our voyage, the weather forecast changed to predict the north wind coming earlier and stronger, potentially ten knots of wind from the bow overnight. We considered changing course and heading to Cadiz in Spain after all, but different forecasts were conflicting and some said that there would be barely any wind. We decided to keep heading towards Ria Formosa and hope for the best, which usually is a bad idea but worked out well this time. We arrived in Ria Formosa the following morning after motoring into only a few knots of wind overnight and even managing to sail a bit.

I’m glad we made it here, as Ria Formosa is a great place to spend a while relaxing. We are anchored off Culatra, an island that is mainly a beach with a few small villages, but we are also near to the city of Olhão.

Zooming out of the Mediterranean

Ria Formosa and North Winds

Mahón

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