Formentera
We arrived at about 6p.m. and aimed for the anchorage outside La Savina harbour, which was crowded with yachts. We found a place and once anchored consumed a litre of cold Sangria between us, which was excellent!
The next day, Tuesday 3rd August, Nigel took Dan to the beach in the morning. Then we went into the shopping area by the marina, and found a couple of good chandleries. We bought a Spanish chart of Formentera and Ibiza, and fittings to make a shower in the cockpit. Also I bought a courtesy flag for Italy, I mention this because of the price of 3.3 Euros. It is the same quality of flag that you normally pay £10 for in England.
We ate very simply at one of the marina restaurants as it was clear most things were considerably dearer here than in Spain. Then we wandered further, and discovered the inland lake/sea which hides behind this part of the island. It is big enough to windsurf on, and is full of moored boats around its edges. Looking at the chart, further on there is another lake which is part of the nature reserve. Consequently the harbour is about 3km or a bus ride from the nearest town. We had a brief visit to the small supermarket and then used the local internet place which is in a hotel and very expensive at 5 Euros per hour. The other internet place nearer the harbour that we found later isn’t much better at 4 Euros per hour, although we understand you can arrange to connect your own laptop there.
We went back to the boat and swam from the boat. The water is about 28 degrees C with visibility of up to 40 metres.
Wednesday 4th August we went to the beach first. Nigel went snorkelling and Dan and I swam, Nigel spotted a lot of bream and went to get his speargun, he ended up with four, two with yellow stripes, and two brownish ones. We cooked them on the boat with garlic and rosemary and had a delicious meal. However the large stripy one was so chewy I gave up on it. The brown bream were wonderful.
Later Nigel prepared a cheesecake for dessert - so very good eating that day! I went into town to make the payment for our boat insurance which comes up in a few days - more money.
That evening there was a lightning storm over Ibiza, although we expected bad weather it never arrived over us, we got a maximum of Force 5. However during the preceding 24 hours the wind had changed direction about 360 degrees.
Thursday 5th August was a quiet day, we mostly stayed on the boat and swam from it. Large wind changes during the day. We have never seen so many idiots in charge of sailing boats as here. There are well over fifty boats in this anchorage, which curves along a sizeable beach. Yachts are coming and going all the time. The worst culprits are in Spanish-registered boats, both owner-driven and chartered. They will drive through the anchorage and instead of selecting an area thinly populated with boats, they will select a position between two boats which are properly spaced apart to be safe, and anchor between them. They put their anchor next to an existing boat’s anchor and drop back to a position only a boat length or so sideways of an existing boat. This means that when everyone swings around with the wind (which happens frequently here), they will be in the way either with their bow and chain threatening your steering gear, or with their stern tangling with your anchor chain. It also means that one of you will have trouble leaving because one boat is likely to be sitting above the other boat’s anchor.
At night the bay looks like a Christmas tree because of all the anchor lights, cockpit lights, deck lights and various other lights. We use a solar light for an anchor light, it is dim but better than nothing.
There is a considerable amount of nudity, not only on the nudist beach opposite, but people on their boats in full view. A quite old German couple next to us were polishing the stainless steel on their pushpit for quite some time, completely starkers!
And nobody seems to wave to each other. Everyone carries on as if nobody else is there, and even if they see you wave they don’t wave back. This is so different from anything we have seen along the coast of Spain itself.
Friday 6th August
We went to an internet café to connect our laptop, the first time we had downloaded our mail since La Coruña. After they had called someone specially to set up the connection, the download was quick. However I still cannot send mail via Outlook Express, it was suggested that the Spanish internet system may not talk correctly with the Guernsey server. I think I managed to send the emails I needed to by using the webmail, but I am not sure as they didn’t appear in my sent box.
Nigel took Dan swimming and later went windsurfing, although there was not quite enough wind.
Saturday 7th August Nigel took the dinghy in to the fuelling berth at La Savina, and found out that you could not obtain water unless you paid for a berth. So we decided to proceed towards Ibiza although we had two days in hand before we definitely needed a supermarket. We moved the boat up to a beach further north, nearly at the northern tip of Formentera. We swam and Nigel windsurfed although there wasn’t quite enough wind. I took Daniel to the next little island in the dinghy.
Sunday 8th August we swam and both of us windsurfed, there was a good wind. We met three Italians from Venice, who had sailed to Formentera from Sardinia. Later I walked to the northern tip of the island which was littered with constructions made of stones, driftwood and rubbish from the beach, making little houses, tombs, “gardens”, mobiles, windmills, and a full sized fisherman’s “house”. We do not know who made them, but suspect a naked bald man who slept on the beach!
In late afternoon we moved the boat from Formentera around the west coast of Ibiza.
On the way we caught a tuna, and managed a couple of hours under spinnaker only. We were aiming for Sant Antoni de Portmany (St Antonio for short), the only large town on this coast. The rocky scenery on the way was beautiful, with high cliffs and low rock shapes, and generally very deep water right close to the shore, typically 70-90 metres deep.