Mallorca : Palma
We arrived in Palma early evening on the 15th August and looked for one of the cheaper marinas. The harbour is enormous and packed with thousands of yachts of all sizes. However it was very difficult to tell which marina was which, so we settled on one and cooked the tuna for tea. At 8:30 p.m. the marina man came round, and we found out that this was a new marina, and that it would cost us about 60 Euros per night! I explained that this was far too much and we would move on. We headed for the eastern end of the harbour where we had been indicated for one of the cheaper marinas, and on the way we passed an area with some very lived-in boats, some in poor repair. So we asked around and were told this was a marina for the boatyards, only for boats needing work to be done on them during their stay. We were told a policeman came every day to check this, and the first boat told us we couldn’t stay. However we saw a family on another boat, who waved to us and said we were welcome to tie alongside their neighbour, and that it would be easy to get around the formalities just for a couple of days. It turned out the family was originally from Leicester, although they had been live-aboards for several years. Jason and Jane had two children, Luka, who was just six, and Billy, who was 21/2. They also had Jason’s sister visiting, Marie. They had been in Palma for a year, working on their boat, which was a Roberts 44 similar to ours, only built in steel. They had also been supporting themselves by Jason working as a carpenter on boats, and Jane sewing covers, awnings, sails, etc.
We made friends and spent parts of the next three days with them, drinking beers and letting the children play together. Luka did not have a lot of friends as she was educated on board, and her brother was too young to play with very much. But Dan and Luka got on very well, so we encouraged them to spend a lot of time together. Dan doesn’t often get to make friends now so we were very pleased to have this opportunity.
16th August
After our first night we went to find the office. The lady we found was nice, and after agreeing that we could sort out our gearbox oil leak problem ourselves with the help and advice and parts from the boatyard chandlery, she let us stay. We found out why prices are so high here, as there are several taxes imposed on visiting yachts. One of them is imposed as a flat fee for a stay of up to 10 days. Consequently the price for one night is high, but here at the boatyard marina at least, if you stay for several days the price becomes quite cheap. The examples we were told were for one night approx EUR70, for two nights EUR 90, for three nights EUR 110, and for eight nights EUR170. We settled on three nights which cost 102 EUR in the end, averaging approx GBP 22 per night, which was ok.
We were close to the town centre and the cathedral, and on the first day we decided to take the tourist train into the mountains, to Soller.