Since arriving in Port Ginesta a lot of water has passed beneath Castor's keel (so to speak) firstly there was Castor's shock! Let me explain, it all started the day after we came back from a visit to England, I woke to find we had no shore-power, leaving the boat to investigate I was somewhat surprised to see that the boat beside us had sunk! At first it didn't sink in (puns aside) and then I noticed that its shore-power cable had snapped and must have shorted out the power supply as the boat went down.

Now that's not the shock I'm speaking about, that arrived with the divers and the marina staff that came to supervise the lift. They brought with them a large 3 phase pump and air-bags, Joining the gathering crowed we watched with interest as the divers attached the air-bags under the hull of the sunken boat and by pumping air into the bags, slowly lift the stricken boat off the marina sea bed.

Once the excitement had passed we returned to Castor to discover that while rewiring the power supply for their 3 phase pump they had mistakenly connected the 300 plus volts of the 3 phase supply up to Castor, burning out everything that was working at the time. We lost our ship's battery charger/inverter, automatic switching system that detects shore-power or generator, our hot water tank heater element and the charger for our laptop along with our coffee machine. The repairs have ran into a four figure bill that our insurance company is still fighting to recover.

Our other bone of contention was regarding the monster at the end of the pontoon, it wakes at ten o'clock in the evening and groans and thumps and shrikes until six o'clock the following morning. It has one day a week rest and continues throughout the year, summer and winter. I have been known to leave the boat at four in the morning screaming like a mad man just to get as far away as I can to gain some sanity and relief from the never ending thump thump thump.

Eventually we put an ultimatum to the marina staff, move Castor as far away as humanly possible from the inane tribal thumping of this wretched excuse for a nightclub or else we will be off to another marina. It worked, we were given a place in the newly constructed extension far away from the inane thumping. We are now in a well protected basin close to the beach, our thump thump has been replaced by a gentle swish as the waves wash up on the beach. Bags under the eyes have gone and I'm sleeping like a baby!

In fact we are so happy with our new found tranquillity that we have decided to pay up for a full year and use Port Ginesta for Castor's base for the next twelve months. This coming season we will sail in June out to the Balearic Islands again and spend the summer cruising between Ibiza, Formentera, Mallorca and Menorca, returning to Port Ginesta late September if we can be bothered to implement plan B we might even visit Corsica, then again we might just leave it for another year.