For the very short sail a mile or so up the coast we did get the sails out and drift along in the 5 or 6 knots of breeze. We tried to practice gybing our big geneaker which always gives us problems but today it was the sheets (the control line tied to the trailing end of the sail) that had minds of their own. Whatever we did they decided to catch on cleats and places that they had never touched before. Even when we had given up and were furling the sail Chris had to go forward twice to flip sheets off the cleats and obstructions they had found. Probably there was not quite enough wind to carry the sail around but it was a frustrating sail… The Skipper decide the best policy was to get into harbour for a beer!
We refueled before picking up a mooring buoy in Porto Colom with the assistance of the Rib from ‘Club Naval’ who run them. The charge is E28 each night with free water if you take your boat to the quay to load it. We have read that its quite salty though so won’t bother. A big harbour with good shelter and quite a few boats here though there are still plenty of free buoys. We went into the area described as the town by the guy in the Rib and it was a rather uninteresting domestic settlement with a few tourist restaurants and bars clustered around a square. We were looking for car hire places, the first the woman just about managed to stop chatting after a while to tell us it was E50 per day, leave at 10.00 be back at 16.00. We found another clearly family run operation with a friendly lady where the price was E33 to use the car from 09.00 hrs to 21.00 hrs in the evening… guess which one we chose! We have booked a car for the day on Friday to tour the inner parts of the island. Dinner was at a place right by the dinghy dock, Restaurante Mestral, which was friendly when we stopped for a drink and did local style cuisine, we both had versions of pork dishes with a Mallorcan take on ratatouille or a sort of sausage of meat and veg stuffed into the tenderloin. Very tasty. Thursday morning has been spent shopping to stock up the food supplies and we plan to walk the other way around the bay later when it cools slightly. The buildings we can see from the boat look older and more interesting in that direction.
Photo: Grey skies over the anchorage in Porto Colom, the weather today has been variable!