Fri 22 Jun

One of the challenges of living on a sailboat is: How to stay fit? We don’t have a lot of space, and weight is an issue too (our own, as well as having a limit on the stuff we can bring 😉 ) so we can’t carry any training equipment. Instead we’ve been following this bodyweight training routine, which is basically just a bunch of static exercises like planks and whatnot plus a bunch of bodyweight exercises like pushups, squats and dips. Our goal is to do these three times per week, and so far we’ve been doing … alright-ish.

We started today with one of our workouts on the beach, and walked up the thousand stairs to the little village to get some bread. Filled up one more round of water jugs, and back to the boat we went. As I was doing our last water run, I bumped into an older German lady who complained (in German) to her friend about this being a shower and not a water place blah blah … she looked quite confused when I replied to her in perfect German, wishing her a wonderful day. 😀

Cala Porter is a beautiful place, and there was a risk of us retiring there and taking up permanent residence so we thought we’d better get out of there while we still can. We made our way down to Illa de l’Aire, which is a small uninhabited island on the southeastern tip of Menorca. We’d read in the pilot book that there is a special species of black lizards that apparently love tomatoes, so we had to check that out. We had a beautiful sail down there, and dropped the hook in a fairly sporty 20 knots of wind. It still feels a bit weird leaving your home hanging on a bit of chain and metal, bumping in the sea while we get in the dinghy and go ashore.

We made it to a rocky shore, where about a million seagulls made it abundantly clear that they did not want us on the island. I’ve never heard so many birds scream and shout at the same time, it was quite scary! There were also no lizards around, so we went back into the dinghy and drove a little bit further up where we saw the remains of an old hut and something that looked like it was a peer a long time ago. We went ashore, and sure enough, there were curious black little dragons everywhere, and they came up to us and ate tomato from our hands. We had a little nose around the island, and headed back to Bon Bini who was luckily still rocking about in the same spot that we had left her.

We picked up the hook and headed further west in preparation for our passage to Mallorca tomorrow. We found a tiny cala called “Cala Biniancolla” and anchored there for the night. The bay is tiny, and we used our awesome laser distance measuring thingy more than once to make sure we are not ending up on the rocks. We spent the evening snorkelling, reading and generally just relaxing and taking in the nice views.