The long awaited season 3!

Its been about three years since the picture below was taken. We were looking sad in the photo because it was going to be another 6 months before Bini was supposed to go back in the water. Instead it turned out to be three years. Three years! Bini was supposed to be splashed in Turkey at the end of April 2020, ready for another season of cruising. Instead the world went upside down with Covid, and we found ourselves wondering what to do. What followed next is a long story of picking up jobs, moving to Barcelona, getting Bini delivered then moving down to Benahavís. I’ll spare you the details. But at the end of March 2023 we were finally ready to set sail again, woohoo!

But you know what they say – cruising is really just another word for fixing boats in exotic places. So before we could set sail, there was a massive list of boat jobs to be done. In fact the list was so long that if you wanted to read it out loud you would need to do it with the voice of the guy reading the fine print at the end of a radio ad. I’ll spare you the details, let’s just say there were a lot of small things and a few big things that needed to get done. One of the bigger jobs was to replace the teak caulking in our cockpit. The old caulking had started to completely disintegrate leaving what looked like black dust all over Bini’s shiny white decks. We don’t have a lot of teak but replacing the caulking turned into a mammoth project involving scraping bits of rubber out of the deck using various tools, sanding the whole cockpit, oiling it, putting new caulking in and sanding the whole lot again. In fact this was so much work that we had to do some of it on the go, as our contract with Puerto Banus marina was coming to an end.

We took off towards Sotogrande on the 3rd April, with Tony on board for the maiden voyage. The idea was to spend a week or so in Sotogrande to finish boat jobs before then going to Gibraltar to finish even more boat jobs. You see the theme here. Fortunately or unfortunately, we weren’t able to get anything done in Sotogrande, as the weather was terrible and I suffered the aftermath of a boozy half marathon in Prague. So off we went to Gibraltar where we were getting the standing rigging replaced. Coming into Gibraltar is an odd experience, sailing past that massive rock and having to check into the UK. Proper procedure calls for hoisting a yellow flag (called the “Q” flag) as you come into a new country and wait for customs clearance. We’d lost our Q flag somehow so had to take the scissors to a German courtesy flag – sorry Germany! We ended up staying almost two weeks in Gib, getting a lot of boat work done and meeting lovely fellow cruisers. We mostly spent our days on the hunt for this or that tool, raiding the chandlers and enjoying sun downers with fellow cruisers. Some of the orca stories they shared were outright crazy! After spending what felt like forever in marinas, we were finally ready to set sail. We hopped over to La Linea (in the bay of Gibraltar) to check back into the EU, which was met with very confused looks by a few customs agents. Apparently nobody cares if you come back into Schengen by boat. 

Our main goal for this season is to make it to Greece, which is about 1200 miles east. To get into the central Med we were waiting for westerly winds with the plan to ride them for as long as we could. Our first sail was a lovely 120 miles passage to Almerimar. After a day and night of glorious sailing we arrived at the entrance of Almerimar and found we could still make reasonable progress with the wind blowing from the west so decided to press on and we sailed another day and night to Cartagena. 250 miles for the first passage of the season, not bad! Cartagena is a lovely Spanish town, ehrm city, with beautiful architecture and generally an extremely relaxed vibe. We managed to roam around the city and finished off the last bit of teak work. The weather here at the end of April is still all over the shop, so getting a consistent weather window has been a challenge.

After spotting some westerlies on the forecast, we set off to hop along the cost, either to Mar Menor (a funky in-land sea) or any of the marinas along the south east coast of Spain. After talking to a German couple who were also going east we decided to join them and sail the 180 miles from Cartagena to Formentera. This passage would take roughly a day and a night, the only problem being that the winds were going to shift northerly throughout the passage, and north east is were we wanted to go. To avoid having the wind on the nose, we decided to hug the coast and use the wind to sail as far north as possible, so that we could then beam reach it across to Formentera. The passage started nice enough, with the wind behind us and flat seas. The wind kept building and building, at some point we were sailing with a reefed Genoa only and Bini was still flying at 9 knots! As the sun set over a sleepy Spanish coast, Camilla spotted an odd looking cloud forming just off our stern. We kept on sailing, and watched this cloud turn into a nasty thunderstorm just as the night set in. There is something special about floating on a tiny piece of plastic with a massive metal pole sticking up, in the dark, with lightning cracking all around you. We both have a bit of lightning-induced PTSD, going back to a horrible thunderstorm off the coast of Sicily a few years back. Not wanting to repeat this particular experience we decided to run before the storm and kept heading north to find shelter in a marina in Altea. We arrived in the marina at 2am, salty but happy with all of our electronics in the oven.