Friday 25/03/11 Bizerte, Tunisia to Mahon, Menorca

We’re in Menorca! We sailed 320 miles from Tunisia to here all in one go, all by ourselves! We’ve just had a hot shower! Amazing! I am so pleased about how clean I am and how far we’ve come I am radiating smugness. We are brilliant.

We looked at the forecast on Monday and saw that three or four days of decent east wind were on the way, so we thought we might see about making some progress westwards. So we left Bizerte on Tuesday morning and finally tied up on the quay here in Mahon last night about 10pm.

We wanted to leave Bizerte with first light at around six, so we went to see the garde nationale on Monday to arrange to do our paperwork before we left. The nice man on duty called up the port authority people so that we could pay for our berth, and we arranged see him at 5am on Tuesday so that he could arrange with the polices frontieres to come and stamp us out of Tunisia. Paying for our berth was fun; two older gentlemen with impressive moustaches, tweed jackets and flat caps turned up and gravely took out their order book. One sat down, and began to fill in our information on the form. The other acted as intermediary and communicated to his colleague the information written on our entry paperwork, relayed to him by the garde nationale sitting the other side of the desk watching an Arabic cookery programme on the TV. It was all deliciously complicated.

Then they asked us when we arrived, worked out how long we had been there for then decided they would only charge us for six days, which came to a total 22 Tunisian dinar, the equivalent of £10. Ideal. In the meantime the nice garde had switched the TV to the news and I was getting all excited about Arabic which amused him. He wrote ‘Planet’ for us in Arabic, which looks like this:

Anyway, back to Tuesday morning. We finally left just after six, and decided to head for the south west tip of Sardinia, about 110 miles away so that we could have a fast sail over there and have the option of heading in to Carloforte to break the journey if the forecast changed or we were tired. It wasn’t much of a detour and it made sense to us. The wind was due to be stronger overnight and then easing from Wednesday morning onwards, but weather can change quickly in the Med, particularly in the winter, so we wanted to leave our options open. As it was, the weather and the sea did exactly what it was forecast to do from the moment we left Bizerte to getting to Mahon, which was a great help. Anyway, we made good progress once we got a little offshore. Si saw some turtles, which we decided were as auspicious as dolphins and then we began gradually reducing sail as the wind picked up, until by nightfall we were down to just the small jib and the staysail which carried us in a force 5 at between 5.5 and 6 knots all through the night. Amazingly, Planet liked this set up so much there was virtually no weight on the helm and she was happy to steer herself which made our lives so much easier. We took it in turns to have a couple of hours sleep each at a time, with an hour or so on watch together in between to allow time to make coffee, cook dinner, do the log and things like that. This worked really well, and although the nights are still quite long at the moment, we had the company of thousands of stars and a three quarters full moon for most of the night which made the darkness very light indeed. By the time dawn came on Wednesday we were in sight of the Sardinian coast and within VHF range of their forecast, which continued to be good. So we decided to make the most of the full moon, the good forecast, the rhythm of watches and sleep we had settled into by then and use the time we would have spent getting in and out of Carloforte harbour to bear away and carry on to Mahon, about 200 miles away.

As if in confirmation of the quality of our decision, shortly after this some dolphins turned up and frolicked around the boat for a bit. The wind eased so we got the main up and shook out some reefs, then after lunch the wind went completely so we motor sailed from then until dawn when the wind came back as we sailed over the Spanish border and raised our latest courtesy flag. We had another starry moonlit night disturbed only by the presence of bees. A few appeared around the boat towards sunset on Wednesday, then more and more turned up to roost.

They sat in stupid places, were all furry and disgusting to touch accidentally in the dark, and on the whole we would have preferred not to have been sailing in a boat covered in bees, but what can you do? Then dawn came and we found them all, lolling around like a bunch of teenagers with hangovers who have crashed a facebook generated rave in somebody’s living room and are sitting around bleary eyed the next morning refusing to take any responsibility for the chaos that surrounds them. We also found various ex-bees, squashed by us in the night. There was generally bee-related wreckage. Around mid morning once they deigned to get up, the bees all flew away, leaving us to clear up the mess.

The wind came and went all through yesterday so a few hours later we were motor sailing again and I had just put my head down when an almighty thud came from the hull. Si says his instinctive reaction was to think we’d gone aground, because that was definitely what it felt like. Obviously this was impossible as we were out of sight of land and in 2000 metres of water, so then he looked behind and saw emerging from under the hull a semi submerged log, measuring about 5ft in length by 2ft in diameter that Planet had just driven over. Clearly with fairly large rolling waves it is impossible to see something like that in the water ahead, so there was nothing we could have done, but it was quite alarming all the same. Si went and had a look at the bow, but there was no sign of any damage, and after monitoring the bilges every half hour for the next couple of hours there was no sign of any water getting in at all. We’ll have a proper look tomorrow in the light, but it would seem that Planet is pretty robust. Certainly the log we hit leaving Lyon in the Rhone didn’t do her any damage beyond removing a little layer of paint so fingers crossed. The sea was a lot bigger yesterday, with some tall rollers for Planet to surf down which made her a bit heavy on the helm, but we managed to sail again for most of the afternoon which made it easier, and by sunset we were about 15 miles off Mahon. A bit of a haze started up during the day which meant we didn’t catch sight of Menorca until we were about 12 miles off, just as the sun was going down. I had been assuming I would be really excited about our landfall, but by this stage I must have been too tired to be that fussed because I can remember looking at the horizon, seeing it and just thinking good it’s there, and carrying on. We put the engine on, got the main down and motored into the harbour entrance. Mahon is a large natural fjord like harbour, so it was a good deep harbour to come into at night, and well lit too which is always helpful. Anyway, we chugged past houses and expensive looking pontoons and cheap looking anchorages that we were too lazy to go to because of having to get the dinghy out to row ashore, and finally tied up on a medium looking bit of quay, right outside an open bar selling large beers which we headed straight for. We were so tired neither of us said anything for the first half pint, then we perked up, had another one and went to back to Planet and slept for ten hours.