Back home in Catalunya

We're back home on Spanish waters! The 150 n miles long passage across Golfe du Lion went pretty smoothly. Started with calm sea and around 10 knots of Southerlies, then we caught a 30(!!) kilos mega tuna, slept OK, woke up with 2 meters of waves around us and an established F6 with gusts to 36 knots. Good variation on that one. And can you imagine how glad I am to finally have nonstop service on the wifi?! We have realized a lot of things during this last trip. One is that we definitely need satellite connection through Inmarsat, aboard our boat for the circumnavigation. /T

Weekend trip

Our friends have now all returned to their homes around the globe and we're back to the normal and some final work before leaving for vacation. That doesn't stop us from spending the weekends on the sea. Or to be frankly honest, we're pretty good at finding excuses, and have already cut down work to around 50%.

Some pics from our last trip, somewhere in between Tossa de mar and Sant Feliu:

Costa Brava some weeks ago

It's a pretty small area of the coast we're hanging around in at the moment. From Sitges a bit South West of Barcelona and along the Costa Brava coast up North. That's the area you see in the box around Barcelona.

Some weeks ago, we left our marina again for some quiet sailing up North along the coast. We decided to find an even better creek to set anchor, for a peaceful weekend in the nature. As you can see we had a really smooth and comfortable ride up, but on the way back we had to face conditions which made the regular ten hour trip to more than the double and forced us to a couple of stops along the way.

Anyway, the sail up was smooth and wonderful. At some points, the wind died out completely and we had a perfectly sunny day and plenty of time to fish.

We were hoping to get some of those big tunas we told you about but none of them in sight.

Only a couple of small mackerel's and bonito's which were good enough of course. Here one with coriander, lemon, garlic and spring onion, served with grilled potatoes.

In action.

We found a nice creek after Tossa, just in time for the sunset. We were totally left alone in this beauty of the nature, no other boats in sight for the whole stay.

So we anchored the boat, pumped up the dinghy and went out to explore the surroundings.

Beautiful rocks.

I can not in any way tell you how the sunset looked like, as these pictures doesn't give a fair expression, but it appeared like a dream... the last beams of sun covered parts of the mountains in a theatrical way before they disappeared behind the hills. Breathtaking. And the simple moment was so quiet and peaceful. Like a dream.

We paddled further in our small creek to the other side where we discovered some caves..

Inside. Beautiful colors.

Then back to Caos..

Where we ended the night with a cheap but nice bottle of wine.

Early morning and time to go home. This is what we got on the hook just before we left.

When we checked the forecast that morning, they announced wind south-east, wind force: 1-2, but the reality was more like south west 5-6. Crazy ride back and forth. We got seriously exhausted by the 20-23 knots of wind in our face for twelve hours, the 1,5 meter high waves and all that tacking back and forth so we decided to stay over night in Arenys de Mar. Which was pretty nice as well but made us miss one day of work at home. Thank God we're both self employed and able to schedule our days pretty much like we want.

If someone wonders how our home looks like from the inside, in conditions like that. Everything-up-side-down, would maybe be a fair description.

The wind was pretty humble the day after so I took the opportunity to work an hour or so on the way back home from Arenys de Mar... Thank God for the wireless dongle.. Over all it was a very beautiful and peaceful weekend, exactly what is needed after a stressful week of work. /T