Our sailing adventure started on Friday, July 24th from Port Roda De Bara, a delightful marina that is conveniently located next to a number of supermarkets and within a 20 minute drive to Tarragona, a larger town that houses all the big stores like Bauhaus, Le Roy Merlin and the biggest Carrefour hypermarket I’ve ever seen. This marina is definitely recommended and has better rates than other nearby marinas that are closer to Barcelona.
We started with a short distance sail (6hours) to Porto Forum in Barcelona, the only reason we stayed at a marina is that whole stretch from Roda De Bara to the North has no bays for anchoring and we didn’t want our first trip to be a long and tiring one for the kids. We did a quick visit to Decathlon which was located within walking distance of the port and then we were off early the next morning for an 8 hour sail to a protected bay we could spend the night in. We discovered La Riera, a beautiful surrounded by cliffs where were people hiking, water skiing and others were jumping off the cliff so the kids hurriedly took the paddle boards out to get in on to the action.
We were all ready to sleep when the sun set at 9:30pm, yes 9.30pm! The day is very long in summer in Europe which is great because you get to do so much in a day. Everyone fell asleep and I felt exhausted but every time I’d sleep I’d hear a noise that would keep me alert. A passing boat, a wave, the clacking of the sails; my main concern was the anchor dragging and knocking into a neighboring boat or on to land. I couldn’t believe I was the only one worried about our boat.
The next morning Anwar and the kids were so amused that I was awake at night even though there was hardly any wind and the seas were calm with only a few boats around us. Hani, my eldest son, showed me an app he’d installed that records the position of our anchor and he set it so that it beeps if the boat moves out of a certain radius which would indicate that we were dragging anchor. What a relief because the next night when we slept in a new bay I was able to put my head on the pillow and sleep soundly!