From Spain to France

It’s been a while since I wrote (this is Anwar by the way) . Let’s recap what we did since the last entry we made.

After leaving Sa Riera, we headed north and decided to stop at a place called Cadaques. I love it when we choose a place by chance, knowing nothing about it. Turns out Cadaques has a special place in art History, it is the town of Dali. Other artists such as Picasso and many others spent time there. Such a beautiful place. We then continued north and spent the night in a town called La Selva before crossing the border into France and reaching our first planned destination Canet En Roussillon. We were worried that we might have issues due to all the COVID restrictions.. But all was very smooth!

In Canet I had to do my Yanmar engine service and have some other stuff checked out by our dealer.

We left Canet on our first long crossing since the start of this trip. We crossed Le Golfe de Lion to Les Porquerolles Islands, à trip that took us near 24hrs to complete. I was a bit anxious as this bay is where the Tramontane winds prevail. And as someone told me (Faisal Khalaf) , any wind system with a name, I should worry and watch out for. Needless to say, we planned it so that we had near 0 wind and flat seas. I did not want our crossings to be uncomfortable.

After completing the crossing, we headed to Les Porquerolles where we spent the night. We then went to Port de Man in the next island. Because this was a marine reserve, we were not allowed to anchor near shore. The offshore Anchorage was over 20m. As I dropped anchor, I kept on giving out chain (I usually take the depth and multiply by at least 4 times)… My son signals that we were out of chain! I look at the chain counter, it said 60m! This was shocking to me as I was under the impression that we had 85m! No worries, I contacted my dealer and they started working on sorting this out for me at our next Marina stop. Fast forward… I now have 100m of Chain 🙂

After the islands, we headed to St Tropez. This is one of my favorite places on the planet… Massive Yachts, cozy cafés and restaurants, lot of bling… We anchored about 500m from the Port. Sarah took the kids in the afternoon for a walk around while I stayed on the Bayti. When they came back, I took my wife out on a date, picked a fancy restaurant and enjoyed a lovely meal.

Swe headed back to Bayti around 10pm, soon after, right before calling it a night, we went outside to take a final look, we found ourselves in around 30kts of wind and to add insult to injury, our anchor was dragging… Remember I had 60m of chain back then! We tried to remain calm, we removed the anchor and chose a different spot hoping that the bottom will have more grip… It was around 10m depth and I released all the 60m of chain we had. We had a very interesting night. Sarah and I slept outside, just to make sure the anchor sdoesnt drag again. The forecast mentioned that another squall would hit at around 5am…nothing happened.

To be continued…