sailing maloo: how to catch a swordfish,a night on land and la cabrera

from mahon on menorca we had a wonderful sail down to portocolom on mallorca.

for the very first time we had our gennaker up for more than 5min and loved it.

under way, the boys trawled some lines again...and again Lukas pulled a little tuna out! - great for sashimi!

shortly after we tied up in portocolom a spanish boat came in, with a wonderful 1m long swordfish lying on the back of their boat. of course we had to find out, where they'd caught it - and we were quite surprised that they'd pulled it out just at the opposite jetty! a commercial fishing-boat hat tied up there to unload tones of massive swordfish caught around the area of mallorca. they just happend to be at the right spot in the right time and got a freebee since the little fellow was to small to be sold. after lending them a water hose (we also borrowed from the marina) we were rewarded with what would have to be the most beautiful fillet...and it just tasted divine!

the next day had us say our goodbyes to Michael and Lukas, desperately finding space for all their fishing gear on our boat, which Michael left with us for the atlantic-crossing, and meet our new crew for 4 days.

we spend a night on land in a wonderful finca surrounded by a breathtaking garden and being woken up by the calls of a donkey (i just looooove donkeys - even if they wake me up). how different it is to use a toilet the one does not have to pump ;)

the next morning we sailed down to la cabrera - a nature reserve just south of mallorca and spend one not so nice night on a very rolling and rocking buoy, and one wonderful calm night on a much better buoy! ( in la cabrera you have to book a buoy ahead and depending on boat size you are allocated a buoy in a certain color - in our case yellow for boats from 12-15m. these buoys are right in the middle of the bay though...and they roll if swell is coming in. the white buoys are for smaller boats. however they are built the same way, but in much better positions - so the second night we moved!) we had great snorcheling, a wonderful island-walk...and a phantastic time with lots of laughter with our friends which i hope to see again soon!!!!!

we then moved on to porto petro and back to portocolom to drop off our crew.