The past week has been spent circumnavigating Ibiza, sailing from one cala (cove) to another. They really are beautiful it’s just a shame that at the head of each one the beach areas are so built up. Sitting in our cockpit if you look one way there is just blue sea, dramatic cliffs and tree covered hills.

In the other direction are hotels, some high rise others more tasteful, beach bars, restaurants and people, so many people. Every inch of beach is covered in sun beds and sunshades, the buoyed off swimming area is full of swimmers and the restaurants are buzzing. Around us speed boats whiz by pulling kids on floating toys or water skiers, leisure boats come in and out ferrying people on glass bottom boat trips, trips to the next bay, trips out to the islands and then, there are the pedal boats. In what circumstances did someone sit down and actually think – I know what the world needs, a pedal boat shaped like a car with a slide on top?

  
We could really do with going into the marina for a day or two but the prices here are bonkers. The lowest quote for a night we have had is €300 plus water and electricity, three hundred Euros to tie up to a floating piece of wood and use their loos, I think there is a bit of a mismatch in supply and demand. To put that in context I think the very highest fees in the UK are about £70 a day and the main Marina in Palma has just quoted us €120.

So we are at anchor. It’s amazing, day to day, how little we notice the essentials we rely on. That is until you don’t have them, long term anchoring does bring with it a few practical problems.

Water, we can make our own fresh water from sea water to drink, shower, wash up, clean the decks, do the laundry etc etc., and with just two of us onboard we seem to have plenty.

Food, we are using the dingy to go ashore for essentials at the small resort supermarkets, using our stored supplies and are justifying eating out more often than planned, by the fact that anchoring is free.

Rubbish, which builds up surprisingly quickly, despite it being just the two of us, we are taking ashore and using the local bins. This is something we need to think about for the Atlantic crossing, food waste and glass can go into the sea but plastic and similar waste will have to be stored somewhere.

Toilets, we try and use the toilets ashore when possible, we have holding tanks so we can use the toilets onboard until they are full when we either have to sail offshore far enough to empty them or call into a marina to have them pumped out.

Internet, we have a satellite connection, but it is slow and expensive, we use it to download emails to the boat address and grib files ( a type of weather report ), but for anything else we have to take our tech ashore and find a bar that has wifi that we can use. Not so brilliant for blog writing!

Crew changes, Matt and Robyn we put ashore at one of the east coast resorts,  dropping them and their bags at a rickety few sticks on the rocks that we managed to tie the dingy too. Yesterday we had to pull the dingy up on to the beach, obviously not far enough, while ashore the sea got rougher and when we returned it was full of water. Penny and Stephen arrive tomorrow so we are sailing to San Antonio today to try and find a better solution to get them and their bags onboard.

Routine maintenance, there is always something not working on a boat, people joke that cruising is boat maintenance in exotic places.

Yesterday Rick spent a few hours trying to get to the bottom of the problem of our unreliable air conditioning. This would have been much easier had the boat not been rocking and rolling every time a another boat came past, although being at anchor did mean he could dive under the boat to clean the water intakes.

In the anchorage around us there are boats of every shape and size. Some are small yachts, and actually not so small yachts, that I’m sure would love to have watermakers and salitalite coms and others are huge super yachts that have a full staff and no doubt all the amenities of a large hotel. Raya is designed for long term cruising, there is nothing we are desperate for, we are living very comfortably and we love the relaxed nature of being at anchor, I suspect however we will be looking forward to a few nights tied to a pontoon by the time we reach Mallorca.