2016 On Mango

2015 ended by us spending Christmas on Mango and using our cockpit tent for the first time since leaving Biscay.  We had hoped to get out for a sail but the weather was not conducive.
Easter was mainly spent catching up on maintenance, testing our new mainsail and fitting new solar panels and regulators.
Our plan for the summer was to cruise Sardinia which is about a 3 day passage from where we are based in Spain.  We were initially delayed by a minor injury Helen sustained, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the summer has been characterized by more frequent than usual strong winds which would have given us a headache as they have been stronger in Sardinia and finding a weather window to get back would have been all consuming.
Our foretaste of having escaped some challenging sailing came when we were just short of Fornells in Minorca and we heard a gale warning on the VHF, the forecast had been for the following night to be a 5 gusting 6 and for light winds to follow.  In the event we were stuck in Fornells for 10 days while two gales blew themselves out.
So, rather than going to Sardinia we circumnavigated Minorca and revisited some of our favourite places in North Mallorca and had some good sailing but more motoring that we have had to do in previous years
Fornells did not impress when we first entered, but it grew on us as we stayed there and we would go again There is plenty of room in the harbour, but it does have a lot of motor boat and dinghy sailing activity (which was a useful distraction when we were stuck on the boat during the blows).  The town is small and pleasant and the old fortified tower at the entrance has been restored in to an interesting museum.
After Fornells we sailed down to Addaia past a rocky coastline with lots of inlets which would make wonderful day anchorages.  We arrived at Addaia doing over 7 knots under sail with a following wind and had to do a smart sail drop as the channel is very narrow and winds.  The main part of the inlet is mainly filled with mooring buoys but being a shallow draft catamaran we were able to go through to a shallow pool beyond the moorings and anchor in idyllic surroundings with a pleasant walk along bridleways into the town.


ps Our apologies, yet again I forgot to make a note of our cruising stats before leaving the boat.

Posting on hold

For the time being we have gone back to work.  Mango is still based in Spain and cruising to the Balearics so each year is pretty much a repeat of the previous ones so we are not actively maintaining the blog.

This year we learnt the hard way that you need to filter fuel even if it comes from a reputable source (we found rust in our tanks from fuel we got from a marina) and if you are not using a boat regularly you need to empty all your petrol tanks before leaving and clean the tanks as deposits build up.

2017 seems to be a repeat of 2016 for regular Tramontanas and gales from the East.

The upside of being in Spain is that it is warm, being rained on is not a hardship and the seafood is unbelievably fresh after the poor stuff one sees on UK fish counters.

The upside we have found of having Mango is that she is so light she will sail in winds when everyone else is motoring so we can go for a day sail.  We put a new main on last year and found that we had more weather helm, put on a new jib this year and the sails are now perfectly balanced so it is probably worth replacing sails as a set if you can.

We have decided to go back to wire shrouds as we have found that the Spectra shrouds are affected by tempreature to a degree that they need regular adjusting which is too much work for a short handed cruising boat unless one invests in some expensive dead eye arrangements.