Cartagena, Spain

Returning after such a long time away is often a bittersweet experience. What you left remains frozen in your memory, (and in your fridge) yet the inevitable passage of time means that despite your best attempts reality has not stood still.

In some aspects the attempt to freeze time is a matter of maintenance. When you leave the boat, ideally almost everything works. If you’ve done the ‘winterising’ right then it should still work when you get back. On that front we did pretty well for our first hibernation period. Even after 6 months the mooring lines were almost good as new and after a bit of fuel, oil and encouragement pretty much everything sprung obligingly back to life. The batteries were still alive, nothing was mouldy, the engine ran (although a barnacle hat to be prized off the through hull to revive the water intake).

In the spirit of our resolution to take things slowly this season, we decided to simply lazily wait for some good wind to carry us over in the direction of Valencia, rather than beat up wind or motor. We’re not rushing towards the Atlantic this time, so we can afford to only move when conditions are ideal.

Anyway, we still had a couple of weeks of boat maintenance to go through in Cartagena so we turned to face our wall of sticky notes once again and tackle them one by one. In between tasks we had time to meet up with some old and new friends in our boatshood. Dawn and Joe the veteran, who were getting ready to sail back to the US, and Gal and Martina who were passing through Cartagena again on their way East. Probably one of the greatest joys of sailing is having a nice boat-cooked-meal and playing cards into the small hours of the night with friends.

We also had more time to explore Cartagena, a city we probably never would have come across if we hadn't been sailing. The city is mostly known for its naval history but it also has an impressive amount of Roman ruins in fairly good condition (as recommended to us by Cameron’s grandfather). Whenever we needed some off boat time we would go to one of the various, almost-free museums the city has to offer; underwater archeology, naval history, submarines, amphitheatre, etc. and spend the day in their cool and quiet halls.

P.s. Cartagena has a fancy  array of pavements: