Sailing Menorca: a cruise around the Balearic islans

Back in 2012, I decided to try a different type of trip and checked myself in a sailboat trip to go from Barcelona to the Balearic Islands and there spend some time sailing Menorca.

Initial doubts about sailing Menorca

I had never met any of the other seven people that were going to share that small ship with me, so I was a bit concerned about being in such a close contact with complete strangers. Poor me. TBH, I ended up being quite happy with my fellow pirates. All of us were travelling “solo”, and there were some people with a profile similar to mine.

First impresions about the sailboat and the trip

We met around mid afternoon at the harbour. We planned on going to buy some food before departing and do the first part of the trip during the night. The sailboat was quite small, no more than 15m long and even though it looked completely equipped and safe, I didn’t completely trust its capacity of crossing half Mediterranean. Despite the thoughts crossing my mind, our captain looked very competent so, for a while before departing, we all sit down and listened to all the rules and norms we needed to know before starting our trip and sailing Menorca.

The first shock during the trip were the sleeping arrangements: the saiboat had three small cabins, so I had to share a mattress with two strangers. Let me tell you that that’s one of the fastest ways to get really close to anyone. I’ll agree that it can be a bit extreme, but it works! At the end, it all worked out, I shared the bed with a couple of girls slightly older than me, a scientist and a hairdresser. Although a bit reticent initially, we spent quite some great moments all through the trip.

I was very excited! It was promising!

Traumatic experiences

The first real problem I encountered (that I have still not emocionally overcome) was the bathroom. Or to be more exact, the toilet itself. I, like I guess most people who’s only seen a sailboat from afar, never thought that a toilet mechanims would be different from any other found in land. I took for granted the beauty of pushing a magical button that makes everything dissappear. Ha! It turns out that doing any type of “anything” (you know what I’m talking about), goes on as usually. Then, the problems start. You must get your hand below the toilet, find a key and manualy pump until everything is washed away by sea water. That was not that bad. My traumatic experience heppened when they told me that no paper could be flushed through the toilet. And the way to fix that? Well, by having a bag in a closet with toilet paper full of shit (yep, traumatic, definetely, right?). Just imagine the picture, 9 people trapped in a tiny boat with two bags full of crap. The stuff people writes poems about! Anyway, I can happily admit that I was able to “save” myself for on land trips to the toilet, but I still have some emotional scars from that experience… Definetely not one of my preferred moments while sailing Menorca.

If the WC mechanism was not disturbing enough, we were so very lucky that we ended up in a cabin with a toilet that wasn’t working properly: every time we used it, a petrol stink crawled into the room and kept us company for several hours. We agreed to use it as little as possible when we were in the room, but it was terrible anyways.

A bath in high seas

The next morning, I woke up quite early, like I usually do, and I sat down to enjoy of the sunlight and the sea. The neverending blue, and the slight rocking of the boat. By that time I barely felt it anymore. A bit later, the rest of the people woke up and we had breakfast. Juan, our captain, stopped the boat around noon and announced that, since the sea was extremely calm, we could bath!

Personally, there are very few things that I respect more than the open sea. It’s not that I fear the sea itself, it’s more in the line of thinking, I have several thousands of metres of water below me and I don’t know what may be there waiting to bite me (irrational, I know, but most fears are!).

Anyway, I usually don’t allow my fears to guide me, so… I grew a pair and I took a leap. Initially, it was tough, I was quite stressed, but I started to slowly relax and finally I really enjoyed the experience. We swim for a while in the clearest water I have ever seen. It was a great moment and a fantastic way to get rid of the sun’s warmth after many hours of sailing to Menorca.

The time passes by differently on a sailboat

I am quite obsessed with time. That’s a fact. Because of that, for once, I decided to have some relaxing holidays and decided to give up my watch for the whole trip. I made it to 24h. Not knowing the remaining time of the day was stressing me. A lot. But when I gave in and started wearing it again, I realized how slowly time was passing by. We’d been on the boat for barely a day and I couldn’t wait to get to Menorca. When we finally saw land, I was so happy and excited that decided to seat on the sailboat ‘s bow and wait to make it to the harbour. It took three hours! I could have imagined then that sailing Menorca was not going to be the pleasant experience I thought it would be. But no, I learned that the following days.

When we finally arrived to Ciutadella and went ashore, all of us a bit out of balance due to the disembark syndrome, I felt in love. I had been to Menorca many years before, but the landscape was beautiful: The whole town had grown around a very nice harbour, the bar terraces (having normal wc’s, yeah!) were everywhere, and the tiled streets were all clean and filled with flowers. Since we arrived slightly before sunset, every part of the city was lighten with soft light that made the landscape even nicer. I loved it.

Amazing moments

Since we were moving around the island through sea, sailing Menorca allowed us to reach breathtaking beaches where we were the only people around and enjoy of a kind of freedom that otherwise it might not have been possible (some places are not accessible from land, for example). Some days we would spend the night in a beach with only other three sailboats as company and enjoyed of the most magnificent view of the Milky Way I have ever witnessed.

But a sailboat trip is not for everybody

Around the fourth day sailing Menorca, we finally made it to the west part of the island and docked the boat in the very cute Mahón. Because this natural harbour is open to the emptyness, there’s usually a lot of wind ravaging the coast. And that happened to us. We arrived to the dock around midnight, and got trapped there for three extra days.

The harbour of Mahón is, after Pearl Harbor and a few more, one of the biggest natural harbor in the world. It’s beautiful and you can spend hours just walking around it or simply visiting the city (let me tell you, the food is amazing, ohhh the cheese!). And since we were stucked there, I proposed to rent a couple of cars and drive to other more accessible beaches or calas (small beaches).

Know more about the gastronomy of these islands here: Sobrasada and cheese in Mahon

I must say that, even though it’s a bit sad to admit it, I enjoyed more those two days that we spent driving around that the rest of the trip. Sailing Menorca was fun, but being able to actually make it to places in a reasonable amount of time was even better. During that time we ate delicious food, enjoyed of a relaxed athmosphere in Mahón and, we were able to reach almost anything in the island in only half an hour! I loved the tiny calas we visited with the sailboat, but going so slow was driving me crazy.

Sailing for many hours every day just to cover few kilometres, was more relax that I could take. I can only assume that doing this type of trip with friends or with your partner must be a very different experience, but don’t count me in for the next one!

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