There's been quite a bit of drama!

Well we finally managed to drag ourselves away from Valencia. If you saw our last blog you will know that we loved the city - and in fact we are now planning a mob-handed return there in March for Las Falles, their big fire festival. Anyway, since then we have slowly started to move south and we are currently in Cartagena. We are heading for Gibraltar because we plan to leave Viridian there whilst we return to the UK over Christmas. Although I don't like Gibraltar very much, it is cheap and convenient for flights and it has VERY cheap fuel.

Cartagena is actually not very far from Valencia, but although we haven't travelled a great distance we have experienced quite a bit of drama! I will tell you about this later.....

Our first stop after Valencia was Calpe, because there is a nice anchorage there (and anchoring is free so we like it very much) and Calpe is a nice town. When we arrived in Calpe we discovered our visit coincided with one of their annual festivals. Spain loves festivals - it seems that there is one pretty much every weekend. I didn't get all the details, but I gathered that this particular one was to commemorate the Moorish invasion and it was splendid! The town was rammed and the entertainment ran over several days - there were several parades; fireworks; and a re-enactament of the invasion with a battle on the beach. I thought their parade of floats was fabulous - in my opinion it made the Notting Hill Carnival look a bit amateurish....

We would have stayed in Calpe longer but the wind direction changed to the southwest and it promised to be a bit uncomfortable on the anchorage there, so we moved to a very quiet and very protected bay where we could anchor a little further down the coast. Unfortunately whilst we there our generator failed (yet again.......this was getting very tedious) - so after an overnight stay we headed down to Alicante.

Our very secure and secluded anchorage

We had visited Alicante a few days earlier, taking the bus from Calpe to watch the start of the Volvo Ocean Race which was very exciting! I must confess I was a bit surprised to see so many spectator boats impinging on the race course - it looked like total bedlam out there and I understand that there were very nearly a couple of collisions. Race management should have been better, you really shouldn't have to worry about crashing in the first few minutes of a Round The World race - its pretty much the equivalent of a dog running onto the football pitch at the start of the World Cup and stealing the ball!! 

It was mayhem out there!

Whilst we were in Alicante this time we visited the castle and found an amazing restaurant. The views from the castle were great, but one thing that really made me upset was the graffiti.....what kind of person thinks it is clever to put their tag on a building that is over 1200 years old? Very cross!!

Great views from Alicante castle

Keko and Laura need a good kicking..... 

....as do Justo and Elena!

Our trip to the castle was trumped by our visit to the restaurant L'Atelier where we had a great 4-course lunch for €13.50! If you are interested here is their Trip Advisor review.

From Alicante we went on to Torrevieja and it was during this passage that our first bit of drama occurred....

We were a couple of miles away from Torrevieja and getting prepared for the anchorage (my mouth was getting prepared for the first beer of the day) when we heard "Mayday, mayday, mayday" on the VHF. You could feel from the speaker's tone of voice that he was really distressed and he went on to say that his propellor shaft had just been ripped out his boat; that they were taking on water very rapidly; and that they were sinking! Cartagena Rescue Service responded and requested that any vessels in the vicinity provide assistance. Although a couple of other boats replied to say that they were about an hour away, we worked out from the position given that we were closest so we went up to maximum revs and altered course to go and find them; luckily we had loaded up with 200 litres of fuel in Alicante. As we were making our way there we pulled out our emergency pumps, but when we understood that the boat in trouble was an 80ft motor cruiser we realised our hand pumps simply weren't going to crack it.....Fortunately by the time we reached the motor boat they had managed to slow the ingress of water and their bilge pumps were enough to keep them afloat whilst we shadowed them back to Torrevieja in case of any further problems. They were very grateful. 

Conquest of 1966 making for Torrevieja - before they sink...

From Torrevieja we came down to Cartagena. We like the city, the marina there is very reasonably priced, and we know Juan-Pedro who is a brilliant engineer. He fixed our watermaker last time we visited and we were confident that he would be able to do a proper repair on our generator.

The catacombs in Cartagena

One of the beautiful buildings in the city centre

I love this statue.....

Cartagena's sculptures are everywhere....

It was here in Cartagena that we had our next bit of drama......

It was 02:30 and we were both in bed asleep when we were woken by someone shouting "Socorro!" loudly and constantly. It took a while for this to register (I now know this means "HELP"), but after a few moments we realised there was a problem out there so we scrambled to put on enough clothes for decency and had a look outside. What we found was about 10 metres down the pontoon there were a couple of people trying (and failing) to pull a body out of the water. If you have ever tried to lift a comatose body you will know that it is really difficult. It was pitch black so Jan grabbed our big torch whilst I rushed over to help and collectively we dragged the body on to the pontoon. I don't know how he had fallen into the water or how long he had been in there but he wasn't breathing. One of the other guys gave him some rescue breaths (rather him than me) whilst I started heart pumps. Well the First Aid course was worthwhile, because luckily after a couple of minutes or so (it seemed like a very long time) he spluttered a couple of times, spewed out some water then started breathing.....Long story short - police arrived some minutes later, closely followed by the ambulance and he was taken away. Hope he was OK....