'Jemm of the Sea II' Sailing Blog

After all this time of preparations and re-fits, the boat seemed ready to be taken out to sea. Sunday September 8 we set up sails in the direction of Playa Santa Cristina, Spain with intention to anchor there for a few days. We crossed the windy and rough Gulf of Lion in nice 20 kts winds.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Crossing Gulf of Lion to a great weather!                                                                                   

After a quick passage of about a day, w e reached our destination. Anchorage turned out to be really a fair weather one and it was horrible with S-E winds as the boat constantly swung and heeled when in cross wind. This anchorage seemed to untenable in that weather. After consulting Predict Wind and some other weather places, we decided to set sail immediately for Menorca island. We were supposed to get no more than 20 kt winds with fairly good sea. It was like that only until about sundown.

Then the wind stiffened up all the way to a near gale Beaufort 7 with wind speeds of 30+ kts. I should say it was a pleasure to sail this Super Maramu in these conditions, if sailing in B7 or above can be a pleasure indeed. She takes waves with grace and slides off of them with grace. Pounding is so rare and happens only if for some reason there’s so slight change in waves period. Thru that night, lighting storms kept forming but luckily it was all happening behind me and prevailing direction of those storm were traverse to my course; so I needed not to worry. However the display of lightning was spectacular – cloud to cloud, cloud to sea and it had gone for hours. After one storm dissipated the next formed pretty quickly. Being a cautious guy, I stuck all my movable electronics into the boat oven.
Then before noon on the September 10, being about 3 hours ahead of my landfall, a lightning storm formed in no time just above us. I enjoyed one more display of lightning hitting all around me and being scared shitless that one of those will hit the boat and fry all the electronics if not burn some holes in the hull. We got lucky this time and arrived unscathed at Club Maritimo de Mahon at Menorca. This passage, while rough and demanding was my second night of what I call watchman sleep: anything between 15-40 minutes sleep on a timer to check boat vitals and most importantly, position of all other boats as reported by AIS. So when we finally moored at Mahon I was dead tired and somewhat bruised as was my lovely wife, Joanna. Still, the boat turned out to be a reliable and sturdy blue water cruiser which is capable of handling rough weather.

Unfortunately we had some damaged to the boat interior but we were able to located some great boat craftsmen who helped us to fix our problems.

One of the galley cabinetry door split along its hinges after it got hit by a flying object after it opened on itself.

The same door nicely fixed by a local boat carpenter.

I think both my boat and I gained so much confidence that we can handle most seas and weather conditions.