Curare's Adventures

Real Club Nautico de Palma de Mallorca

After being at anchor for the past several weeks it was time for Curare and her crew to head into a marina to get cleaned up and ready for the next adventure. Since we were in the Bahia de Palma we searched through our Navily app for a suitable place stay for a week. Palma is an enormous, actually ginormous, superyacht basin. There are literally hundreds and possibly a thousand super yachts moored to the docks around the bay but mainly within the port area of Palma. The Port of Palma has an impressive superyacht work yard where the boats can be fixed up after the summer in the Med before heading across to the Caribbean for the winter cruising season. It boasts three travel lifts, numerous cranes and 50 or more boats greater than 100 feet on the hard in various states of repair, renovation, maintenance and painting. The possibility of getting any work done on 36 foot Curare was essentially zero. Why would a repairman bother with our steering wheel reconstruction for a few hundred Euro when there are multi million Euro projects to be had everywhere. Back to doing repairs ourselves I guess.

So, along with the superyachts come super high costs to moor. Fortunately there are still a few small boat basins in the bay and we managed to secure space within the Real Club Nautico de Palma de Mallorca, a member of the International Council of Yacht Clubs. When we arrived on our scheduled day we were greeted by a marinero in a inflatable that guided us to a small (very small) space between two sailboats. After a bit of maneuvering we managed to get Curare squeezed in and tied bow to the dock. Within minutes the hose was running and the washing began, we hadn't been to a marina since we left Tunisia and Curare was looking rather grubby. Our berth was near the end of a very long dock and we had a great view as sail and power boats went in and out of the marina, but it was a long, long walk to the bathroom and showers.

The RCNP is a huge marina and yacht club, the oldest and largest in the Balearic Islands, founded in 1948. It's most famous member is the King of Spain - his majesty Juan Carlos - but we did not get to meet him. There are berths for nearly 1,000 boats ranging from 15 feet to 70 feet, and around 30% of these are reserved for non-members. It is the host facility for national and international regattas, hosting three regattas in the eight days we were there, and daily sail training took place in Optimists, Lasers, 29ers and 49ers. As reciprocal club members we were permitted into the elegant clubhouse were we enjoyed a nice lunch one afternoon, but we did not have use of the two swimming pools or the gymnasium. This did not bother us we were far too busy cleaning, repairing and getting Curare ready for another trip.

Train Ride and a Hike

To get away from our seemingly endless boat tasks while anchored out in Mallorca we decided to take a day off and travel to the town of Soller on a narrow gauge railway, and then go for a quick 5 km hike on the Barranc de Biniaraix trail. The railway trip, the community of Soller and this hike are all tourist destinations - we were not doing anything out of the ordinary.

The train leaves from the city of Palma, Mallorca winding north to Soller through the Serra de Tramuntana mountains via 13 tunnels ranging in length from 30 to 2,900 meters. The town of Soller is located in a fertile valley which grows olives, lemons and oranges and in the early 1900's business was booming. Transportation of product to Palma was the bottleneck because this lucrative merchandise had to be moved to the south coast by donkey cart.

In 1911 construction began on a narrow gauge railway and it was officially opened in 1912. Today it is one of the few private rail lines in Spain and although it no longer transports fruit, it still uses the original wooden cars to transport day trippers. We left Palma at 10:10 AM, the trip took 1 hour and 10 minutes, we wandered through the town avoiding the tourist shops but stopped to buy 2 rolls of much needed electrical tape at a ferreteria, a couple of bocadillas (tiny sandwiches) at a patisseria, and walked 40 minutes to the small town of Biniaraix to start our hike.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LE had spent the previous day gathering information about this circular route hike and storing it on her phone, but she forgot to take her phone. Luckily her memory is still mostly intact and we found the trail-head despite the non-existent direction signs. The recommended hiking direction is counter clockwise so that the roughest part of the trail is encountered while hiking uphill. The down hill part is like a paved highway of cobblestones. We did not walk at a rapid pace and LE stopped to take many, many photos of the olive groves, the dry stack stone terraces and walls, and the Soller valley far below. Various reports said it could be completed in a little over two hours, we took two and a half hours - slowing down a little after LE blew out her hiking sandal but could continue onward after GG repaired it with the newly purchased electrical tape. The highlight of the trek was the downhill part where we were walking alongside a small river, the Torrent de Biniaraix, which at one point went through a narrow canyon, the Barranc de Biniaraix. In the spring and early summer this river has waterfalls and small pools for swimming, when we went in mid-October it was dry, but it was still enchanting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We were finished our hike with plenty of time to enjoy a frosty beer at a local cafe, to check out the free Picasso and Jean Miro art museums in the train station, and to go to a grocery store to buy a bottle of bleach for cleaning the boat. Our return train to Palma left at 5:15 PM.

Yacht Nero

A few days ago as we were motoring into one of the marinas that fill the north west end of Palma Bay LE spied a familiar looking superyacht with a black hull, cream coloured superstructure and a bright yellow smokestack. The yachts name is NERO and she was last seen by us in February 2015 in Falmouth Harbour, Antigua.

First a few statistics: length 90.1 meters, beam 12 meters, top speed 17 knots, range 5,200 nautical miles at 12 knots.

NERO's original owner, Neil Taylor, intended to restore a yacht from the 1930s but was unable to find one that met his requirements, so he built a modern replica inspired by J.P Morgan's Corsair IV yacht. Taylor actually established the Yantai Raffles shipyard in China to build his yacht and it took 400 workers nearly four years to complete. She was launched in 2008. NERO has a crew of 20 and can be chartered for a mere 497,000 Euros per week. She can accommodate 12 guests in six cabins and boasts a beauty salon, a gym, a swimming pool, a movie theater and every water toy you might ever want to play with. She is a popular charter vessel in the Mediterranean during the summer and the Caribbean in the winter.

Almost as soon as she was launched she was for sale. In 2009, the yacht was listed at US$98 million, in April 2011 the price was reduced to US$88 million, and in 2012 the price was further reduced to US$78 million. In 2014 she was finally sold to Denis O'Brien for a price of US$70 million and he immediately sent her to Barcelona for an intensive refit. Then in 2019 while in dry dock in Genoa, Italy she fell to her side causing some damage. This accident led to another refit - completed in 2021.

We assume she is waiting for a suitable weather window to cross the Atlantic back to the sunny Caribbean because the Mediterranean yachting season is over and temperatures are falling. Today it only reached 24 C.

A Busy Airport

For the last week or so we have been moving around the large Bay of Palma, anchored in different places while we do some much needed chores. At one of these anchorages, S'Arenal, we had a perfect view of the planes landing at night with their lights piercing the blackness. It seemed to us that the landings were very close together so LE timed it on her watch. The interval varied between one to two minutes, but on average it was one minute and 20 seconds between planes. This was a lot of planes landing on a small island.

A website sponsored by the Mallorca Airport reports statistics. In August 2022 - 4,161,847 passengers passed through the Palma Son Sant Joan airport, the majority of them from England, Germany and Spain. The passenger statistics for September have not been compiled but in September 2022 a total of 32,585 flights landed representing 81 different airlines, including private jets and smaller planes. In the year 2021 - 14.5 million passengers passed through the airport and a report from 2019 says 29.7 million passengers arrived and departed.

It is the third largest airport in Spain and handles as many as 1,100 movements, dispatching 12,000 passengers per hour during busy periods. This is almost as busy as London-Heathrow, the busiest airport in Europe. From Palma de Mallorca it is possible to fly to 156 destinations in 28 countries. All very interesting data that helps explain the huge hotel developments along the shoreline. But seriously, with a plane landing every minute how do they process that many people quickly enough for them to get out of the airport to enjoy their holiday?