Barcelona

Glyn To celebrate Castañada the marina throw a party for all the boat owners and marina workers, it’s quite a lavish affair with free drinks, special cakes and hot roasted chestnuts. Castenata is an important celebration in the Catalan calendar, it means chestnut and is used to remember deceased family members.

The 2nd week of November was the Barcelona Boat Show which uses one of the marina pontoons and the marina kindly provide free VIP tickets for all the boat owners so we were able to come and go as much as we pleased. I bought two new oars for the dinghy to replace the one stolen in San Antonio and did a lot of research into long lasting anti-fouling. Copper seems to be the answer and one company have people who spray in on but charge a whopping £100/m2 and that doesn’t include all the preparation. I found a company that sells a similar product which you can apply yourself for less than a tenth the price.

Debbiie & Colin We spent a lovely few days when Tan’s son Glyn came to visit at the end of November then Dick and Anna came to stay with us for a few days mid-December on their way back from their house in Den Haag to their lovely home in Mallorca. Unfortunately the last part of their journey was marred when Anna’s bag was stolen in Palma bus station.

How quickly Christmas arrives, time to put up the Christmas lights again, not an easy task with a 15 metre mast! Dear friends Debbie and Colin came to stay with us over Christmas which was marvellous. We went out for lunch on Christmas day to the Restaurant Peru and had a very enjoyable Spanish meal and lots of drinks, not a turkey in sight! The weather broke over Christmas with a drop in temperature and some rain, but when the sun was shining it was still very pleasant.

Christmas lights New Year was a quiet affair on the boat, I saw it in behind closed eyelids! On the 4th Jan. we had a day out and went to Monastir de Monserat, a monastery built half way up a mountain. It’s about an hour out of Barcelona by train and is home to the oldest choir school in Europe. The monastery is best reached by an aerial cable car or by funicular railway and is in spectacular settings. We took a further funicular railway to the top of the mountain and enjoyed a walk in the lovely sunshine.

I’d booked the boat to be hauled-out at Port Olympic on the 18th Jan so we went the 1.5 miles round the coast on a beautifully warm sunny day, the weather has been great since the brief bad spell just after Christmas. We had also booked into the family run Marina Hotel Folch of which the restaurant Peru is part. The plan was to use a very strong chemical stripper to remove the old anti-fouling and primer then apply the new primer and two top coats in four days. The reality was that after the stripper had been on the required 12 hours and then power washed off, imagine our dismay to find most of the primer untouched. Most sane people would say if it’s that good we’ll paint over it but the product we had bought is a two part epoxy system and specifically states that all previous paint had to be removed.

Pete the painter! Three days of sanding followed, it was extremely hard work, both of us were exhausted at the end of the day. Thank goodness for the Hotel Marina Folch, with it’s shower and half bath which we could soak away some of our aches and pains. The hotel and Restaurant Peru are excellent value for money and the family and staff are wonderful. This was the luxury we awarded ourselves for all the hard work. One of our neighbours and fellow cruisers, Pete, offered to help us with the painting. We are most grateful that he did, it enabled us to get both top-coats on in one day so there’s now 25kg of pure copper on the hull. Next morning we burnished the bottom and were lifted back in and back round to Port Vell (home), just in time, because the temperature plummeted and the wind gusted to force 7. They even had snow in Mallorca!

Barceloneta Carnival What we would call Lent and would largely go un-celebrated is widely celebrated here by a week long carnival with hundreds of different events throughout the city which culminates in the burying of the “sardine”. We chose to go to the local carnival parade in Barceloneta, a superb event by local people who throw themselves wholeheartedly into the celebration. It’s obvious that a lot of work has gone into the preparation and costumes by groups and families in the parade, so now it’s time to party! But it’s so civilised, so family, so welcoming to strangers, they let their hair down but never tread on anyone’s toes.

Pete's 60th Birthday party Ten days later, it was Pete Gibbins’s 60th Birthday, so to celebrate there was a pontoon party, and what a party! I’m not sure it’s ended yet and most of the photo’s aren’t suitable for the web! I arrived just after midday, everyone brought a dish to share, traditional pontoon party style and as I recall I was the 1st to leave sometime after 19:00 but that’s an estimate because the cava flowed freely.

Speaking of cava, towards the end of Feb. we took a trip by train with some of the other cruisers to Sant Sadurni in the Penedes region to visit the main production site of Codorniu. We stood in the very place where the Spanish equivalent of Champagne (Cava) was first produced in 1872, the vineyard dating back to 1551. Codornui now sells 40 million bottles of Cava worldwide every year and has the largest “caves” in the world (over 30km) storing over 100 million bottles. It took a lot to get me out of there!