In really cheesy movies, they love to use a montage to show the quick passage of time. The main characters – who hated each other at sight, but now have to work together to save the town, host a wedding, and rescue Christmas by finding homes for 15 puppies – are seen mixing cookie batter, cleaning the barn, laughing as they splatter each other with paint… all the hard work that’s required for today’s version of the movie wooshes by in a few moments, leaving us with 45 minutes to get to the main part of the story. (And now I will pretend that it’s going to take me only 45 minutes to finish this post!).
Mike and I aren’t living in a cheesy movie (I don’t think!), and I wouldn’t say that the last few months were all hard work, but I do think that we could really use a movie montage to bring us back up to speed for where we are today: sitting in an anchorage in northern Ibiza, enjoying being back on the water, and contemplating what the season has in store for us.
Going forward, I suspect that our posts will be a mix of current adventures and flashbacks to some of last year’s highlights. To give you some context, however, here’s a brief overview of our travels from 2024…
We made landfall in Portugal on July 10th, and spent two weeks anchored in Cascais, a pretty little beach town just outside of Lisbon. After more than a month at sea (22 days to the Azores + 7 more to the mainland), we were happy to be sitting still for a while, and just enjoying our surroundings. We eventually worked our way down the coast – stopping in Sesimbra, Sines, and Sagres – and arrived in Lagos in early August. A month-long trip back to Canada followed (me to Vancouver and Mike to Ottawa), and then we were back on the boat for September 12th.
That late in the season, we needed to be on the move every day. The winds weren’t ideal for sailing, and we were restricting ourselves to coastal waters of 20m or less – reports had placed the boat-attacking orcas much farther north, but we didn’t want to take any chances. We took a couple of days to visit Cadiz and Gibraltar, but were otherwise moving almost every day.
Our journey ended with a slightly unexpected two-night sail from Gibraltar to Cartagena, prompted by an oncoming east wind that would otherwise have trapped us in place for at least a week. Instead, we forfeited our last night at the marina in La Linea (the Spanish side of the border with Gibraltar), and sailed out at sunset on the last of the Western winds. Forty-five hours later, on September 26th, we docked Innisfree in Cartagena, Spain as the East winds were just starting to pick up. We sleepily settled Innisfree into the dock slip, not realizing that it would turn out to be an almost eight-month stay – Yikes!
Fortunately, Mike and I were more mobile than the boat this winter, balancing our time between Canada and Europe before finally leaving the dock on May 24th. If you follow our Instagram accounts, you will already know some of the details of our travels, but there are definitely lots of stories to be shared. Stay tuned, and we will do our best to get you caught up!
