D
Deleted User YDKXO
Guest
We’ve been based in the Balearics for nearly 4 years and feel we’d ‘done’ most of the islands in past hols. This and the frustrating lack of visitor berthing got me thinking about visiting a different coastline for this year’s hols. A contact recommended the Costa Brava coastline for it’s natural beauty and relative lack of boaty crowds. It sounded good so the Costa Brava it was for this year’s cruise.
Due to various commitments, we ended up with only 13 days actually on our boat so to save time and hassle, I decided to have our boat delivered to Barcelona from it’s Palma berth. So the 3rd Monday in August saw us pitching up at a steamy Port Vell (Old Port) in Barcelona to find no sign of our boat.
Entrance to Port Vell
Port Vell itself
As usual with all things boaty, there had been a hitch in that nobody expected the fuel berth in Palma to open as late as it did due to some Spanish holiday thing. Anyway, the boat finally arrived covered in salt and with a somewhat weary looking skipper describing the marginal sea conditions he had experienced. He also dropped the minor bombshell that the main fridge was kaput and the RIB dinghy had been damaged. This was serious stuff as the means of keeping beer and wine chilled is crucial to my holiday temper and no dinghy meant no anchoring off and tendering to the shore.
We found ourselves on pontoon F in Port Vell and what do you know, parked right next to another forumite, Colin with his fine boat, Englander, and his wife, Belinda and a few boats further down, Pauline B and Mr B. I immediately set to, trying to find an engineer to repair our fridge and, luckily, found one who was willing to take a look straightaway. Luckily also, Colin kindly agreed to let us have his young lads who were working on his boat, one of whom turned out to be a dab hand at grp repairs. So we spent a couple of days waiting for repairs to be done, drinking too much (thanks Colin!) and sampling tasty Barca cuisine in a local tapas bar with the forum crowd, which was great.
Eventually, come Wednesday afternoon, we set off northwards from Barcelona towards the Costa Brava, several hundred euros poorer but with a functioning fridge and dinghy and with rather sore heads. The Costa Brava itself starts about 40nm north of Barcelona at a town called Blanes and ends at the French border some 100nm further north.
I’d decided to push on to St Feliu de Guixols which looked attractive in the pilot book. The first surprise was that the Club Nautico wouldn’t take a telephone reservation for a berth and, in fact, we found this to be the case all along the Costa Brava. As far as visitors were concerned, it was first come first served which I found irritating as, every time we moved on to a new harbour, I would fret about getting in but, as it happened, we got in everywhere we wanted to, except Llafranc and Blanes. The second surprise was the berthing fee at St Feliu which turned out to be an outrageous €140/night. The Club Nautico itself was elegant and with a fine restaurant but obviously the loan hadn’t been paid off yet.
St Feliu proved to be a reasonably attractive town with a family holiday atmosphere and a good choice of restaurants. In fact it was typical of most harbours we found on the Costa Brava, relatively unsophisticated with a jolly family holiday ambience and a pleasing lack of Brits with football shirts stretched over their sunburnt beer guts. The next morning dawned windy and wet, the kind of day on which you’re pleased to be tied to something solid. This was a mistral type wind (known as tramontana in Spain) and had not been forecast on any Spanish forecast I looked at or WindGuru. The only warning was given by Meteo France which I then used for the rest of our cruise and which proved to be pretty accurate.
So another €140 poorer, we set off again with the intention of sampling one or two of the attractive looking calas which I’d been boning up on from the pilot book. This proved to be disappointing for a number of reasons. Firstly and this continued for the rest of our cruise, the wind always seemed to have an onshore easterly component and there always seemed to be a swell running which meant that many of the anchorages were untenable or at best uncomfortable. Secondly, the most sheltered parts of many anchorages were taken up with local moorings and the yellow swimming limit buoys were often placed well offshore, such as this one
We managed to tuck ourselves into a few corners but, of course, every other boat had the same idea. Another slight disappointment was the temperature of the sea which proved to be colder than we were used to in Majorca but at least there was no sign, at least in the first week of our cruise, of the dreaded jellyfish swarms. A typical Costa Brava anchorage
I never felt comfortable enough to anchor overnight though as, often, the wind seemed not to die down in the evenings and, only on occasions would the seabreeze turn into an offshore land breeze at night.
Our next port of call was L’Estartit, a large fishing harbour and marina with, again, a fine Club Nautico but charging about half the price per night compared to St Feliu.
Entrance to L'Estartit
We experienced the same thing as at St Feliu though, in that the visitors moorings were at the far end of the harbour meaning a long slog into town for supplies.
But we did find an excellent waterside restaurant where we dined twice on succulent local lobster and crayfish. It was in L’Estartit that a minor miracle happened. We had arranged to have some friends on our boat for the last week of the cruise and they duly arrived with their 14yr old daughter. Our 14yr old son had been morose, rude and so unhelpful up to that point that I actually seriously thought of bunging him on a plane back to Blighty to stay with his grandparents. On the arrival of the 14yr old girl, he suddenly morphed into a polite, considerate and helpful young man for whom nothing was too much trouble. Go and get some bread. No problem. Get the dinghy down. No problem. Haul some ropes. No problem. Lesson learnt for the future!
14yr old son tries to impress 14yr old girl by braving jellyfish infested waters in rubber ring!
From L’Estartit, we did some day boating trying out some local anchorages but again found many uncomfortable and also blighted by the wash of trip boats. L’Estartit seemed to be the trip boat capital of the Costa Brava.
Short cut to next cala which local boats didn't bother to come off the plane for. There seemed to be unofficial one way system in operation!
Our next port of call was Empuriabrava which I had planned to be the most northerly point of the cruise. I was somewhat ambivalent about this place as I knew it to be a completely purpose built development constructed in the last 30yrs or so, plonked on a flat featureless part of the coast but I have to say that we ended up liking it there. The Club Nautico was helpful and the berthing fees were reasonable and all supplies were readily available. Empuriabrava turned out to be an amazingly huge complex of canals and waterside dwellings, a little bit like Port Grimaud in France with a vast number of boats. In fact the brochure boasts of upto 2000 boat movements a day in summer which we could well believe given that I often had to wait several minutes for a gap in the boating traffic to get out of our berth.
We stayed a few days in Empuriabrava exploring the bays and calas north of Roses. This area turned out to be the most stunning part of the Costa Brava in our opinion with deep inlets and magnificent scenery. We wished we could have stayed longer
It was also here that I managed to break the steering on my boat. I can explain how it happened but not why. We were mooching into a cala at slow speed with the autopilot engaged. I decided to go on elsewhere, turned the boat around with the engines but forgot to disengage the pilot. When I started to accelerate out of the cala, I saw that the pilot was still engaged so I disengaged it but the steering felt odd and the boat wouldn’t respond normally to turning the wheel. I have to confess that I was so engrossed with the problem that I didn’t see another small boat to my starboard side and we would have collided had not the other skipper not veered away. Apologies to him, whoever it was. We motored into the next cala, anchored up and looked at the steering system and found the link arm to the port rudder completely sheared off
Red arrows show sheared link
I was able to straighten the port rudder and since the starboard rudder was still functioning, we had some control and motored carefully back to Empuriabrava. This is the second time we have experienced a major steering failure on our boat and I am beginning to wonder about Ferretti steering systems. These are often criticized in boat tests as being heavy and low geared (viz recent test of F510 in MBY) and my boat is just the same. It does make me wonder whether Ferretti need to have a rethink. Anyway, thanks to the assistance of the Club Nautico in Empuriabrava, we found another friendly mechanic who after much sucking of teeth and drawing of sketches, managed to drill another hole in the broken arm and reattach the link bar. I was sceptical about this but the repair held all the way back to Barcelona and, eventually, back to Palma.
We had stayed longer in Empuriabrava than I had intended thanks to the steering problem and we had only 2 days to get back to Barcelona. For once we managed an early start ie 10.00am instead of 1.00pm and started to head south. First port of call was some Roman/Greco ruins at Empuries.
Yup, there are some ruins in there somewhere
I had intended to anchor and take a quick look but once again, there was an onshore swell so we pressed on. I had also intended to drop anchor at Tossa de Mar which the pilot book calls one of the most important anchorages on the Costa Brava but once again, local moorings and an onshore swell prohibited this.
The pleasingly named Tossa de Mar
T'other side of Tossa de Mar
We pressed onwards and I started to check out virtually every cala along the way but none proved comfortable. Eventually we found a calm spot behind the breakwater at Blanes. By this time we had noticed the return of the dreaded jellyfish. On the Costa Brava, they seem to hunt in packs. We motored through this lot and they even significantly slowed the boat
The kids fished one out of the water and they are actually surprisingly heavy and squidgy.
I don’t know whether the jellyfish are affecting tourism but they are definitely more widespread than when we first came to the Med and I think the authorities will have to do something in the future. One of the great pleasures of Med boating for me is splashing about in lovely warm blue water but I do that less often these days.
We tried to moor overnight in Blanes but they waved us away so vigorously that we were left in no doubt they didn’t want us. It looked like a dump anyway. Beyond Blanes, the coast is straight, flat and boring. The only thing keeping my attention was avoiding the fish farms. We eventually pitched up in a place called Arenys de Mar which, once again had a beautifully constructed Club Nautico. We managed to find a good but expensive restaurant where we again gorged ourselves on crayfish and white Rioja
The following day and after a surprisingly boisterous passage, we arrived back in Barcelona, slightly complicated by the fact that somebody had moved the harbour entrance at least according to our brand new C Map cartridge. There were a lot of ships in town including this superyacht, Alexander
Huge but a bit cross channel ferry like for my taste but with interesting tenders/lifeboats
Sunseeker 28 Offshores?
Journeys end at least for us back in Port Vell
Our conclusions on the Costa Brava were these. On the plus side, it is scenically very attractive and there are visitors berths available, even in August. The harbours are plentiful and evenly spaced so you’re always within easy reach of a safe port and the berthing fees are reasonable by W Med standards. The towns are pleasant and you can feed and water a family without breaking the bank. On the negative side, the sea was always choppy and I was always a bit nervous about the weather due to it’s proximity to the infamous Golf de Lion.
We were disappointed with some of the anchorages due to the spread of local moorings and the bathing limits and with the constant onshore wind and swell. Many calas were quite deep too which made anchoring more tricky. It was a pleasant 2 week break and I’m glad we’ve seen it but it might be a while before we’re back
Due to various commitments, we ended up with only 13 days actually on our boat so to save time and hassle, I decided to have our boat delivered to Barcelona from it’s Palma berth. So the 3rd Monday in August saw us pitching up at a steamy Port Vell (Old Port) in Barcelona to find no sign of our boat.
Entrance to Port Vell
Port Vell itself
As usual with all things boaty, there had been a hitch in that nobody expected the fuel berth in Palma to open as late as it did due to some Spanish holiday thing. Anyway, the boat finally arrived covered in salt and with a somewhat weary looking skipper describing the marginal sea conditions he had experienced. He also dropped the minor bombshell that the main fridge was kaput and the RIB dinghy had been damaged. This was serious stuff as the means of keeping beer and wine chilled is crucial to my holiday temper and no dinghy meant no anchoring off and tendering to the shore.
We found ourselves on pontoon F in Port Vell and what do you know, parked right next to another forumite, Colin with his fine boat, Englander, and his wife, Belinda and a few boats further down, Pauline B and Mr B. I immediately set to, trying to find an engineer to repair our fridge and, luckily, found one who was willing to take a look straightaway. Luckily also, Colin kindly agreed to let us have his young lads who were working on his boat, one of whom turned out to be a dab hand at grp repairs. So we spent a couple of days waiting for repairs to be done, drinking too much (thanks Colin!) and sampling tasty Barca cuisine in a local tapas bar with the forum crowd, which was great.
Eventually, come Wednesday afternoon, we set off northwards from Barcelona towards the Costa Brava, several hundred euros poorer but with a functioning fridge and dinghy and with rather sore heads. The Costa Brava itself starts about 40nm north of Barcelona at a town called Blanes and ends at the French border some 100nm further north.
I’d decided to push on to St Feliu de Guixols which looked attractive in the pilot book. The first surprise was that the Club Nautico wouldn’t take a telephone reservation for a berth and, in fact, we found this to be the case all along the Costa Brava. As far as visitors were concerned, it was first come first served which I found irritating as, every time we moved on to a new harbour, I would fret about getting in but, as it happened, we got in everywhere we wanted to, except Llafranc and Blanes. The second surprise was the berthing fee at St Feliu which turned out to be an outrageous €140/night. The Club Nautico itself was elegant and with a fine restaurant but obviously the loan hadn’t been paid off yet.
St Feliu proved to be a reasonably attractive town with a family holiday atmosphere and a good choice of restaurants. In fact it was typical of most harbours we found on the Costa Brava, relatively unsophisticated with a jolly family holiday ambience and a pleasing lack of Brits with football shirts stretched over their sunburnt beer guts. The next morning dawned windy and wet, the kind of day on which you’re pleased to be tied to something solid. This was a mistral type wind (known as tramontana in Spain) and had not been forecast on any Spanish forecast I looked at or WindGuru. The only warning was given by Meteo France which I then used for the rest of our cruise and which proved to be pretty accurate.
So another €140 poorer, we set off again with the intention of sampling one or two of the attractive looking calas which I’d been boning up on from the pilot book. This proved to be disappointing for a number of reasons. Firstly and this continued for the rest of our cruise, the wind always seemed to have an onshore easterly component and there always seemed to be a swell running which meant that many of the anchorages were untenable or at best uncomfortable. Secondly, the most sheltered parts of many anchorages were taken up with local moorings and the yellow swimming limit buoys were often placed well offshore, such as this one
We managed to tuck ourselves into a few corners but, of course, every other boat had the same idea. Another slight disappointment was the temperature of the sea which proved to be colder than we were used to in Majorca but at least there was no sign, at least in the first week of our cruise, of the dreaded jellyfish swarms. A typical Costa Brava anchorage
I never felt comfortable enough to anchor overnight though as, often, the wind seemed not to die down in the evenings and, only on occasions would the seabreeze turn into an offshore land breeze at night.
Our next port of call was L’Estartit, a large fishing harbour and marina with, again, a fine Club Nautico but charging about half the price per night compared to St Feliu.
Entrance to L'Estartit
We experienced the same thing as at St Feliu though, in that the visitors moorings were at the far end of the harbour meaning a long slog into town for supplies.
But we did find an excellent waterside restaurant where we dined twice on succulent local lobster and crayfish. It was in L’Estartit that a minor miracle happened. We had arranged to have some friends on our boat for the last week of the cruise and they duly arrived with their 14yr old daughter. Our 14yr old son had been morose, rude and so unhelpful up to that point that I actually seriously thought of bunging him on a plane back to Blighty to stay with his grandparents. On the arrival of the 14yr old girl, he suddenly morphed into a polite, considerate and helpful young man for whom nothing was too much trouble. Go and get some bread. No problem. Get the dinghy down. No problem. Haul some ropes. No problem. Lesson learnt for the future!
14yr old son tries to impress 14yr old girl by braving jellyfish infested waters in rubber ring!
From L’Estartit, we did some day boating trying out some local anchorages but again found many uncomfortable and also blighted by the wash of trip boats. L’Estartit seemed to be the trip boat capital of the Costa Brava.
Short cut to next cala which local boats didn't bother to come off the plane for. There seemed to be unofficial one way system in operation!
Our next port of call was Empuriabrava which I had planned to be the most northerly point of the cruise. I was somewhat ambivalent about this place as I knew it to be a completely purpose built development constructed in the last 30yrs or so, plonked on a flat featureless part of the coast but I have to say that we ended up liking it there. The Club Nautico was helpful and the berthing fees were reasonable and all supplies were readily available. Empuriabrava turned out to be an amazingly huge complex of canals and waterside dwellings, a little bit like Port Grimaud in France with a vast number of boats. In fact the brochure boasts of upto 2000 boat movements a day in summer which we could well believe given that I often had to wait several minutes for a gap in the boating traffic to get out of our berth.
We stayed a few days in Empuriabrava exploring the bays and calas north of Roses. This area turned out to be the most stunning part of the Costa Brava in our opinion with deep inlets and magnificent scenery. We wished we could have stayed longer
It was also here that I managed to break the steering on my boat. I can explain how it happened but not why. We were mooching into a cala at slow speed with the autopilot engaged. I decided to go on elsewhere, turned the boat around with the engines but forgot to disengage the pilot. When I started to accelerate out of the cala, I saw that the pilot was still engaged so I disengaged it but the steering felt odd and the boat wouldn’t respond normally to turning the wheel. I have to confess that I was so engrossed with the problem that I didn’t see another small boat to my starboard side and we would have collided had not the other skipper not veered away. Apologies to him, whoever it was. We motored into the next cala, anchored up and looked at the steering system and found the link arm to the port rudder completely sheared off
Red arrows show sheared link
I was able to straighten the port rudder and since the starboard rudder was still functioning, we had some control and motored carefully back to Empuriabrava. This is the second time we have experienced a major steering failure on our boat and I am beginning to wonder about Ferretti steering systems. These are often criticized in boat tests as being heavy and low geared (viz recent test of F510 in MBY) and my boat is just the same. It does make me wonder whether Ferretti need to have a rethink. Anyway, thanks to the assistance of the Club Nautico in Empuriabrava, we found another friendly mechanic who after much sucking of teeth and drawing of sketches, managed to drill another hole in the broken arm and reattach the link bar. I was sceptical about this but the repair held all the way back to Barcelona and, eventually, back to Palma.
We had stayed longer in Empuriabrava than I had intended thanks to the steering problem and we had only 2 days to get back to Barcelona. For once we managed an early start ie 10.00am instead of 1.00pm and started to head south. First port of call was some Roman/Greco ruins at Empuries.
Yup, there are some ruins in there somewhere
I had intended to anchor and take a quick look but once again, there was an onshore swell so we pressed on. I had also intended to drop anchor at Tossa de Mar which the pilot book calls one of the most important anchorages on the Costa Brava but once again, local moorings and an onshore swell prohibited this.
The pleasingly named Tossa de Mar
T'other side of Tossa de Mar
We pressed onwards and I started to check out virtually every cala along the way but none proved comfortable. Eventually we found a calm spot behind the breakwater at Blanes. By this time we had noticed the return of the dreaded jellyfish. On the Costa Brava, they seem to hunt in packs. We motored through this lot and they even significantly slowed the boat
The kids fished one out of the water and they are actually surprisingly heavy and squidgy.
I don’t know whether the jellyfish are affecting tourism but they are definitely more widespread than when we first came to the Med and I think the authorities will have to do something in the future. One of the great pleasures of Med boating for me is splashing about in lovely warm blue water but I do that less often these days.
We tried to moor overnight in Blanes but they waved us away so vigorously that we were left in no doubt they didn’t want us. It looked like a dump anyway. Beyond Blanes, the coast is straight, flat and boring. The only thing keeping my attention was avoiding the fish farms. We eventually pitched up in a place called Arenys de Mar which, once again had a beautifully constructed Club Nautico. We managed to find a good but expensive restaurant where we again gorged ourselves on crayfish and white Rioja
The following day and after a surprisingly boisterous passage, we arrived back in Barcelona, slightly complicated by the fact that somebody had moved the harbour entrance at least according to our brand new C Map cartridge. There were a lot of ships in town including this superyacht, Alexander
Huge but a bit cross channel ferry like for my taste but with interesting tenders/lifeboats
Sunseeker 28 Offshores?
Journeys end at least for us back in Port Vell
Our conclusions on the Costa Brava were these. On the plus side, it is scenically very attractive and there are visitors berths available, even in August. The harbours are plentiful and evenly spaced so you’re always within easy reach of a safe port and the berthing fees are reasonable by W Med standards. The towns are pleasant and you can feed and water a family without breaking the bank. On the negative side, the sea was always choppy and I was always a bit nervous about the weather due to it’s proximity to the infamous Golf de Lion.
We were disappointed with some of the anchorages due to the spread of local moorings and the bathing limits and with the constant onshore wind and swell. Many calas were quite deep too which made anchoring more tricky. It was a pleasant 2 week break and I’m glad we’ve seen it but it might be a while before we’re back
Apart from LaSpezia (who didn't deserve it) it's not 140/night either!
