I am sitting in Concerto’s main saloon looking out over Mahon harbour.  Where in the world is that I hear you ask!  Well I’m afraid it’s nowhere exotic but still perfectly pleasant albeit a little on the cool side.  Mahon is on the small island of Menorca just north of Majorca in the Balearics.  It’s somewhere that Gordon and I are very familiar with having spent many a university summers here teaching sailing but it’s certainly very different in winter!  It’s a fairly tourist-dependent island yet not nearly as crowded as nearby Majorca and therefore retains a huge amount of charm although it also means it’s exceedingly quiet over the winter months.

So why on earth did we end up here?!  Well, the owners decided this year wasn’t the year to head over to the Caribbean (looked a bit quiet on the charter front!) so we were set the task to find somewhere safe and relatively inexpensive to moor up for the winter.  After weighing up the pros and cons of Turkey, Tunisia, Majorca and Menorca, the latter came out as the strongest contender for various reasons and so here we are!

We left Sicily back in November having fixed our coupling.  After waiting for a gap in the weather, we headed for a brief stopover in Tunisia.  Because we are a non-EU yacht, we were due an exit from EU waters for tax purposes and so a small detour to Tunisia seemed the perfect option.   We were both looking forward to the change of scenery (and also the increase in temperature admittedly!) and we weren’t disappointed.  We had a fantastic agent who greeted us warmly upon arrival and took us out to meet the locals and to introduce us to Tunisian food, what a mouth burner!

Tunisian food, unlike other North African cuisine, is quite spicy (to say the least!).  Their popular ingredient Harissa is normally the culprit.  Our agent took us to a typical Tunisian roadside cafe which looked like your average fast food joint from the exterior but served us up an absolute feast, all for roughly £3 per person.  There was freshly made Harissa for dipping, brik (small filo parcels filled with meat/tuna and egg), Merguez sausages, Ojja (a tomato ratatouille with chillies and scrambled egg), Guenaoia (an excellent beef stew with plenty of chillies and spices) and various other wonders.  Once we’d regained feel in the tops of our mouths, we headed off to discover the medina in central Hammamet.

It was visibly quiet in central Hammamet being off-peak so we weren’t short of local Tunisians attempting to show us round their various shops and stalls!  Our agent’s local knowledge meant we were drawn away from the ‘tourist tack’ and taken into little gems away from the madding crowd.   One such gem was an old costume museum which required a small fee in return for many rooms with various items of clothing dangling from the walls, some of which looked like they weighed more than the person wearing them!  The intricate designs on their traditional wedding attire were incredible and makes you realise why most would hire rather than buy due to the costs involved in making these.  The other reward that this small museum had to offer was the best rooftop view in Hammamet overlooking all the roofs out to sea, stunning!  After a few more stops around the Medina into amazing jewellery shops where the owner was proudly sat in the corner working away on his next necklace, we emerged out the other end and headed back via a small shop along the main road selling beautifully hand crafted wooden items (I was attempting to justify a salad bowl and salad tongs without much luck!).

Our stay was short-lived and it was soon time to say a farewell to our new friends and head for the open seas towards Menorca.  The seas were calm but we left Hammamet into a dense wall of fog.  I awoke Gordon, who’d disappeared below deck for a snooze, and we proceeded with caution at a reduced speed, keeping an eye on the radar until we eventually cleared the fog a couple of hours later.  Gordon went back down to bed and I was left in charge.  About 15 minutes later, I spotted two dolphins!  We’ve seen a fair few along our travels but these ones stayed with us swimming along next to the bow for about 15 minutes and it was another shout to Gordon who I hoped would appreciate the wake up call!  The rest of the crossing was fairly uneventful in very quiet waters – we didn’t see a single ship after passing Sardinia before we reached the coast of Menorca, where we eventually tied up along the picturesque harbour front.

Clare