Love at First Sight...

After the long flight across to Europe from Melbourne we enjoyed a day in Madrid to get our bearings before venturing south to Gibraltar to meet the new mistress.

Madrid is a beautiful city that Liane & I had the opportunity to visit a couple of years ago so we were able to focus on what we considered our favourite parts to show Kye & Kalani.

Madrid is one of those towns where there isn’t what I would describe a “one big thing” you must see - no Eiffel tower or Vatican City here but definitely a great town to stroll through and enjoy the markets, the shops and of course the local Tapas bars. The Royal Palace is worth a visit but pre book tickets - we didn’t and decided the two hour wait in line was not how we wanted to spend our time on our only day in Madrid but I have been previously and would highly recommend. Next door to the palace is the Almudena Cathedral which is a relatively new building having only been finished in 1993 after starting the build in 1883. A couple of World Wars and a shortage of funds being the main culprits for long build time.

One of our fave places in Madrid is the Mercado of San Miguel where there are a bunch of great market stalls and bar tables so that you can grab whatever tickles your fancy from a stall and wash it down with a glass of Sangria at your table. Magic!

It was a quick trip however to Madrid and we were super keen to get to see the new boat so early the next day we jumped into the rental and made the 6 hour drive south from Madrid to Gibraltar.

Gibraltar is a pretty interesting place and is about the size of a postage stamp. Its most well known for its “rock” followed by its tax free alcohol and cigarettes! The marina is located right next to the airports runway which doubles as a road and pedestrian crossing with a bunch of whistles blown and boom gates coming down when a plane lands - which happens a lot! Actually a few days in, Kye & I took the tender and were able to sit in the water right at the end of the runway which is pretty Coll when a big jet plane is taking off seconds prior to the end - very noisy but very cool.

Upon arrival to Gibraltar we were greeted by the wonderful Jason Chipp of Ensign Yachts , who had spent the last couple of days getting Baruch looking beautiful after its 1200NM shakedown cruise from La Rochelle.

Fair to say it was love at first sight!

We popped a bottle of bubbly, poured a drop over the bowsprit, said a thank you to Jesus & then slowly soaked it all in.

It was pretty overwhelming to see the end result of all the planning and the decisions we had made - she is a beautiful boat.

It wasn’t long before we got straight into the job of getting her set up with the goal of pushing off in a few days. We didn’t really factor in the amount of work it would be doing this - even though we had sent the majority of what we needed over from Australia to set her up - it was still a massive job finding homes for things, learning all the systems, tweaking the things needing to be tweaked, having the engines serviced, signage applied, few issues resolved - the list kept going but eventually after four huge days we were able to push off on Friday 2nd August heading east towards the Balearic Islands.

We said goodbye to Gibraltar with 20 plus knots of breeze pushing us the right way and were instantly impressed at the comfort and speed of Baruch. Having left around lunchtime we opted to do our first overnight passage with Kalani & I doing one watch and Kye & Liane on the other.

The family did an awesome job of the night sailing, in fact it was so comfortable we decided to keep pushing through and did a second night in a row arriving in Alicante around 50 hours after we left Gibraltar for a well earned stop.

What really surprised me was on the second day we had some upwind sailing where we were regularly achieving 9 knots in 12-13 knots of breeze at 35 degrees apparent - much better than I expected!

With gennaker up we can do 10 knots boat speed in 12 knots of breeze and that’s with 1.6 tonnes of fuel and water on board.

Looking forward to seeing what she can really do with some breeze.