We managed to get about an hour's sleep last night before one of the most
impressive thunderstorms we'd seen in a while started. Lightning was
striking all around the harbour so much that you could easily see what you
were doing without any lights on, and we counted 22 ground strikes within a
minute at the height of the storm. Apart from some rain today the weather
hasn't been too bad, but the forecast is still predicting more storms for
the weekend and although it's dead calm here right now there are frequent
flashes of lightning on the horizon. Today's been a fairly lazy day onboard,
and Nina & I have done little apart from a bit of reading and sitting around
in the cockpit discussing where to sail to next.
I've just seen that there's a gale forecast for Mallorca and the wind has already begun to rise steadily. It's quite a strange mixture of apprehension and excitement to be onboard a boat knowing that a storm is on its way, as you wonder how bad it's going to be. Every so often the sky is being flashed by lightning and you can feel that the humidity in the air is increasing. I've just gone around the boat checking our mooring lines and fastening things down, so I'm off to bed now, though I know that it might be a fairly sleepless night.
As I said, the weather last week in Mallorca was awful, with gale force winds and rain for four days. I'd sailed the boat up to another anchorage which was more sheltered a few days earlier but even still Zamindar was rolling so much that I had to hold on to the bed when I went to sleep at night. It gets really tiring when you're moving non-stop like that for days on end and it was too rough to even get ashore, so it was something of a relief when the weather improved and I got to stand on solid ground again.
Just before I left Mallorca, I'd gone for a walk, and after wandering through olive groves with old men sitting in the sun, I returned to town where I passed a group of people, one of whom was lying on the pavement. They were all shouting, but I couldn't understand what language they were talking or guess where they could have been from. Then I recognised the football tops they were wearing... Scotland. One of the girls was on her back on the pavement and appeared to be incredibly pissed while the others tried to drag her to the next bar by her arms, shoes dragging along the ground. It's so good to see Scottish culture being taken to other countries.