Pobla

From Valencia we made the short journey up to Pobla Marina where a good friend of ours keeps his boat On Y Va.  The marina it's self was a little rough around the edges, but it had every thing you could need and the people were super friendly!  It would actually make the perfect marina to buy and refurb, it has a good client base and a lot of Oysters winter there to get round the excessive cost in the Balearics, anyone want to loan me €10m?!

The surrounding towns were all occupied by Spanish tourists, which made a nice change from the "Brits abroad" scene on Ibiza.  It was obvious that the bad times had hit quite hard in this area of Spain, with lots of derelict or half built apartment blocks and quite a few closed down restaurants.  The contrast between the relative affluence of the marina and clear dilapidation of the surrounding tourist areas that have nothing to do with the marine industry was quite stagering.

Unfortunately, we had numerous systems fail on us over the past weeks, so lots of maintenance was required.  Nothing serious, but things that still needed to be sorted none the less, the most annoying of which was the watermaker.  I still think it is a great thing to have and more than likely would go for the same one given the choice again, but they do require a lot of TLC.  The main problem they encounter is the heat, it never stops working because of it, but you get some funky bacteria that grows in the filters and produces some kind of sulfur.  It's not harmfull, but it really stinks and it is pretty gutting to have to ditch 200Lt of freshly made water because of it!  While I am on the subject of heat, I don't think it has dropped below 30C here for the last 4 weeks, I know the UK is having a pretty bad time of the weather so I just thought I'd drop that in!  Not to complain at it, but thank the gods we have air conditioning, it would be nearly unbearable if we didn't;  I just hope the condensation pumps I just had to replace don't give up on us again!

One of the things I liked most about Pobla Marina was the pool club, during the day you could chill and take a dip and at night it turned into a relatively cool bar!  As you'll see from the photo above they stop you swimming after dark though.  I also nearly forgot to mention that Helly decided to make a random appearance after being given some days off work, so needless to say a good amount of cocktails and G&T's were consumed!  

We also had the pleasure of watching the Euro final in a really small bar in the marina.  Those of you who know me also know my hatred of the wretched, ridiculous, played by pansies, followed by yobs "Game".  However, I have had to re-think my position!  The Spaniards that we watched the game with in the bar, and all of the ones that piled in after, were all really cool people.  They weren't your usual UK style thugs and all tried to get us involved in the celebrations as much as possible!  So my re-thought on football is that I don't hate the sport, although they are all still pansies, but I do seriously dislike the majority of the UK supporters of it,  they could definitely learn a bit about how to behave from the Spanish.  

We are still heading up the coast and are now only about 120Nm from Barcelona.  The next post will be on a really ugly place called Burianna!