Report: Travelling across the Mediterranean - between climate change and luxury yachts
Marc Bielefeld
· 19.04.2023
Back at sea at last
In the evening, the sun sank over the sea in the north-west, a warm wind blew across the deck and we sat barefoot at the steering wheel. The mainland had long since cleared, there wasn't a cloud in the sky. In the distance, a Spanish fishing boat passed by on the horizon, heading north towards the Côte d'Azur. I looked through the binoculars and spotted the trawler at a good 70 degrees. It had two nets out, sparse silhouettes against the pale blue, its position lights already glowing. Then the ship disappeared behind the already darkening chine and we were alone at sea.
We had set all the sails, genoa, main, mizzen, so we headed east out to sea, like a seabird. The boat was making around five knots, a whole household under white cloths, gliding with a constantly nodding bow over a surface chiselling with millions of light reflections and emitting nothing but a constant noise. It was the rhythm of sailing. The hull that threw itself into the frequencies of the waves and travelled alone with the wind.
The hatches on the foredeck were all open and we could see into the galley through the forward companionway. We had stowed everything we would need for the next few months on board. The net with the onions and lemons dangled down in the cabin. Next to it, knotted to three ropes, staggered the paraffin lamp that I had bought at a flea market years ago.
Nautical mile by nautical mile
I sat in the cockpit, looking up at the masts. The sails were well in the wind and we wouldn't have to reef for the night. So we made quiet progress, nautical mile after nautical mile, and sometime in the morning we would reach the Balearic Sea.
"That's all I need right now," I thought. Everything was fine. Travelling by sea still felt like a kind of balm. You travelled through this element, detached, completely with the sky, the movements of the wind and the drawings of the water. The world seemed far away now, all the madness. I squinted at my mobile phone. We hadn't had reception for a long time. There was only sea all around us.
It was the first trip on our new boat. We didn't yet know how long we would ultimately be on the boat, on the water. Everything was open. These were strange times, the crises were coming from all directions, and even on those first few miles across the Mediterranean, the boat grew on me like a good friend.
An old ketch is waiting in Barcelona
I regularly read the newspapers and news magazines. I watched the evening news, the talk shows, the specials. In the end, I had to build a mnemonic bridge to be able to list all the problems that surrounded us. In the midst of this maelstrom of daily adversity, I sometimes wondered whether the state of a carefree existence still existed somewhere. The simple, elemental happiness, the beauty of nature. Jumping into the sea, seeing fish. The experience of living in an intact world. On an intact planet.
Now my girlfriend and I had moved onto an old sailing yacht that we had bought in Barcelona. It was an American Whitby 42 ketch from the Caribbean. Two masts, three white sails, a cosy cabin: undoubtedly the best sanatorium there was in these crazy times. We now had many months ahead of us; in the end it was to be a whole year. And I had prescribed myself another recipe: a reduced existence on a few square metres of boat. Not being distracted by everything unnecessary and superfluous. Shedding ballast. Scratching barnacles and letting my head slip into the water. And of course, there was the good old sea.
Back to the roots? Yes, absolutely. And why not? Back to the roots - if I even knew what that was.
View from the porthole to the open Mediterranean Sea
I stretched out the sailboat in front of me, my gaze travelling over the various sea areas between Gibraltar and Sicily, all the way up to the Adriatic. The Alboran Sea and the Algerian Basin opened up before my eyes, I saw the Islas Columbretes off the Spanish coast, travelled over the reefs of the Skerki Banks in the middle of the sea between Sicily and Tunisia. To the north, south and east, sea everywhere, thousands of square kilometres of blue water. I would have loved to dive into the map!
I looked out of the porthole. Out there, the breakwater stretched to the south, and that was exactly where we would be leaving tomorrow. 200, 300 metres, and we would have the open Mediterranean ahead of us, almost 4,000 kilometres of water as far as Mersin in eastern Turkey, as far as Egypt, Israel and Syria. In some places this sea was almost 5,000 metres deep, in others so lime green and bright blue that you could swim through the lagoons like through an aquarium. Fin whales and sperm whales travelled through this sea, as did sharks, rays, striped dolphins and moonfish.
First time on the Mediterranean with your own boat
I thought I was delirious. But I wasn't delirious. The sea out there was real, and for the first time in my life I would get to travel it in my own boat. It was time for a prayer of thanks, time for a sip of Rasmus to appease me. The rest for me.
On a Thursday morning, we walked through the harbour on the Spanish mainland for the last time, past the "Café Dimas", where the woman with the icy grey hair served, past the small bodega and the boat shop on the corner, where a man sat behind the counter next to his fan and sold ice packs that the sailors carried onto their boats. The yachts lay close together in the marina, like happy escape vehicles, and the paint on the cabins of the wooden boats was already peeling and hanging in tatters in the embers. We walked across the jetty in slippers, clutching two last bags of Spanish ham and a few tins of almejas, but then we climbed over the gangway we had built ourselves and were on our ship. The old Whitby lay motionless in her place with her two masts and three open hatches and said nothing. She just lay there, ready for anything.
Mallorca on the horizon
That same evening we sailed into a hot night on the open sea in an almost pink-coloured sunset. The next morning, I checked my position and course again down below, then climbed up the companionway, took the headsail a little tighter, and then Mallorca appeared in the distance.
The island appeared like a pale brown seam on the silver sea, and it was still many nautical miles away. I took the binoculars. No church far and wide, no meadow, no cow. There was no shallow buoy in front of a sandbank, no reed bank surrounded by chattering ducks to greet the sailor. From the sea, the mighty west coast of Mallorca looked like a brick left lying under the scorching sun.
The entrance to the only sheltered bay on the west coast came into view. Two lighthouses on the cliffs, an old fortress next to a military base. Behind it, round as a scallop shell, the natural harbour of Port de Sóller opened up. We saw the beach, yachts moored at the moorings, dinghies zooming across the water. There were palm trees on the shore, restaurants on the promenade and a diving boat crossing the bay. Then we lowered the sails and turned into the bay.
Anchor drops for the first time in the Mediterranean
Less than ten minutes later, we drop anchor for the first time in the Mediterranean. Rock pigeons are circling, two Spanish women in micro-bikinis are paddling past on their stand-up boards, on the yacht next door the gentlemen are having their first drink of the day. It's Friday lunchtime. My girlfriend and I look at each other. We are really here now, on the Islas. I just hold on to the shrouds for a moment, eyeing the shimmering seabed, the seaweed, the sand. After more than 20 hours of sailing, we jump into the feather-light sea. It's as soft as cashmere and as warm as a spa.
We sit on the boat in the evening. "Life won't be able to give us much more," I think. The lightness seems untouchable, the presence of the sea perfect. It is what I had imagined. What had appeared in my dreams, vague and yet full of images, the return of past experiences. Projections and fragmentary exaggerations inherent in our minds. It seems to be exactly that now. A composition without gloom, without doom. The sea, the earth, still without shadows.
The signatures of modernity
I woke up early the next morning, it wasn't even six. I climbed out of my bunk and made myself a coffee. The ship was lying in the smooth sea, bobbing around its chain. It was the time of day when the sea breeze slowly sets in early in the morning and the ships turn around themselves silently. I was sitting up in the cockpit, smoking a cigarette. But the moment was different to many of the previous moments in my life that I had experienced in this way, just sitting there and looking out to sea. My thoughts wandered. As if they could no longer afford to just sit there and enjoy. They knew too much today. They knew facts that could no longer be ignored and simply savoured. Not even and especially not here: by the sea, on the sea, in the sea.
In the corner of my soul, I realised that this whole dreamlike existence was built on increasingly thin ice. Mare Nostrum was heating up 20 per cent faster than the rest of the planet. Habitats were disappearing, dozens of species were threatened with extinction. 80 per cent of fish stocks were now overfished because the Mediterranean is the most overfished in the world with 1.5 million tonnes a year. 30 million cruise passengers per year. 400,000 private yachts, more than anywhere else on earth. The world's highest concentration of plastic waste. And: only 1.3 per cent of the entire Mediterranean Sea is truly under protection, because the remaining declared protected areas are merely paper tigers.
I wrote these numbers behind my ears so as not to forget where I was. What phase of history we were in, what stage of destruction. And I couldn't ignore these facts either. Nowhere else on the oceans are so many people drowning because they dare to travel from the poor world to the rich world in nutshells. Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor is widening, and nowhere is it widening more strikingly than in the Mediterranean. While many on the coasts are fighting for their livelihood after coronavirus, the number of mega yachts worth millions continues to grow.
And now I was sitting here on our boat in the bay of Port de Sóller, off this sun-drenched island in the middle of the Balearic Sea, dreaming my dream of the sea. Our journey had begun. A year on the boat, under sail. The journey was to take us right into the centre of the multi-layered tales of the Mediterranean. Once the stage of Odysseus, the sea of ancient civilisations. Today the blue holiday paradise of the Mediterranean south. But is it still? What has become of the dazzling narratives? And what unbelievable stories will swim in front of us today as we sail through this sea?
Views of a treasure island in the Mediterranean
We weighed anchor in the morning and set off to circumnavigate the island. As soon as we left the bay, heading south in a northerly breeze, wild Mallorca began. The cliffs of the west coast rose up in front of the inky blue sea, not a house or hotel to be seen, just a lone lorry puffing along a sky-high gravel track. In this part of the Tramuntana mountains, apparently only birds lived. Wind and waves buffeted the boat to the south, while the island swept past on the port side like a geology lesson in large format. From the boat, from the water, we had to look almost vertically upwards to capture the stone walls in their entirety.
We made slow progress, we were in no hurry. We would make it to some bay in the south-west of the island by the evening and drop anchor there. We had enough food on board. Pasta with mushrooms, couscous with sun-dried tomatoes. Simple. We passed Punta de la Estaca, and further south the rocky ridges at Torrent de Can Serrada came into view.
The sailors' perspective
Approaching the island from the sea, travelling it by water, had a special appeal. We adopted the perspective of the ancient seafarers who had also approached the island in this way, albeit without having precise nautical charts or modern navigation electronics. In principle, this slow form of approach harboured an idea of impartiality, of caution. But today this was just an illusion. Of course we knew that behind the ridges were the racing cyclists, the shuttle buses and hire cars, the patterns of the streams of visitors and country house guests. We knew that there were melons and ham buffets, tapas restaurants, fincas and Mallorcan holiday worlds up there.
Circumnavigating the island by sailing boat was like a different endeavour today. We would be able to view the Mallorca phenomenon from the perspective of the sea, so to speak. Close enough to recognise details. Far enough away for all-round views and panoramic vistas. The pearl of the Mediterranean seen from the outside, from the sea.
A playground for water sports
The sea flickered with light, and as we rounded the south-western tip of Mallorca, it turned more and more into a playground. Jet skis raced across the sea, turning pirouettes, jumping over the stern waves of other boats. I saw rubber dinghies going out fishing, motor yachts that had obviously come over from Ibiza, and now the density of sports and pleasure boats was noticeably increasing.
The yachts were larger, more sophisticated and modern in appearance. The skippers stood on high flybridges under blue biminis, they steered their yachts from white, hydraulically sprung leather seats and leaned behind tinted windows. Tanned women lay on cream-coloured cushions, stretched out in the breeze like nude models under a halogen spotlight. The yachts sped past us from left and right. Some were dragging bathing rings behind them, yellow bananas, other dinghies. We saw wakeboarders, flyboarders. We saw surfers gliding along in sinusoidal curves and dancing across the water on their foils.
Everything revolves around the sea
This was the height of the Mediterranean summer. The irresistible season that makes life as light and sizzling as nothing else. The sea had been transformed into a stage, a promenade. Everyone flocked to the water. Everyone was by the water, on the water, in the water. Now was the time when everything would have been nothing without the sea.
When two not-so-small sailing yachts passed us at Sant Elm, the proportions were instantly put into perspective. The yachts had teak decks the size of tennis courts. They carried sails whose black carbon fibre layers stood up in the wind like the wings of a jet. Mirrored cabin windows. Anchors that shone like silverware and were probably three times more expensive than our entire sailing wardrobe. The skippers sat behind leather steering wheels like in a sailing lounge. They sat on white sofas and could control their ship remotely.
The yachts in these categories had showers, air conditioning, lavish lounges, fold-out bathing platforms, Jacuzzis and stern garages in which jet skis were stored, 200 hp dinghies and water ski equipment if required. Yachts floated past us, floating on the water like designer hotels. Available for charter for several hundred thousand euros - per week, mind you.
When the Mediterranean tells stories
In our sloop, we looked like paupers, like sailing beggars. But that didn't matter. Our good old Whitby seemed like a palace to us, and we listened intently to all the wondrous stories that the Mediterranean slowly began to tell us.
