My trip of one month in the sailboat Diosa Maat started in Formentera, the smallest island of Pitiuses or Pine Islands. There, I found clear waters and long beaches... A really nice place and it was just the beginning!!!! We sailed between Balearic islands: Ibiza, Mallorca, Cabrera and the way back.
We spent several days in Cabrera, a small island in the south of Mallorca. Cabrera is a National Park since 1991. Ten people met for ten days in a volunteer camp; it seems like the show Big Brother but it was not. The goal was to study two bivalves living in Posidonia meadows: Pinna sp. It was my first time diving in these meadows and it was like walk on the grass of a mountain. But there was time to help a little bit in the park, we spent a day cleaning the sea bottom and collecting rubbish: a lot of beer bottles and even some towels, probably stolen by the wind to tourists during a night storm as we could certify.
Furthermore, we wanted to collect as much as signatures as possible for the European Week of Sharks to send them to the Spanish President. The aim is to prohibit the finning of sharks (a fishery that mutilates sharks to use only their fins) because in the UE it is not regulated yet and Spain is the main country fishing sharks in Europe. We also had a little exposition to explain the people the importance of sharks in the environment. And of course we had some anecdotes: like the children helping us in Ibiza to collect signatures, the dead shark (a little pintarroja) donated by a tourist for our exposition, the lot of people met in Barcelona...We hope to achieve enough signatures to stop the shark finning in Europe.
There are two things that I will not forget of this trip. First, the sailing during the nights when we saw dolphins, Noctiluca scintillans lighting the breaking waves and the fluorescent jellyfishes (they changed our wish of a night swimming). And secondly, the crew on Diosa Maat that was changing almost everyday with people leaving the boat and new people coming, but with all of them I had a great friendship. I hope we will meet again on Diosa soon.
By: El Contramaestre