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Arrived here yesterday. It was a bit difficult to find an open berth in Palma since the place is getting ready for the Palma boat show. But the Royal Club Nautico de Palma had a berth for us after all and they were the most efficient place we’ve been to so far in Spain. Excellent help from the marineros - a crew of four is there to take your lines and if needed, to push the boat into the right place with a dinghy. Check-in took all of 10 minutes - that’s a record, and I didn’t have to copy passport information onto elaborate forms. Brilliant! And the boats that are moored here are just incredible. They seem to make motor yachts only in 25m or more - we call that the “standard size” now. But there are real sailors here as well. Our neighbor on his X55 has done the ARC six times!

The sail here was uneventful but there was a nice sea breeze in the Bay of Palma as advertised. They have a lot of big regattas here and the conditions are pretty compelling.

Being in a real city was great for completing the “to do” list for the boat. For example we now have fishing gear so we will no longer have to buy fish (we might do it anyways just as a backup). Palma also has a few nice sights, like the famous cathedral and the castle on top of a big hill. All those were efficiently checked off thanks to the organization of our tour director Rieke.

And, very importantly, Mike, the Amel rep, actually showed up and had the bilge pump working at 8pm the first night! Turns out he was a German mechanic who had worked for Beyer Leverkusen in their pump business as a trainee. He knew something about pumps - more than my father and I! I had noticed that the little flapper valves were bent open by a few degrees and had thought that was ok but he said no, not ok. Pump won’t create a vacuum. And he was right. With the new valves from the Amel spare kit all was working again. So now I know. Mike had in fact repaired the bilge pump of another Amel 55 a few months ago so this is endemic….. We learned that Amel has identified the problem and is now installing custom valves with little copper weights on them that will close with the help of gravity even if the valves are a bit worn. We will get those when the boat is in Hyeres. I hope that in the future, I will need less help in my quest of taking everying apart on Kincsem …..

We really enjoyed Palma and it’s a place where I’d go back to in a heartbeat.