La Gota Fría.
The summer of 1988 was a baptism of fire for me in Cala d’Or Marina. On ocean freighters, everything was big, on luxury yachts and sailboats things were small and hidden in cramped places.
Boat owners arrived for their summer holidays around the same time. Many boats got little attention out of season and sat idle in the water. If lucky, an owner might visit once in the winter. Consequently, on warm summer days with a turquoise Mediterranean beckoning, the first turn of the key resulted in the click of a starter solenoid or total silence. Battery problems and saltwater corrosion conspired to make a boat owner’s holiday from hell.
After a repair, I invariably had to haggle for payment, like extracting teeth without anaesthetic. Godfrey, a millionaire from selling his farm for housing development, was a particular challenge. Whenever he invited me for a beer, I wondered how much it was going to cost me.
Sensible owners stored their boats on land in the winter and put them back in the water before their holiday. Many of my clients seemed just eternal optimists.
I could fix most problems, but a small percentage of electronic issues that justified premium charges required imported parts. The EU free movement of goods didn’t arrive until 1993. In 1989 negotiating customs in Mallorca was a nightmare with multiple trips to Palma and mountains of paper.
Pre MS Excel, I wrote out a cash-flow analysis based on my previous year’s activity. It was a classic Gaussian distribution with not enough hours in the day in the summer and too little work in the winter. With the dream of owning a bar or restaurant in the sun, it was a trap many a holidaymaker and their life-savings fell into. With me, the only difference was I didn’t have an overhead.
Leno and I had a meeting to confirm what I already knew. I didn’t have a viable business, not if I had to pay for the workshop and admin costs.
“Now that’s a business,” Leno said pointing out of the window at a tractor disguised as a train. It towed two carriages with sixty-four passengers and made ten trips a day between Cala D’or and Porto Petro. He figured, at 400 Pesetas a head per return trip, that train took 1,792,000 Pesetas a week, almost 9,000 Pounds. I had to agree, it beat fixing boats.
Again the Sicilian surprised me. “I don’t need the workshop now. Keep it until I find a use for it”.
That summer, I continued working in the marina and worried about how I was going to make a living in Mallorca. The sensible thing was to work with Sandy selling property, but I was fixated on engineering.
In August, a Scots guy asked for help with a big luxury boat delivered straight from production. He and his girlfriend had opened a sales-service agency for the UK boats in Cala D’or, but they didn’t have an electronics engineer. I fixed some minor issues, but the big problem was the new electronic controlled power distribution panel. I had experienced remote development before, so I wrote a report condemning the electronics and recommending the factory send a standard panel with thermal trips and an engineer to fit it.
This resulted in an invitation to dinner for Sandy and me at La Jardín restaurant, the offer of a job as technical manager, a company car, and 51% share of the service company. They say ‘If it seems to good to be true, then it probably is’. I accepted on the condition I remained self-employed and invoiced them every month until we’d signed a contract.
The next morning at 05:00, I drove to the marina. After a few trips, I’d brought all my things home. When Leno arrived, I thanked him and returned the keys to the empty workshop. It had been a symbiotic relationship, but after an experience with a helicopter off the coast of Trapani, I wasn’t happy with a Sicilian holding all the cards.
I started the new job, but there were storm clouds on the horizon. The first one came from mother nature.
While all this was going on, we were still working on Can Cavea. Sandy wanted a swimming pool. The digger had done its job. We had a 200 cubic metre hole on the lowest part of our land close to the house. The resulting mountain of rock was spread out against the stone wall that separated our land from the lane.
On the morning of 6 September 1989 it started to rain. A third of a year’s rain fell in the first thirty minutes. In the next four hours, 160 litres of water per square metre dropped from the sky, and rivers of water ran off the San Salvador mountain.
The torrents battered their way through old dry gullies sweeping away cars, trees, animals, boulders, and anything that wasn’t fixed down. Roads and bridges just disintegrated. Three people were washed away and killed in Porto Colom when a wall of water and debris burst through a window in hotel Corso’s basement, flooding the room they were in. We knew one of the victims, a lady whose family had owned a house in Son Barcelo.
A high wall with row upon row of rectangular recesses for bodies around Felanitx cemetery collapsed under the deluge. Rubble, including old remains and recently buried corpses, washed into the surrounding fields. Felanitx and Cas Concos des Cavaller were declared a disaster zone.
We knew nothing of this at the time, we were fighting our own battle for survival. That day we learned, the hard way, that we’d made some stupid, near-fatal mistakes while renovating Cana Cavea.
Our land was divided into two fields. The higher ground was separated from the lower, where the house was, by a metre high stone wall. We’d made an entrance from the lane, that ran down from the main road, through the wall into the top field, and knocked a hole in the centre wall dividing the two fields so we could drive our car to the back of the house. Good for unloading shopping.
Water now flowed in from the lane, combined with the water on the top field and then gushed into the lower land. The swimming pool hole filled up in the first forty-five minutes, which along with the excavated rock stopped the collapse of the lower retaining wall. Water also flowed in through our back door, through the kitchen, and down one step into the living room where we had levelled and tiled the old concrete floor that had sloped towards the front entrance. The new floor blocked the old drain that was in the raised lintel at the bottom of the front door. Consequently, the living room filled up with six inches of water to just below the new electric sockets.
To add to this drama, the terracotta roof tiles saturated and it began raining upstairs inside the house. In the evening, when the rain stopped, we bailed out and mopped up the living room and slept together in the downstairs guest room in the only dry bed in the house. The next morning we got out of bed into six inches of water where the ground pressure had pushed the water back up through the floor tiles.
I decided the best thing to do was drive to Felanitx, buy food and first have a good breakfast before getting on with clearing up. Two hundred metres along the main road, I came to an impassable chasm where a bridge had been. Never mind, I turned around and headed to Cas Concos. Where the road branched off to Es Carritxo, I stopped the car and wondered if it would be best to go to the supermarket in Cala D’or. No, it was too far, so I carried on to Cas Concos. A hundred metres down the road, for some reason, I stopped the car and looked back across the field. The bridge to Es Carritxo had been washed away, between the gap, suspended in midair, was the flat strip of the road’s tarmac surface. I’d almost driven over that.
Further down the road my way was blocked by another gorge where there had once been a bridge. I turned around and headed for home, we would have to do with what we had in the house. By this time, the strip of tarmac that spanned the gap to Es Carritxo had collapsed into the void. That was our introduction to a fifty-year event beyond the norm of La Gota Fría (the Cold Drop).
However, there was still a storm of a man-made nature looming.