Classic Sailing Experience in Barcelona

The Bon Temps is a wooden ketch with two sticks and sail, with 13 meters in length of hull, sleeve 3.58, draft 1.78 and weighs 13 tons. The main pole measures 14.5 meters, the sail surface reaches 115 square meters with 6 candles, greater flute, scandalous, mesana, ratchet, jib and genoa. The ship was launched in Palma de Mallorca on March 17, 1926, being built by the master d’aixa Pere Nicolau Mandilego, belonging to a saga of shore-side carpenters composed by his brothers Maties and Bartomeu and their respective children, Antonio Nicolau Reynés and Matias Nicolau Riera. It was inscribed with the number 703 of Palma de Mallorca, in list 4. Its cost was of 20,000 pesetas (10.000 of the motor and others of the wood), in its beginnings mounted a motor San Martin of 15 HP, one of its old engines the Kelvin 44 ‘of 1940, is exhibited in the hall of the maritime museum of Santander. The sloop was commissioned by the Catalan industrialist member of a family of the burgesía of Barcelona Ponsa Hermanos S.A. with textile factories of natural silk in the Poblenou of Barcelona and in Palma de Mallorca, José Ponsa Soca and later it would happen to his brother Jaume, great-grandfather of its current shipowner, being precursor of the navigation of recreation by the islands. There are many anecdotes and events that have supported his ribs with 90 years of service. Among the most curious of them, as from 1939 to 1945 the engine was sealed because of the rationing period, having during all that period as the only mode of propulsion its cottony candles.

After many years of uninterrupted exploration, Fundación Villas del Cantábrico restored it in 2004 and its slender silhouette sailed as a school vessel for Cantabrian waters, participated in the 2002 Cutty Sark and the first two editions of the festival of the sea of ​​Santander, in the more than 3,000 people embarked, in 2016 coinciding with its 90th anniversary, was donated to the great-grandson of the family who launched it in 1926, to carry out a deep restoration that allows to return it to its most faithful and original state possible to celebrate its centennial circumnavigating Spain, with these beautiful words “one day I had to go home and with his family, it is like returning an adopted child with his family, after giving all our love for so many years,” so that a new start in waters of the Mediterranean.