Captains Log: Ibiza to the Spanish Mainland

Saturday, 11th October

We raised anchor at 8:00 a.m. and headed for the pass between Ibiza and Formentera. This was only 6.5 miles away, but we had to run the gauntlet of high-speed ferries running between Ibiza City and Formentera at 30 knots! There was no wind, so we were motoring (unfortunately).

Our goal is to make it as far west along the coast of Spain as the wind permits. This shows a possible track to Carboneras, a 200-mile run that should take us around 32 hours, given that the winds are very light.

After we cleared the pass, we found light winds from the south at about 6-8 knots. The good news is that the seas were pretty flat. We motor-sailed on one engine at 2000 RPM and were averaging around 6.6 knots, so our plan looks achievable.

We had another fish on, but nobody noticed, and it ran out all the line on the reel—that's hundreds of meters of line! By the time we slowed the boat down and started to reel it in, the fish was gone. It must have been a good one to run out all the line. I’ll need to pick up an alarm for my reel at the next stop. The good news is we still have the fish we caught yesterday, so we can have that for dinner tonight. We are making good progress, motor sailing with the Main and Code Zero, doing a steady 6.5 knots with one engine. Around 6.00pm Stephen again noticed that all the line on the reel was out again, so we stopped the engine and furled the code zero and Stephen and David took turns reeling it in. I think I have at least 500m of line so it takes about 15 minutes of hard grind to get the line in to the point where you can see the fish. When we got it in we discovered it was a decent sized sword fish or a Marlin. We were going to release it but the hook was caught in both beaks and the fish would not cooperate during our attempted removal. So we took it on board.

At around 5pm on Saturday we pulled into the marina at Villarecose for fuel. That is about 70 miles down the coast from Cartagena. We have been sailing for about 34 hours at that point. Once topped up we decided to head up the coast for an hour and anchor for the night. The wind had dropped so rather than motor on we decided to rest up and set off the next morning.