Balearic Island of Ibiza to Spain

Leaving a Marina
Coast of Spain
Natural Rock Formation

The next step involved making the 50NM (minimum) jump to Cabo de le Nao....I use the word “minimum” as land falls away to the Southwest very quickly, so if you can't make that point you end sailing merrily down the coast basically forever.

Of course, the wind was blowing a typical 20+ from the NW (too close to being on the nose to sail), but we were able to motorsail (mainsail up for some help) and bash our way through the steep waves for 12 hours to just catch the heaThere is a shipping separation zone off the point, which we managed to cross the NE bound lane with no problem, but some math on getting (slowly) across the SW lane with the speed and progress of a downbound tanker would have put us squarely in the middle of that lane entrance (I was staying just outside the zone) which would have put the captain of that ship in charge of deciding which side to cross us on.

I like to be the one making that decision (I hate looking at the bow of a ship traveling at 18 knots when I'm slugging it out against the winds and waves at 4)...so I took a hard right and burned 20 minutes to sail past him and then ducked behind his stern.

Which turned out to be a good move as 2 other freighters came from the North and passed far ahead of us.

We hit land at 10:30 pm (literally as I clunked the keel and had to back off a reef in what I thought was an open beach area marked as a good anchorage on my pilot guide...so much for that drawing!).

From there we've been able to work our way (mostly motorsailing) against high winds by hugging the coastline.

At one of our stops the marina manager told us he'd been blown out of a boat (same storm from my earlier blog post with all the boats on the beach) by 120kmph winds when he went out to chase down a boat that had broken free from its mooring.

He told me his theory was that boats come to the Med to sink...relating a story about a “successful” 5 year round the world cruise by someone that lost their boat off Barcelona.

I told him I didn't want to hear any more stories!

On this leg there's been 1 severe low pressure center that has given us fits (they come charging in from the Atlantic, dissipate a bit if they go over the mainland but typically just come full bore through the gap at Gibraltar causing gale force winds in various directions as they move into the Med).

We've managed now to work our way to a NW “corner” were we'll be able to work down the coast to Gibraltar, our next (and main) destination before we get into the Atlantic and head South for Casablanca (and beyond!)