Alicante to Ibiza

New Years Day
New Years day dawned bright and sunny, a little chilly but the day would get warmer. Forecast for the next 2 – 3 days was light winds and smooth seas, perfect for an overnight run to Ibiza. Out of Alicante marina, dodge a big ship coming into the container port and out to the open sea. There’s always that tingle of excitement when setting off, whether you’re going 30 or 130 miles, perhaps because with the sea you can never know exactly what you’ll be faced with during the journey, and of course where ever we’re going we haven’t been there before, but today it’s lovely, for now anyway, and we begin this journey with the spinnaker up and sitting in the sunshine. We expect this trip to take around 23 hours, so we’ll get into Ibiza late tomorrow morning. As the day wore on the winds increased to the high teens, spinnaker came down, Genoa came out and our speed over the ground increased to over 7 knots (a knot is a bit less than a road mile), doesn’t sound fast but for our boat it’s a fast cruising speed and we plan our journey times on an average speed of 5 knots. As dusk arrived two things happened, first the winds increased further so we put a reef in the main and the Genoa, we were flying, at this rate we’ll be in Ibiza well ahead of 23 hours and second we had cause to radio a large ship and ask what his passing intentions were, if he continued on his course he would run us over. We would normally do all the changing of direction to keep out of their way but we were sailing on a run, see getting up so our manoeuvrability is restricted. After a quick discussion on the VHF, he agreed to alter his course to cross our bow with some sea room, even then he crossed only a couple of hundred meters off our bow, too close for my liking. A few hours later winds picked up a bit more and we put another reef in the main and Genoa and were hoping it wasn’t going to get up any further because what we were experiencing right then wasn’t forecast for another 2 days. It was going to be a slightly anxious night, for me anyway. I have great respect for the sea and how quickly things can change and we are sailing in the winter, even though the temperatures are nothing like the English winter, it’s still chilly at night and the winter storms can be fierce. But on top of that, it’s 14 hours of darkness every night and that is a long time in the dark. Around midnight we were getting gale warnings on the VHF and the SSB reports, great, that’s all we needed, however the speed we were sailing at we’d probably be in before it got too nasty. As it happened we rounded the bottom of Formentera at about 2am, 6 hours before we thought we would, so for the next 4 hours we did something we’ve NEVER done, we set the sails to spill as much wind as possible and I played with the Genoa for the next 3 hours trying to keep the boat under 5 knots. We didn’t want to go into Ibiza in the dark, it didn’t look a very friendly entry, even with that as we approached Mark turned around and went back out again for a couple of hours. The journey that should have taken us 23 hours, had we keep sailing at the speeds we could have would have only taken us around 18 hours. So we’re tucked up in Ibiza ahead of the gales and thankful for it.