36:35.60N 4:30.37W

ALBA and her travels
Jim Panks
Sun 22 Apr 2012 14:54
What a difference a few hours make. Yesterday we were rescued by the Spanish Life Boat. The reason was that the boats systems were failing and although we could continue under sail we felt that it would be unwise to go through the Gibraltar strait with no engine and the wind on our nose.
First problem happened a couple of days ago. When we set sail it was a nice force 4-5 and was expected to get less. We sailed and motored for 12 hours and everything was fine. We turned SSE just passed Denia and after about two hours the wind increased to around Force 7-8 which is a Gale Force wind of 35-45 knots. This still did not cause much concern as we were motoring into it at 4knots. It was very rough but caused us no concern about our safety. Suddenly the Radar dome attached about twenty five feet up the mast broke loose and started banging around the mast hanging from its cable. After ten minutes the cable broke and it crashed to the deck and went into the sea. It also took out our mast navigation light.

We were still happy with this. A few hours later the Map Plotter which runs the auto pilot and lets us see where we are and where we go stopped working. Again we reverted to our back up system an Apple iPad and this worked fine. We navigated another 220 miles with no problem and went back to sailing. After ten hours we wanted to motor again and the engine failed to start and there was a smell of burning.

By now we were off Malaga. Malaga has no yacht harbour so we headed towards Benamidena harbour and contacted them asking them to tow us in. They agreed so we tacked thirty odd miles to get three miles off. I contacted them and they refused to help, said they did not speak English and put the phone down on us. We had to react by tacking back to sea. Now the choice was sailing through the night at 3 knots on a long tacking course to Gibraltar. Although its 65 miles direct it would involve a tacking distance of over a hundred miles which at 3 knots would take 33 hours !!!!! The other problem is that we would be floating around with the wind in the wrong direction and lots of BIG ships in our path.

We decided to get some advice so I got in touch with Falmouth coast guard in the uk. Everything swang into action and then we found our main radio would not work. Using our Sat Phone we were assured things were ok. Because our radio was out we used our small emergency portable which managed to contact Malaga Control where a lovely Spanish lady relayed our messages to Tarrifa Emergency Control. Thirty minutes later a big orange life boat appeared from Malaga some 15 miles away. They took us under tow and pulled us into the place that refused us help. Those that know me can imagine my reaction. Unlike the RNLI in the UK life boats in Spain are run by a private company under control of the Spanish Government the cost was €480 for towing us and they expect it there and then !!!!!!

So now we are having a beer waiting the mechanic on Monday morning.

Blimee that was a book

More once I know the outcome.

Sent from my iPad