Island Kea II has now gone round the world

Island Kea II
Steve and Katrin Everett
Wed 3 Aug 2011 09:18
Position 36:08N 05:21W
 
We have now arrived in Gibraltar, where we started from.  so we have now completed sailing round the world.
When we set off from Torrevieja we assumed a pretty quiet trip.  wind was first behind and then on the nose.
There were lots of Dolphins and the seemed to enjoy throwing themselves up in the air out of the sea.
 
Just after midnight on second night at sea, a few miles of Marbella motoring into confused sea, suddently there was a loud bang on deck.
Turning on the deck lights we could see that the inner forstay had come loose and the drum and whole of the inner forestay was swinging and hitting the deck.
It came to a halt at the mast supports.  Katrin went out on deck with some lines to tie it down to stop it doing more damage and we considered our options.
There were no anchorages and we did not fancy trying to get into a marina in the middle of the night and decided to carry on to Gibraltar hugging the coast so
we could head for the coast if things got bad.
The seas died down a bit after a while and we made it to Gibraltar about 8.30am on Tuesday 2nd of August.
We spent the rest of the day re fitting the inner forestay which meant disconnecting the backstay.
What we have learnt from this is that we must not become complacant even though we are only about 1200 miles from UK now.