Distance approx 70 miles.

Sailing 70 miles on  the chart in ‘Timeless’ is one of those awkward distances. 

The sail ends up being just a little over 10 hours ie. just a little more than daylight hours.
In practice, this means getting up at sunrise and ‘maybe’ arriving in the dark, or, leave before sunset and ‘maybe’ arriving at the destination just before sunrise.

On the basis that we neither like getting up early, nor arriving nor leaving port in the dark it is a conundrum! The solution for us is always a very slow night sail.

We left San Antonio, Ibiza at midday.  
The predicted winds were 15knots, clear skies and calm seas. Our plan was to have a late lunch in a bay (Cala, in Spanish) on the NW corner of Ibiza and then leave from there at dusk for a slow sail to Palma, Majorca.
The plan was going well.
But as always happens with us,  when we reached the NW corner (at around 5pm) we decided not to stop but - press on!
Our thought was that by the time we would have anchored we would be lifting it again. As it was a really pleasant sail with no other boats around, just a light wind and a pleasant evening, a slow cruise of around 3 knots would get us to Palma after daybreak.
They say conditions change quickly around the islands.

Almost as soon as dusk came so the wind picked up to 20+ knots from where we were headed along with a sea swell of 2-3 meters. Discovery 55 sailboats love this combination and Timeless did what every self respecting Discovery should do – it found it’s groove and increased speed to 8 plus knots. Damb!!
Time to reef.

Shortly after, out came the tankers and the cruise ships!
Lots of tankers and cruise ships.

What a nice captain!
The first cruise ship was really cool.  Although not on a direct collision course (clearance 500 meters) and still a good 10 miles away, the cruise liner immediately altered course by 10 degrees to give us plenty of room to sail - before we changed course as is the normal practice for us.
What a great captain!
..it made us feel quite important.
..and it’s never happened before.
We ALWAYS move out of the way of BIG ships – because they NEVER change their course.

By now the wind speed had increased to 25+ knots.
Time to reef again! The boat was still speeding along at 6 knots.

..back to normal
We noticed a tanker 6 miles behind us. On a direct heading  for us motoring at 18 knots (a COLLISION heading even). The rules of the sea state that the overtaking vessel must steer clear of the overtaken vessel (regardless of power, sail, etc).  He did not change course even a few degrees – not a jot, nothing.  So if we hadn’t of noticed him or if we didn’t have a good watch system he’d just run us over!  Geesh!

Just on principle we decided to wait just a little longer to see what he would do. Nothing. 
..back to normal then.

Regardless of the navigation rules and with a good margin of safety we did tack away and left him to motor on and get to his beer.

As we were sailing quite close to the wind the tack meant a BIG change in our course and it was a good 30 minutes before we could tack again to get back on our destination course giving him a clear sea.
Ah well, our boat was sailing too fast to Palma anyway! 

Oh! This reminds me..
We came across this really experienced elderly couple (late 70’s) this season. They had clearly been sailing many many years on their own.

It’s quite normal for people sailing in one direction to swop charts, pilot books and the like with people sailing in the other direction and this is how we met them.

They had just sailed for 8 days non-stop. As they were clearly a very experienced sailing couple I was interested in their watch system as we find 3 or more days on our own just plain tiring.

“Oh, nothing special.”,
the skipper started to explain their system,

“We tend to go to bed at about 9pm and then get up at about 7 or 8 in the morning. Our radar proximity alarm is set for half a mile and tells us if something is near us. We are getting a little hard of hearing these days so we rigged a baby alarm by the radar speaker and put the baby alarm speaker by our bunks. It works a treat!”

..anyway back to ‘our’ night sail and the autopilot throws a tantrum

John went for a nap whilst Les took first watch at around 10pm. 
BEEEEEEPPPPP!  BEEEP!!
BEEEP!!

Within 15 minutes the chart plotter/autopilot decided to have a tantrum.
The autopilot wouldn’t reset either.

BEEEEEEEEP!

The autopilot was in a tizz and refused to hold our course. We couldn’t really therefore trust the chart plotter readings either as it is all connected together.
The choice was to manually steer and live with the incessant BEEP or, turn the autopilot completely OFF so the BEEP stopped and manually steer.
I turned the autopilot OFF.

Tush!...a short 30 mile manual steer is nothing to us

We are used to manual steering. When we sailed from Auckland to Tahiti with John and Amanda Neal, we sailed the whole 3,000 miles without the autopilot.
So this was nothing.

..but we do like to use the instruments for our hourly log and completely manual was going to be a real pain.    AND!  Sudoku was going to have to wait for another night.

John was stirring down below.
“We have a problem. Can you come up John. The electronics is broken”

“..and I’m missing my Suduku! ‘cos I have to manually steer.”

John went through his trouble shooting routine for 10 minutes and came up with nothing. We were going to have to make the BIG decision.
“Let’s just shut everything down and reboot to see if that fixes it – like a Mac!”  

“If this doesn’t work – well, we are in big winds, messy seas in the dark, ships everywhere and we are no worse off.” 
Powering ‘down’ and ‘up’ seems to take forever when you are waiting – just like a Mac – or a kettle of water on the stove.

A few real minutes later (and 60 emotional minutes) we are working perfectly again. The boat electronics had had it’s tantram, then had had it’s ‘time out’, and, like all children was now acting as if nothing had ever happened. 
Thanks to all the manual steering practice we had had with John & Amanda, Les had steered a pretty well perfect course such that no course correction was necessary at all!  
hmmm….smarty pants

We were smiling.
John reefed down again.

John went back to finish his sleep. 
The wind was peeking at 32 knots. 

John came back up for his watch at about 1 am and noticed a little lightning on the horizon but nothing too scary. I went off to get warm and have a sleep. 
Quite a few more cruise ships, freighters and tankers had decided to make for Palma during the rest of that night.

Then the wind died.
The wind died around 3pm and John put a tad more sail out whilst still trying to keep the boat sailing at under 3 knots. Not too much sail mind - we didn’t want to arrive before daylight! 
Damb it!  Within an hour the wind got back up to 25 knots again and we were racing at over 8 knots. Time to reef – again! 
It was a busy night.

Romantic couples go for a ‘sunset sail’ – we try a ‘before sunrise sail’
Finally, we reached The Bay of Palma. This Bay is a big Bay – about 10 mile deep.
Arriving was fine but we were 3 hours too early to be at this position!
We needed to ‘really’ slow the boat down. We reefed the jib yet again such that there was very little showing and put the mail sail completely away. See the photo.
We were still doing almost 3 knots! We were ready to go for a ‘before sunrise’ cruise of the Bay if needed.
Two cruise liners and three tankers passed us as we were sailing into port.

We resisted the urge to enter the port before daybreak.