36:41.78N 02:47.41W

Saturday 21^st August & Sunday 22^nd August

Well after a long and sleepless night on Friday night, we then discovered that the weather on Monday and Tuesday was turning against us and seriously affected our plan to move onto Almerimar early in the week. The end result was that we went off in the morning with Steve and Chris from Scott Free to visit the excellent naval museum in town after which Sarah and Chris went for a shopping expedition to El Corte Ingles whilst Steve and I returned to the marina. Around 3.00 pm both boats set off on the 120 mile trip heading south and west along the Spanish coast enjoying a very favourable 18 knot wind from the east. We soon had our cutter rig set and were slipping along at 7 knots in a fairly flat sea and enjoyed a very fast ride for several hours. Gradually the wind began to drop away and backed towards the north which slowed us up and introduced an uncomfortable swell.

At 7.00 pm we were visited for the first time in our travels by a pod of Long Finned Pilot Whales. They came up to us at speed and spent a short time almost inspecting Serafina before moving off eastwards towards Scott Free who were around 3 miles behind us. In fact they followed us closely the whole way and since we both have AIS transponders it is possible to watch and know each other’s every move. The trouble is that you soon become a bit competitive about the sailing speed as we know each other’s speed over the ground and so tweeking the sails to keep the speed up becomes rather compulsive. They were just 2.2 miles behind us at one stage but this ended up at 4 miles before the wind finally died.

We managed to keep sailing at a reasonable pace until around midnight when finally the wind dropped to barely 4 knots and had backed to the point where it was directly behind us, which caused the boat to roll heavily and was not enough to keep the sails pulling despite lashing the boom out to the gunwhale. So we were reduced to using the engine again through the rest of the night, which remained very warm and beautifully moonlit throughout.

The shipping lanes alongside our track were very busy and inevitably we came across a fair selection of interestingly lit fishing boats and some other strange boat movements, which remained fairly suspicious... Dawn brought clear blue skies and sweltering heat, but no wind and we ended up motoring all the rest of the way to Almerimar which we reached around 3.00 pm. However at 9.00 am we were visited by a large group of dolphins of mixed types, but mostly the Common Bottlenose. What was remarkable about this pod was that they behaved quite unusually with the smaller dolphins holding their heads under water and beating the surface of the sea rapidly and violently with their tail fins. This we understand is usually a tactic used to drive prey along into a waiting trap, but in this case it seemed almost aggressive and directed at us. They did not stay long and the photos at www.rhbell.com do not do them justice.

We were very disappointed to have left Cartagena so early and to have missed the opportunities to explore it further and enjoy more of what it had to offer, but frankly the Med Cup party had taken over and it was clear from talking to the locals that things were about to get a lot worse over the next few days as the event built up to the actual racing. I think that we would have felt compelled to move on even if the weather hadn’t made the decision much easier.