Bavaria 31 delivered from Cardiff to Palma de Mallorca

The owner wanted his Bavaria 31 in Palma for the summer and had a firm deadline. Our crew of three, a skipper and two crew, arrived in Cardiff, spent one day on preparation and left the next morning. Two days later they were past the Scillies and out into Biscay, four and a half more days to A Coruña. Then down the coast: Peniche, Lisbon, Gibraltar, Almería, a last stop in Alicante and across to Mallorca. Palma on day 23, five days before the deadline.

The first days were the hardest. From Cardiff down to about 48° North the Atlantic gave us a proper beating. We kept well off the French coast and away from the main shipping lanes, but close enough to the big ships to ask them for the latest forecast on VHF, and we had an Iridium phone on board. The one real problem was the autopilot: the old reinforced belt in the Whitlock Lewmar drive kept jamming the steering. The wheel would turn about ten degrees, stop, and you had to back it off a few degrees before it would turn again. Tiring work for three people in a big sea. A service in A Coruña opened it up, found the cause and had no spare belt, so the crew hand steered the rest and wrote it up for the owner. The plotter also lost the plot from time to time and the electronic charts ended at the edge of English waters, so from Scilly onwards we sailed on our own charts on a laptop.

After 48° North the sea calmed down and dolphins kept us company for hours. About 100 miles before A Coruña the wind died completely and a whale surfaced right in front of the bow. We had to turn hard to miss it. South of Biscay the nortada, the steady northerly wind along Portugal, pushed us down the coast. Off Peniche we sailed in fog so thick we could see maybe 50 metres.

A fishing net off Cape Finisterre

Off Finisterre we sailed into a deep water fishing net and it caught the propeller. The quick fix would have been a knife on a boat hook, but cutting a fisherman's gear is the last thing you want to do, so we called the local fishermen on the radio. Nobody answered. After a few calls the Spanish sea rescue, Salvamento Marítimo, answered instead. They asked how many people were on board and told us to do nothing and wait. Their boat was with us in about 30 minutes. They tied a line to our pulpit and went full ahead on their big engines. For a moment we were sure the shaft and propeller would stay behind on the buoy, or the hull would come out a few feet longer. Then the net let go. They towed us to the nearest harbour and in the morning a diver took the buoy off the propeller. No damage at all. The small black steel buoy, smaller than a football and almost impossible to see at night, came home with us as a souvenir.