We are still planning on getting to Porto, Portugal for the 2nd August, so we need to work our way down the Spanish and Portuguese coast, while also finding time to relax, and enjoy some of the coastline, as well as break up the sailing.

We came up with a very detailed plan, as can be seen on the whiteboard to the right.

This plan started off with some more time near A Coruna after the Biscay crossing to relax. Followed by a 60 nautical mile dash around the corner of Spain to get away from some 1.7 to 1.9 meter swell that was meant to be coming in.

So the 26th of July or Day 36 was the day to set off!

We set off around just before noon as the morning was showing very light wind. The sails went up straight out of the anchorage, and we set course on our heading for the first half of the hop.

Fishing

Fishing jumped to the top of our minds again, and we set up both rods, one looking for mackerel and one looking for bigger fish.

We were quickly successful for mackerel catching one rather swiftly.

The other rod wasn’t having so much fun, there was lots of seaweed and other stuff in the water.

At least we were doing our little bit to clean up the oceans…

We were trying a whole range of different lures on the main line, as we are both fairly new to catching anything other than Mackerel and wanted to work out what was best for fihsing while underway.

We settled on a 10cm jerk bait lure (Read about jerk baits here) which seemed to work quite well at 3-6 knots, not putting to much strain on the line, but also managing to stay at the right depth.

After 5 hours of having the line of having the line out with this lure for the first time something bit! We quickly got to the rod, which was in a rod holder, and started trying to reel whatever was at the end in. We generally prepared for landing our biggest fish yet (not a mackerel), with our landing net etc.

A few minutes passed as we were fighting the fish, occasionally seeing it pop out of the water. It was getting closer and closer to the boat. Unfortunately, when it was about 20 meters back the line became slack, and reeling it in we discovered that the knot attaching the main line to the leader line had either pulled through or snapped.

You can see the reel, with half of the knot still in tack in the image to the right.

Not only did we not land our first big fish, but unfortunateely this fish is probably now stuck with this lure and line.

Another late anchor

The wind was lighter than we would have liked, so we lost some time during our sailing compared with our plan. It also dropped off sooner than expected and we had to motor for the last part of this hop.

All of this led to us once again anchoring in the dark, this time around 2am.