Story 49DX/E448 Story from 49DX/E448 activity. Des Bosc (AKA Ferradura) Island is located on the North Coast of the main island of Ibiza, Des Bosc is approx. 730m from the coastal resort of San Miguel. 49DX/E448 turned out to be the third island we activated on this particular day, earlier we activated 49DX/E088 Botafoch isl and E468 Illa Grossa, Des Bosc turned out to be the most enjoyable to activate due to strong pileup we experienced. Prior to our holiday I had looked at the location of E448 on Google Earth and got the impression instantly that access to Des Bosc would be a piece of cake, how wrong was I, what looked like on Google Earth was a nice road was in fact a maze of dust tracks which seemed to turn off at every direction. Our drive along these dust tracks suddenly came to a stop at the bottom of a very steep hill, I said to Sean that no way could our little 995cc Chevrolet Matiz rental car make it up that dusty rocky steep hill, I reversed the car as far back as possible for the best possible run up and then floored it in 1st and then 2nd gear, we made it half way up the hill until we started to slow down very quickly, a quick down change back into 1st gear saw up wheel spin another 30 metres or so until we started to slow down again, we just about barely made it to the top, if the hill had been another 10m longer we wouldn’t have made it, anyway we carried on driving trying to follow the map I had written on some paper, how we ended up at Des Bosc island I never know, it was through shear luck and certainly wasn’t down to my map drawing skills. Des Bosc island is linked to the Main island by a shingle beach, we parked the car over on Des Bosc side of the beach, we quickly found out that it was a private island with no access to the centre of the island, so we quickly erected the vertical antenna South West side of this little island, connected the Icom 706 to the car battery and fired up the radio, the call frequency was very busy, Sean said his goodbyes and went fishing, I took photo’s and some video footage for proofs and chose a clear sheet on the logbook and got pencil ready. CQ this is 49DX/E448 listening .570 .570, uff the pileup was BIG, first in the log is 14OF017 Fred at 17:02local, followed by many many friends, signals genuine 5/9+20 +30, many mentioned they had worked me from the previous islands, anyway the log filled up very quickly. We finished at 19:22loc with 14AT069 last in the log, we still had people calling but I was worried about driving down that damn steep hill, we would be soon be losing daylight, so I decided to stop, in total 195 unique callsigns were logged. Anyway we started to say our goodbyes to the people still listening in, within minutes of dismantling the antenna we were driving around those dust tracks and thankfully we made it down that steep hill and within a few mnutes we were whizzing around the roads heading back to Portinatx. Hope you worked us from all 3 islands. 73 de..Darran and Sean return