Portugal - Madeira 38.4N 25.6W
Dandelion
Rick, Helen, Sue, John
Wed 3 Aug 2016 18:00
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> Thursday 28th July,
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> With real regret we leave the Spanish Rias today and start the trudge down the long, straight and, some might say, featureless (and they'd be right!) coast of Portugal. If your ideal coast is one that is heavily indented with bays, estuaries and rivers, under a backdrop of scenic, rolling hills and dotted with picturesque fishing harbours and waterside towns, I wouldn't necessarily rush to include the coast of Portugal in your 'My Favourite Coastlines' book. If, on the other hand, what you dream about is an endless, straight-as-a-die, strip of continuous beach, in front of Europe's largest coniferous forest, punctuated with the odd Stalinesque industrial complex or high-rise seaside town, this could be the very thing (you'll tell me if you think I'm over-selling it, won't you?).
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> Fishing Floats
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> The one feature which does predominate along this featureless coast (if follow me) are fishing floats. Let tell you, if your business is the manufacturing and repairing fishing floats you definitely want to set up a branch down here. There are 100s, NO!,there are 1000s of the things - it's a bloody minefield. We're currently 5M off-shore and weaving through a cluster (whatever the collective noun is) of a dozen or more hard-to-spot floats in 200' of water.
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> Conventional, modern yachts offer three 'points of capture' to the line which links fishing floats to seabed (and thence to the lobster pot). In order of batting (assuming you're going forwards): the keel, the prop, the rudder. Any one of these can snag the line and, before you can say ''lobster thermidor', arrest the progress of the vessel in an undignified and spectacular manner. As it happens, DDL stands a half-reasonable chance of scraping by as our keel and rudder are joined and the prop lives in an aperture within the rudder. But, as all sailors know, the God of Small Things is rarely off duty and our Achilles heel is the Hydrovane* rudder trundling along behind, ready to act as a kind of arrester hook should the line slide cleanly under the keel/rudder/prop doings.
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> *wind-powered self steering which I might explain about later.
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> Should you cruise down this way the floats are generally advertised in one of four ways:
> A four foot stick topped with a small, red triangular flag.
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> A four foot stick topped with a small, faded-to-white triangular flag which blends almost perfectly with a sea full of white-horses.
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> A four foot stick with no flag.
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> None of the above (I.e. No stick and no flag).
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> Nighttime sailors might like to consider how far off-shore they need to navigate to avoid these invisible-at-night perils. (If it was me I'd be looking at being outside the 100m contour.)
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> One of the great things about living on a boat is that there is always plenty to do. And if you run out of jobs and risk becoming idle for an hour or two, the answer is to break something. The latest item to join the list is a broken loo. Yes, somehow one of our two heads* (*nauticalese for loo) has developed cracks in two separate places. T'riffic, what joy.
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> Sunday 31st July.
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> We've been spending a couple of days In Povoa de Varzim. This is a small, dusty fishing harbour/holiday town about 15 miles N of Porto. The town is actually OK notwithstanding that the beachside disco (sorry I know you can't say 'disco' anymore) operates at a level which almost certainly contravenes the Geneva Convention (they can probably here it in Geneva).
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> Anyway, yesterday I had a Special Day: -
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> First I changed the engine fuel filters. A task which I won't describe in print but, to boil it down to its essentials, a degree of bad language comes into it and you know you've been successful because you end up lightly basted in diesel fuel.
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> The second task was to apply a resin bandage to the broken bits of the bog. (We really know the meaning of having fun down here.)
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> And we've fitted the TV. Now before I hear a tumult of protests from the old salts, I'm not talking about watching Sky or whatever - it's just for DVDs. And whilst on that topic, may I offer a qualified thanks to those who donated freely from their own collections just prior to our departure from Blighty.
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> I have now had time to study some of the offerings.......
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> Actually, Godzilla was not on the top of my wish list. By the same token, nor was the 2006 World Cup. And I think I remember asking that Titanic was to be excluded.
> Anyway, thanks, really, thanks a lot. I'm sure there'll be some gems.........
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> The River Douro
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> We slipped from Varzim after lunch, and heading south (with the endless beach over to port) and entered the Douro river at teatime.
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> Now, when one opens the Pilot Book at the entry for Porto and the River Douro certain words and phrases leap out at one:
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> '6 - 7 knot Spring ebbs.....dangerous bar.....crowded with dozens of small open boats.....raw effluent in the water.....'
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> In short: Take the train.
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> Notwithstanding the doomsayers we made the river entrance against a strongish, albeit neap ebb and the Mate piloted us up into the city which is arranged on steep hillsides above either bank of the river. It's clearly a 'Port ' town as you see the famous old houses 'Sandermans', 'Graham's' etc on the south side. Navigation for masted vessels comes to a hard end at the Eiffel-designed, Ponte Dom Luis with it's 8.8m air-draft.
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> There was rumour of a possible berth just below the bridge right up in the city. Take my advice - forget it. The river is churned up with the wash from tripper boats, there's a mass of visitors parading the riverside (and probably throwing things), the noise, the tide, the garbage, the (alleged) effluent, the berth is probably reserved for the tripper boats and .............well, look, just forget it, OK?
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> In the end we berthed in the newish marina down on the S side of the river, guided in by two most efficient young fellas in a RIB who led us to a straightforward berth, took our lines and in the morning brought us fresh rolls.
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> Saturday, 6th August
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> Today we shook off the dust of Portugal, cleared Cascais marina and turned the bows out into a very blue ocean, toward Madeira - about 550M (3 or 4 days). Drawing our intended course on the passage chart, I notice that we'll pass close to the Gorringe Ridge. This is an extraordinary feature in that the depths around it are in the 4800 - 5000 metre range and yet this seamount rises to within 20m of the surface. Amazing. All that effort and missed becoming an island by 20 metres! If I was Gorringe, I'd be sick as mud about it.
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> We've had a few very nice days in Cascais. It's a posh-ish seaside resort. The anchorage can be subject to nighttime katabatic winds (where during the day warm air gets shunted up onto the hills behind the town and hangs around until nighttime when it cools and then comes rushing back like it means it, causing consternation and discomfort to innocent yachtsmen in the anchorage).
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> One of the many useful gadgets in this sailing game is known as a snubber. We've just bought an extra one from the chandlers here. It's purpose is to take the shock out of mooring lines if there's any surge in a marina (or if tied to a wall/jetty/etc). To describe the thing: well, it's made of black rubber, it's tubular, about 18" long and, at each end, there's a blunt, pointed bit which starts off a little thicker than the middle section. And to a non-nautical person it might perhaps be not entirely un-suggestive of the sort of item you would tend to order by post and which subsequently arrives in a plain envelope.
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> Now, one can stroll around a marine waving this thing around like a demented conductor and no one will turn a hair, but, take it for a walk round the smart streets of Cascais and you'll become the cynosure of all eyes.
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> As I can now testify...
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> We did a major stocking-up in Cascais. There's a 'Pingo Dose' about a mile away at the top of the town (why they always put supermarkets on a hill is something of a mystery) and here we headed to fill two trolleys - partly for the immediate passage and partly as background stock for the longer voyages to come.
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> Supermarket trolley-wheels are designed to float effortlessly, and in any direction, over the mirror-smooth floor of a supermarket. They are specifically NOT intended to cope with the cobbled pavements and streets that make up most of Cascais. Our somewhat stumbling and erratic route back to the marina took us through an 'eating street' where the tables extend right across the way and one has to negotiate a course between them. Pedestrians, fine. Cyclists probably, maybe even a horse but pedestrian + top heavy, loaded-beyond-it's-design-weight trolley with teeny-tiny wheels? Tricky, very tricky. And we could see it in the waiters' eyes, 'here they come again, those English guys. Look, they're trying to get those two trolleys through here, it's madness! Yesterday they were walking around with that weird, black sex-toy thing'.
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> Anyway we did manage to get them down to the pontoon pretty much intact and loaded everything onto Dandelion's deck.
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> Then R and I glanced at each other and there was a moment of mutual, guilty awareness.
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> 'How much was the deposit?', he asked.
> 'One Euro', I said, 'per trolley'.
> 'How deep's the Marina?'
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> In the end conscience won out and we pushed them back up to the Pingo. During our return journey we found we had urgent need of revivement - which gave The Mate and H plenty of time to complete the stowing (without R and I getting in the way).
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> Cascais - Madeira.
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> We've been treated to some pretty good night skies on this passage. The Milky Way is more-or-less lined up with our course, it's twin, dusty-looking bands, each of a billion stars, hangs right down to the horizon in front of us as if to say 'look, it's this way, come on, get a move on!'
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> A crescent moon, a fair wind and a sea full of phosphorescence.......
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> When one is Trade Wind sailing one tends to go with the wind (which in this case is a benign F4/5) and under a constantly blue sky and over a constantly blue sea, one day can merge into the next. As in....
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> 'Got up, looked at the sea/sky, had breakfast, did a few jobs, had lunch, went up onto the foredeck and read a book, had tea, looked at the sunset, had dinner, went to bed/stood a watch, got up, had breakfast.....
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> All very wonderful and everything but, you see, it lacks what we in the writing game call ZIP.
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> A few Dolphins came to visit on the first night out and since then just a few seabirds. Today though (this is the 9th), we saw a TURTLE!!! Not 20' from the boat, steadily paddling to gawd-knows-where (I imagine the turtle has got a pretty good idea) and clearly in no rush. Actually there's very little wildlife to see out here. I suppose it's a biggish ocean and unless you're looking at just the right spot at just the right moment.
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> Wednesday, August 10th
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> These days of course, the glamour and tension associated with a good landfall are things of the past. The plotter tells you it's there. Ergo it's there. This morning, though, Madeira did not, as advertised, reveal it's serrated rocky spine above the horizon at 50M. Nor did it at 10. We'd already acquired it on radar (just to make sure they hadn't taken it away) when, according to the plotter-thingy, at just 2.6M distant, a grey, steep, jagged headland emerged from a greyish sort of dawn, Pta de Barlavento, on the extreme eastern end of the island.
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> So here we are in Quinta do Lorde Marina on Madeira's SE coast. We'll have a few days here to mooch about and then R and H will leave us for a while and the Mate and I will take DDL south, now following the route of HMS Beagle, to the Ilhas Desertas (part of the Madeira group), then to the Selvagem islands and on to the Canaries.
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> More rubbish as it occurs,
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> Love, the Skipper
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