Agriculture, fishing and tourism are the main industries. The climate allows a great variety of crops to be grown but dairy is the principal activity. Away from the more intensive flat agricultural areas small fields, scrub and woodland abound and as you drive around on your scooter you can hear birdsong and feel insects colliding with your helmet. It’s a bit like a huge garden until you get up onto the higher slopes of the volcanoes where moorland predominates.

The older houses are built of black volcanic rock, mainly single story, often with the jointing painted white but mainly all the wall painted. In the towns and villages two and three stories are the norm in the Portuguese style. On Pico, within the area of black jagged solidified lava from the last volcanic eruption the house walls are often left as natural black rock and the windows, doors and shutters are painted red. Grape vines are grown within small rock wall enclosures to produce a high quality dry, mineraly white wine. This area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

For outdoor activity such as walking, cycling, scuba diving, whale watching and of course sailing, with a mild climate and plenty of scope to get away from it all, the Azores would be hard to beat. I’d imagined finding somewhere remote, rugged, isolated, a small marina haven in the middle of the Atlantic. But no, it is a welcoming, accessible and very desirable part of Portugal.

For a yacht visiting the Azores there are two almost obligatory customs to perform. The first is a visit to Peter’s Sports Bar. The bar has been a watering hole for yachties for many years and presumably whalers also in the past. The bar has become world famous. So much so that there are now offshoots in many other places and it caters for the tourist market with an additional eating area and gift shop with Peter’s Bar branded products, whale watching trips and so forth. It still caters for yachties and will facilitate repairs, supplies, provisioning and the like. There is usually a crowd of salty looking types having a beer on the harbour front by the bar.

The second is to paint a record of your visit on the harbour wall. Or the flagstones on the sea wall edges, or the walls alongside the marina and harbour, or the ends of harbour buildings. In fact anywhere you can find an empty space or an old painting that is so faded and unrecognisable it can be over painted to freshen up the spot with a clear conscience. Some of the paintings are works of art, others less so but all tell the name of the boat, when it was there, usually who the crew were. Some are beautifully illustrated, others little more than the name of the boat. Colin, Glenn and Mel on Endorphin Beta painted theirs on the front of a concrete seat and hid the tins of paint for us to find and use, which we have done. Of course painting something by hand on rough stone is more difficult than you might imagine and our effort is a lot less polished than we’d hoped it would be. Still, it’s there and holds its own against many of the others. There is a little bit of touching up to do for which we need the white we used for the background. I painted the background one night as it was due to rain the following day and left the tin by the painting to indicate that it was a work in progress. I will be charitable and suggest someone thought I must have been offering the tin to another yachty needing paint because by the morning it had gone.

When passing the Cape Verdes Islands Ken and Bart on Windsong had an exhausted racing pigeon land on their boat for rest. They fed and watered it and it made a couple of attempts to fly off but soon returned. So they put it into the cat’s carrying cage (yes, they have a cat on board called Tikki and bought by Ken at a market in Indonesia), named it Pedro and pampered it for 10 days until arrival at Horta. From the rings on its legs they were able to determine that Pedro was in fact Petra i.e. female and came from the Canary Islands. They didn’t know this when passing the Canaries. Here they released it but it came back to the marina every evening at 1900 for a crop full of salted peanuts. After Windsong left Annie and I took on the evening feed, not sure whether it was the main feed each day for the pigeon or just part of an ingrained urge to return to its loft. All was well for the first two nights and Pedro duly arrived and was fed. On the third night we didn’t see Pedro but most of the peanuts had been taken. Last night there was no sign of Pedro and the peanuts are uneaten. Maybe Pedro is on her way back to the Canaries.

We now seem to have been adopted by a cat. We are hoping that the loss of Pedro and the arrival of the cat are not connected. It turns out the cat is called Andolph or something like that and was locked out of the French boat alongside during stormy weather and took shelter under the sprayhood in our cockpit where it slept soundly overnight and all through the following morning. The French boat has four gap year students on board so I don’t know what the longer term outlook for Andolph is - it certainly isn’t with us!

On the equipment front I discovered that the pushpit mounted windex was reading a low wind speed because it had defaulted to metres per second mode. Readjusted to knots it is now working perfectly so we are not going to buy yet another one for the top of the mast. In addition we still have the original windex. The guys here think the baseplate and cable connection for the windex come as a sealed unit on the end of the cable and cannot be sourced and fitted separately. If that is the case and we need another cable we have the one from the pushpit that we can use. We’ll sort it out back in Blighty and in the meantime have secured the existing cable at the masthead. We are the second boat here this week that has had the windex fall off the masthead.

Today is Wednesday 14 June. The forecast for the trip home looked good from Tuesday but Des advised us to hunker down as the weather this summer is very unstable and there are a number of low and high pressure systems that could create compression zones between them with high wind and big seas. Yesterday we were advised to be ready to leave at short notice. We have refuelled and provisioned with a view to a Thursday departure and, touch wood, will get a favourable passage straight through to Bristol with Bantry Bay, Cork or Falmouth as possible bolt holes if needed.