Porto Santo
Innamorata
Steve & Carol
Thu 16 Nov 2017 18:46
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After arriving last Tuesday we went ashore to
book in - you have to report to port police and marina office, we had nice long
hot showers and planned to take a walk into town on Wednesday for a look around
- however the weather had another idea! Stephen left on Wednesday, he flew to
Madeira on a small plane, spent a day there then flew back to the UK while we
were plagued by strong winds and sudden violent blasts of wind up to 40 knots
blowing down the steep hill which went on for the next 2 days - flipping a
dinghy and causing a collision when one boat hit another while trying to
re-anchor, by Friday the wind became more easterly and constant and by Saturday
were able to eventually go ashore and stretch our legs.
Sarah one of the sailors on the pontoons
managed to get a video of us being hit by a blast of wind , below are a couple
of stills from it.
  The laundry is shut at weekends and so were free to explore the town a little and do some shopping. Monday was laundry day - the marina has one machine and one dryer and it took all day to do ours as the machine was in great demand and if you missed the end of a wash someone jumped the queue - we did meet a lot of other people during the process though. On Tuesday we walked into town to see about a bus tour but as the ferry from Madeira doesn’t visit on Tuesdays there was no tour so after a walk to town we decided to go for a walk we had been told about along the coast and around the hill overlooking the marina, it took 3 hours and was somewhat further than we are used to walking! The walk along the coast was on a narrow track which turned to a sandy road after the arch through the end of the island and then on to a proper road. Outline of our walk on map
 Some views on route..
The hills we walked around
View down of harbour and towards Madeira
On Wednesday we took the bus tour with a Dutch
couple and a Norwegian couple from the marina which was a much easier way of
seeing the island!
Inside the windmill.
We were hoping to head for the Canaries but there is no wind at the moment then it is coming from the south and getting stronger, a spot in the marine became available this morning (there are really only 2 berths suitable for us here) so we decided to come into the marina for a few days - they do deals here and so its not going to be much more than if we stay on mooring but we can go ashore when we want and fill up with water etc we have also given her a good wash there were salt crystals everywhere, we also went for a swim and cleaned the waterline and a foot or so below the surface, we need to put our dive gear on to do more. The water here is crystal clear and there were some fish having a feed on bottom of the boat which was nice to see. |