Well we have had an interesting few days! Yesterday we sailed down from Peniche. We experienced a range of weather that I have never ever seen before all in about 12 hours. We had blasts of HOT wind - like the heat of a strong hot hairdryer at about 30knots. This would then change 180 degrees to a blast of cool air from the west. On the sail down we had times when we had to motor due to no wind and at the end we had 38-45knots consistently for 3 hours. With 2 reefs in the main and a small amount of jib out we were OK. We don't currently have our inner forestay rigged up, in the ideal world we would have set our smaller inner jib. We can certainly see the benefits of having 2 furling foresails.... Also getting the mainsail down in that much wind was quite hard work. We motored straight into "it" for the last hour to Caiscais and had fun manoeuvring around the marina. With barepoles we were doing 4knots - made for interesting parking. The guys here were brilliant and helped take our lines.
It's a stark contrast here to the rest of what we have seen. There are lots of brand new boats here and lots of restaurants and businesses in the large marina. I guess we are close to Lisbon so there is more of an economy.
Today we have swam, fished, snorkelled and done a few boat jobs.
Sadly our laptop has imploded and it seems terminal, as this is our main way of getting weather forecasts and sending pics we are slightly behind on things.
Probably stay here tomorrow and head into Lisbon Tuesday.
