We arrived next day in the afternoon and dropped the hook. It was indeed worthwhile!  The ‘main’ island has a lighthouse and is inhabited by a handful of  people. The islands are a national park/bird sanctuary with trails for walking. Also there is an old monastery which seemed still  in use according to the lights that were on at night.  We launched the dinghy, went  over to a small beach and walked around for a bit. We didn’t see that many birds but for the rest the view was great. Rutger walked over to the monastery were Monique and I picked him up with the dinghy later. We did a short tour around the cliffs in the dinghy and went into a cave that was in fact a tunnel. The steering was a bit special because of the funny waves and eddies but we managed to avoid the rocks and the walls.

We had a very nice barbeque that night and stayed for the night. The wind had picked up a bit, so we hoped that we could have a nice sail to Lisboa the next day. Actually, we’ll be heading for the marina in Oeiras at the entrance of the Rio Tejo. From there it´ll take about 40 minutes by train to get to the center of Lisboa. According to the pilot, the marinas more upstream are very crowded and don´t have any berths for visiting yachts. Only in high season there might be some open spots from boats that are away. Cascais is the marina where most passing yachts go to, but that is a pretty long ride to Lisboa, and also very expensive.

When we left the beautiful anchorage at Ilha da Berlenga, the wind had died again so we were back to motorsailing, hoping the wind would pick up later. However, since we left Scheveningen, we have had no rain, apart from a few lost drops, only sunshine and starry nights and that´s really nice, too!