This morning at around 7:30 am local time we arrived at Horta. It took us 16 days in all. 16 days of great sailing, no storms, only 2 showers and only 3 days with no wind :-)
After clearing with port control, immigration, customs and the police we were free to go to Cafe Sport for lunch. Walking on the hard again was not easy. The whole place seems to be wobbling all the time..
Right now we're all sort of exhausted and in for an afternoon nap.. probably till dinner time :-)

Tomorrow Frits is flying home so today was his day. We rented a car to explore the Island. We first stopped over at Mid Atlantic Yacht Service to pick up some stuff for the boat. It's a small shop but very well equipped and very knowledgeable staff.

The sailmaker recently had a double bypass operation and was not in the mood to fix my gennaker. Well, I can understand that. It can wait until I come back in July...

We had a very challenging drive all the way up to the crater of the volcano. The [dirt]road was steep, with lots of hairpins ad the higher we came the thicker the clouds, until we couldn't see anything at all. Half way up we had a flat tire, just in a corner of the road... but with 4 guys we had it fixed in no time..

The crater itself we never got to see . too cloudy …..Anyway we drove on to the western point of the island where we did see the lighthouse and the lava stream that ruined the village some 50 years ago.
All In all we had a great day, in spite of the rain that's pouring down for two days now :-o

Later this week the weather is supposed to clear but this occlusion front seems to be very stable.
Tomorrow will be an exciting night. we're gonna watch the football match Portugal - Holland in a local pub ..our table is reserved :-)

Still raining... never thought off so much fresh water for free, no need to rinse the boat :-)

We got the paint to put our mural on the wall but with this kind of weather there's no chance it will last for more than a day. I guess this also will be a project for Rutger and Eline when we come back in July.

Last night we had a great time watching the match at Internacionale, the local pub. Bruno had our table ready, in the middle of all dressed up Portuguese.. I brought my Dutch flag and my fog horn, just in case... It was an exciting and fun match to watch! Especially the first 20 minutes :-) Since none of us is really into football, we didn't mind that the Portuguese won eventually. It was a great match to watch.

After the match we had some drinks and Eline had to buy Bruno and the rest of the staff a drink :-o
Because of the rain we did some jobs on the boat, adjusting the belt tension, putting some new rivets in the boom rail and the vang. The inverter also broke down but they can't fix it over here.

We had planned to go on a whale watch trip. However.. when we checked later, the trip was canceled because of the bad weather... another thing left to do coming back in July.