Finally we get wind

Salila
Peter Ablett
Sat 13 Aug 2011 09:59
Position 12/8/2011. 41:22.29N 8:45.93W

Baiona was a lovely place. The old town is a maze of small streets with lots of restaurants, and I managed to visit the castle and the replica of the Pinta, one of Columbus' ships which made landfall in Baiona after discovering the new world.

For the first time since leaving Poole we got wind yesterday, quite a lot of it. We left Baiona at 0700 heading for Povoa de Varzim. We decided to put up the big gennaker, which is like a spinnaker but it furls on a drum. It's quite a lot of cloth, and as we left the anchorage there was almost no wind, as usual. Turning South out of the harbour we had 10 to 15 knots of wind from the correct direction, marvellous. For a couple of hours we were having a whale of a time, doing 8 - 9 knots, surfing down the waves at over 10 sometimes. Great fun. We actually saw 11.2 knots on the display, but the found that it had tripped itself into MPH not knots.

The wind then built, fairly quickly, and the old saying "if you think you need to reef, you do" was re-proven. By the time we tried to get it down it had wrapped itself around the jib, but I finally manhandled it into the locker after three attempts.

We ended the day with a very conservative two reefs in the mainsail and a tiny jib, with winds of 25 knots gusting 33. Getting into the rather tight marina was fun, I'm so glad I've got two engines.

We will now be here for about 4 days. Fiona arrives on Sunday, so we are getting a car to pick her up, and there's a small possibility we might visit Porto, where they make the best hangover juice in the world.