Saturday 11th June, 2016

Off Portugal  38 10.9N  9 19.4W

Today's Blog by Richard  (Time zone: BST; UTC +1)

We have been a little quiet (on the blog front, at least) for a couple of days so I’ll cover our progress from Wednesday.

We set off, as planned, at midday on Wednesday, for our 200 mile passage to Cascais, near Lisbon. The winds were generally light and we had a mixture of great sailing and motor-sailing. Peter is still in charge of setting the watches and so I fulfilled my customary 02.00 -05.00 watch with my customary good grace. I must say, though, that it was magical – clear skies full of stars and a great view of the Milky Way. We even spotted a couple of shooting stars. There were quite a few shooting fishing vessels as well which we managed to avoid.

Arriving at 19.00, we anchored in the bay off Cascais for dinner on board. We were advised by the authorities to move further away from some rather pretty floating pontoons with radio transmitters in evidence. Good advice as, later on,  they were the source of this:

On Friday morning, we went to check in to the marina, close by. At the reception pontoon, we were greeted by Richard Freeborn, (sailing on Oyster 56: “Sarabi”), who we met this time last year in Bermuda, when he was crewing on Oyster 56: “Yantina”. A helpful member of the marina staff told me that the office would open at 09.00. I pointed out with a large grin that it was now 9.45 but, as I have blogged before, it does not pay to be smug. I had not realised that Portuguese time is an hour behind Spanish!

Once we had checked in, it was merely a matter of parking the boat at the assigned pontoon, except that the wind was blowing a hooley in a tricky direction. David got us in with his usual consummate ease but I managed to land awkwardly when I jumped onto the pontoon. The knee on that particular leg lacks an anterior cruciate ligament from a previous skiing accident and is not the most stable joint so I was (still am) in considerable pain. I briefly considered cutting short my holiday and flying home on Saturday but David confiscated my passport and forbade me from leaving. I don’t think he could bear the thought of losing two members of crew in the same week. On that record, he’d be on his own, in no time!

The wind speed indicator had failed on passage so we were having to make ‘educated’ guesses to inform our sail changes etc. We found this harder than we should. So, on Saturday morning, poor Peter drew the short straw again and went up the mast to replace the anemometer so that our wind speed could again be displayed. He shimmyed up and down in no time.

We went into Cascais for dinner last night. It’s geared up well for tourists with English spoken everywhere. David comments that it was a small fishing village when he last visited, 20 years ago, but it’s been massively built out.

You do not want to be walking on this pavement when you have had a few!

In the event that this is my last blog (of this trip, thank you very much!), I’d like to say what a pleasure it has been to sail with Ted for the first time. No, …… really. For an Aussie, he’s a real gentleman. And, he’s a mine of information. He throws out preposterous statements like “wasn’t it the Portuguese that introduced tea to Britain?”, teasing us to guffaw with incredulity, only to discover that he was correct on every occasion. He also showed me how to eat Cote de Beauf:

He is really at home on Serendipity, where the forecabin has now declared independence:

However, the funniest moment was when he asked us, with a very straight face, whether we had heard of a particular kind of splice (I won’t put the name in this blog as some readers are of nervous disposition).  Ridicule ensued but I can reveal that he was again proved to be correct by checking with Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander and there is an alternative, slightly shorter, name, being, a “cut-splice”.

We left Cascais at 16.00, heading for the southern tip of Portugal. We have just seen 55m LOA Drumbeat on its way back to port  – we last saw her moored in Hamilton, Bermuda at this time last year. Who is chasing whom?