Lat: 39:22.9. N : Long: 031:10.0 W. - Thursday, 19th J une, 2014 - Noon Position (UTC now) in Lajes Marin a, Flores!
Sulana's Voyage
Alan and Sue Brook
Thu 19 Jun 2014 15:06
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Lat: 39:22.9. N : Long: 031:10.0 W. Thursday, 19th June, 2014 – Noon Position (UTC
now) in Lajes Marina, Flores!
Yes, we
have finally arrived in the Azores, all safe and sound. We dropped anchor in the
small anchorage just outside Lajes Marina early this morning, at 03:45,
and promptly went onto Azorean time by putting our ship's clocks forward the
necessary 3 hours. Because the Azores have Summer time
too.
So we and
"Sulana" are now on UTC exactly, for the first time in ages.
Our last
evening and night at sea was a slow and sorry amble through the light winds
that sat just off the coast, as we trickled our way slowly along under
poled out headsail, rolling along, with all sails slatting all night. We
did, however, by doing this, arrange it so that we arrived off Lajes at
first light and were thus able to enter harbour in daylight, which was what
we wanted to do all along for safety.
We could
have come in fairly safely earlier, as it happens, as Lajes is an easy approach,
with little or no offlying dangers and an open bay to anchor in, but I like to
play it extra safe when / if it is easy to do so, especially with a new
landfall.
On going
ashore this morning, just after 9:00 am Azores time, Alan and Will took the
RIB and left Jason and Nelius to sleep off their last hours of being on
watch. Upon tying up at the tidy little new marina here (all built with EU
funding, I am sure) we disposed of our 4 bags of trash in the dumpsters nearby,
having to - sadly - ignore the designations for Cardboard, Metal, Glass,
Plastic, etc. with which they were each seprately coloured and carefully
labelled, as all our trash on board has to, by necessity, go into one big bag,
so was completely unsorted!). No sooner than this was done than we turned around
to see a Police type car drive up, containing two young officers in it, with GNR
marked on their shirts, along with the typically European truncheons and
handcuffs on the webbing belt! Oh dear, I imediately thought, we have been
caught by the Enviro Police!
Not at
all. They had simply seen us come in, spotted our 'Q' flag flying and, when they
saw us come ashore, they just came down to clear us in with the Immigration/
Customs formalities. They could not have been nicer, nor more friendly and
polite. The forms were filled in on a clipboard over the car's bonnet.
Easy!
The
younger one who wrote up our Entry Document was the spitting image of Portugal's
World Best Football Player, Christiano Ronaldo (who is actually from
Madeira).....Is he in hiding from the World Soccer Cup that is playing in Brazil
right now?
We still
have to go to the Capitania do Porto, to get our passports stamped, but when we
went to his office there was a simple sign on the door stating he was
sorry, but was away from his office, working on the docks, and could we please
come back tomorrow morning! So that we will do.
Walking
up the hill on a smart new port road, past many lovely and equally smart houses,
all with flowers in their garden borders and roller-shuttered blinds on the
windows and doors, we stopped at the local Port Restaurant to see if they
will get our business this evening, for that first Portuguese beer and supper.
They will!
Further
on we passed the very effective lighthouse that sits in the middle of a
long house's red tiled roof and came to a Bank, from where we able to
withdraw a few Euros and proceed on to the local supernarket. This proved to be
very simple, and quite good enough for us to renew our fresh food stocks.
We could also have bought in whole deep frozen octopus, if we had wanted to,
complete with giant tentacles and rubber suckers!
Fully
laden with enough to get by with for the next few days, we were just about to
stagger back down the hill in the heat when Madame (who rang up the till for
us in the shop asked us in her best Portuguese if we had a car, or were on
a 'bote'?
Fortunately
Alan grasped enough of this to quickly understand what was on offer and in
a minute's time she had deposited us happily right back at our dinghy in her
car! How nice it must be to be able to leave your shop in somebody
else's hands for a few minutes, just to take the time to do that for
us!
Sadly,
upon questioning back in Alan's worst Portuguese, whether the island offered any
laundry service, the answer was no, you need to find a local washerwoman who
will do that for you! But then, she didn't know anybody who would offer
that service either. So it is hand washed clothes for us all until we get to
Horta in a few days time.
Tomorrow
then is a day of reconnoitering the island and geting to know it a little. This
morning the boat got her first rinse down and wipe clean in two weeks, so
"Sulana" is looking pretty good for her last two thousand three hundred ocean
going miles. We are now refilling the watertanks with our watermaker and
hoping not too many of the horrible little, dark brown, stinging jellyfish
surrounding us will not get sucked into the manifold!
The guys
need to get ashore now, to catch up on their wifi / emails / Facetime / running
to lte off steam and stretch their leg muscles again and recover their
general shore legs, before we hit the bar tonight.
From then
on Flores really starts to come alive, as, on Saturday night, a 'Miss Portugal'
contest is apparently taking place at the local village hall!! That
perked the crew's attention up a bit, to overcome their somewhat lackadaisical
enthusiasm upon receiving our description of how small the town
(village) here is..
More news
may be a bit sporadic from now on, as I go about on island tours, the
crew do our maintenance jobs, etc, at least until we get underway
again towards Faial and Horta.
Then I
intend to restart the regular blog, but probably just for
the days spent at sea.
That's
all folks,
Alan and
the Sulana" crew.
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