Cascais- Lagos
Trippwire
Sat 10 Oct 2009 06:46
Having been in
Cascais for a couple of days, poor weather came in and so we had to move from
our anchorage off the beach into the marina. The nice thing now we have got down
to this latitude is that when the weather is bad at least it is still warm. My
plan was to do lots of kite surfing, but before then, I still need one more
lesson. Unfortunately, despite good wind, it seems that there was no beach
around with the right wind direction - an offshore wind would give me a rather
unplanned (but potentially quick) trip to Madeira, whilst an onshore wind would
more likely than not turn me into strawberry jam on the side of a building.....I
therefore took the less heroic option and wimped out! So, lots of boat sorting
and a bit of surfing later, we set off after lunch on Thursday 8th
after a very pleasant stay in Cascais.
The forecast was for
more motoring, and so a force 3-4 from the north-west was very much appreciated,
particularly when it turned out not to be a sea breeze and continued through the
night. The sea was pretty mixed up having had a few days of strong southwester
lies, creating a motion that made it difficult to stand up. Setting off just
behind us was a Discovery 54 owned by some very nice people that we met whilst
in Cascais..we expected to sail off into the horizon, but this Discovery proved
to be pretty quick.....suddenly there was rather a lot of pride at stake!
Anyway, a bit of tweaking later and we had the legs on them, but for a while it
was a close run thing...and re-opened the "spinnaker debate".
We has already
pre-agreed no spinnaker whilst there are just two of us on board...this was
after a fantastic sail that we had last year from Falmouth to Dartmouth,
when we put the spinnaker up and the wind
increased progressively....Jen set 20 knots of wind as the limit, and
fantastically, every time she came on deck the wind dropped to 18
knots....umm time for a confession...only after I had turned the wind
reading to read apparent wind rather than the original true wind speed....and
given that we were surfing downwind at 14 knots, meant some pretty
good breeze. It all came down ok when it was time to bring it down,
but it was decided that we had perhaps exhausted our luck. Which is
all very sensible and stuff, but when you have a perfect 14 knots from
behind you...unfortunately and despite several consistently better lines of
persuasion, I proved just not to be persuasive enough and had to make do with
the two sails we had up!
We came around Cape
St Vincent at around 5 in the morning and reached a huge milestone; we did our
first tack or gybe of the trip so far. When buying the boat, one of our main
concerns was the running backstays. These are bits of rigging that attach
themselves to the back of the boat, and you attach them via a pulley and a large
winch to the windward side of the boat; this means changing them over every time
you tack or gybe. The particularly important thing about them is that if you
have an accidental gybe (which can be very likely when
sailing downwind under autopilot), or just get a tack or gybe wrong, the danger
is that when the sail gets thrown across the boat, that it takes the mast out
with it....so, not for the faint hearted, or indeed for anyone with any sort of
sense who is cruising double handed. My logic was that we would be using the
boat for ocean passages during which there are very few maneuvers anyway.....a
few friends 'in the know' did a huge amount of teeth sucking and generally
agreed that we were bonkers.....well, to all you tooth suckers, our first gybe
(well, we chickened out really and tacked around, which was more than sensible
given the 20 knots and lumpy sea off the headland!) was done after we had
clocked 1080 miles. Don't worry though the tooth suckers, you still have at
least 10,000 miles to prove me wrong!
We had a fantastic
sail for the last 20 miles into Lagos, with the wind on the beam and a steady 10
knots on the log, and arrived in ready for breakfast, a bit of a kip, followed
by a lunch in a beach side cafe washed down by lots of
Sangria!
The plan for the
next few days is to potter around here, do a bit more boat sorting, and perhaps
a couple of short hops along the Algarve, ready to meet Charlie D who is coming
out on Thursday night for (weather permitting), a trip to Madeira and perhaps
some fortified wine!
Jen &
Miles
________________________________________________________________________
This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star. The
service is powered by MessageLabs. For more information on a proactive
anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit:
http://www.star.net.uk
________________________________________________________________________