Oeiras Marina - waiting out the weather
Walkabout has gone Sailing
Andrew and Traci Roantree
Tue 14 Sep 2021 12:42
We left our anchorage in Cascais on Saturday 4 September and headed a whole 6 miles along the coast to Oeiras Marina to wait out some weather.
Bruce our FD waving goodbye to Cascais
Its been a great few days where we’ve been able to wash the boat down, jiggedy-jog along the coast and head inland for an explore.
Someone has a new jiggedy-jog outfit…
The weather has been a bit mixed whilst we have been here, with some thunderstorms and rain. The southerlies have come through - this was the main reason for moving on from the anchorage at Cascais.
Marina life has enabled us to get a few boat jobs done, and prepare for our next leg.
The Hydrovane (our self-steering system) is all sorted now, and so we hope to put that to use over the next few days.
We have funky LED’s in the cockpit, which will give us red light at night, to save our night vision.
The tender is packed and stowed away, as we don’t really want it swinging from the davits on an ocean passage.
We met up with Kate and Iain from Intrepid Bear for dinner last night, so social life is good!
Kate and Iain from Intrepid Bear
There are about 6 ARC+ boats in the marina, and it seems that most have the same idea - to set sail for Porto Santo tomorrow (Wednesday 15 September 2021). This is the first good weather/wind window in quite a long time, so everybody is planning to make the most of it.
Andrew on the pontoon with Walkabout a few boats along
So we are swapping SatPhone numbers and MMSI numbers in order to be able to stay in touch with the little armada that will set sail tomorrow.
Tom D commented in a message that Porto Santo “looks pretty isolated - Epic!”. Which made us think about this leg a bit more. 20 or 30 years ago, before GPS was a thing, navigating to this tiny dot in the Atlantic would have been quite a challenge. Now we take all the electronic systems for granted, and the Nav is quite straight forward. But if we did miss that tiny dot, then the next stop would be Brazil!!
The passage is about 500NM and should take us between 3 1/2 and 4 days.
Next stop Porto Santo, Madeira then a week or so in Lanzarote for some cycling. We have a lift out booked in Lanza for 4 October - a bottom scrub ahead of the ARC+.