I don’t believe it.  This is meant to be a SAIL down to the Canaries but the weedy wind continues in a fluffy cotton wool pfft of 7 or 8 knots. Utterly ridiculous.  It has meant a wallow down the coast under motor eventually leaving Spain by approximately 9:00pm last night (with the raising of the Portuguese flag with due ceremony but still no accompanying national anthem because no one knew it again) and pottering along slaloming between endless lobster pots.  Haley has earned the sobriquet of Hawkeye as she seems to spot them at least half a mile before the rest of us.  Ah the eyesight of the youth! 

Bob had a close encounter of the fourth kind last night when a  notoriously secretive Portuguese fishing boat deigned to reveal itself via its navigation lights at the very, very last moment. He was obviously panicking seeing us bearing down on him!  The phut phut of his engine seemed alarmingly close at 3am in the morning.  A close call but avoided by our valiant skipper Captain Bob.

We’ve all been in shorts and short sleeves today for the first time and everyone decided to get a bit of washing done so we have been draped overall.

The Atlantic coast of Portugal is surprisingly short of good places to stop and we are surprisingly short on time to dally at whim.  We changed the original plan and decided that on second thoughts we would give Nazare a miss as we needed neither fuel nor facilities (the watermaker is working a treat and with the engine on so much we are showering as often as we fancy in wonderfully hot hot hot water).  Nazare looked rather too big in the Pilot, and certainly from the sea was a sprawling great mass, and stated that it was a 1 1/2 mile walk to town (Bob didn’t fancy that at all), and you had to pay to be in a marina (no anchoring) so we headed instead for Sao Martinho a small little bay, so small that it doesn’t appear in the modern pilot books. 

It has an imposing entrance carefully missing the scary rocks on the left and the right, opening up into an inviting bay.  It turned out to be full of tourist boats and ‘who knows what’ floats so we have ended up parked at the entrance so it is somewhat rolly as we are totally exposed to the Atlantic.  We are not too bothered as we are getting used to it after a week of our incredible journey.  As a result we are being rocked by the sea and the disco that is playing at full volume in the tourist resort.  We have decided to stay on board this evening and will go and walk the long beach in the morning.

The only mistake of the day is perhaps the horseradish mash with the tasty stew tonight.  The results are already starting to reverberate, rather too much phut phut and pfft, but as they say we are all in the same boat.