This is it!

The Main sail was returned to us this morning. Turns out that a lot of the stitching on the luff tape had come undone. Why this had not been picked up on the winter service I do not know. The whole luff tape had to be re-stitched, and all of the batten pockets replaced. A new luff tape with silicon rubber pin head spots has been fitted to all of the batten positions. The sail now looks better than it did at the start of the season. The company who did the work, FoFovelas, spent over 9 hours working on the Main Sail and only charges me 340 Euros, including VAT at 21%.

Once the sail was re-instated in the boom, we packed our beach gear and headed for a beach day. Once camp was established and lunch prebooked at the (fabulous) Linda’s Beach bar I settled down to Jane Fonda’s autobiography “My Life so Far”, and Jennie got stuck into Wilber Smiths latest novel. We had an idyllic morning until south London parked next door and felt the need to tell the whole beach (in Lennie Henry tones), about their late night experiences in the flesh pots of Lagos. All in semi illiterate English. Concentration was quite impossible!!  So we moved off to somewhere quite, then departed for a wonderful lunch. Met several other yachties and great people over lunch and had a brilliant time. Then a siesta, and back to the boat for our last night in Lagos.

The weather has now settled back to a normal pattern, and is very comfortable Apparently, the temperature here, 4 days ago was the highest since 1991.

The weather forecast looks very kind for tomorrow, so we will be off at 0800, for Cascais, via Sines. The plan will be to creep into Sines at around 2000, anchor for the night and be off at 0600 the next morning, so avoiding the need to waste a couple of hours on the formalities.

There is a massive regatta under way in Cascais, so we will have no choice but to berth the marina. It is a great place so I suspect we may spend a couple of nights there before we head off north for the delights of Peniche…………………….