Cascais 17th - 26th September 2005
After our overnight
sail we managed a couple of hours sleep, before getting to work tidying Lazy
Dawn for the Royal visit……my (Jo) parents were coming!! 2 bottles of champagne later we finally
left for lunch. It was great to
rendezvous in Portugal whilst they were there with friends John and Anne to play
golf. We did plenty of drinking and
eating with them over the next couple of days, but regrettably for Chris, no
golf. Bringing golf clubs would
have just been one too many things in the toy shed! We already have kite surfing kit, power
kites, scooters, body surfing boards, snorkels and flippers, tennis racquets and
running kits……
Anne on the Left and
Jo's mum Pat at the helm of Lazy Dawn
Once they left, we set to work on the
still many needed jobs on the boat, whilst we waited for the Engine to be
serviced. Of all the stops so far,
Cascais had the only decent Chandlers and Technical support, so it seemed the
sensible thing to do. Thank fully
neither of us minded too much spending longer here, what better place to be than
10 mins from Portugal’s best surfing beach. Armed with body boards, wet-suits and
flippers, we headed for Praia do Guincho.
Despite it being the Atlantic, our ‘shorties’ were warm enough, and very
soon even we were catching some pretty big waves J . 2 hours later, totally knackered, we retired
from the waves for a well earned rest and some sunbathing. (Not something Chris
usually finds easy!!).
What a pleasure it is to do the jobs
in the warm Portuguese sunshine. I
managed to scrub and rinse all the teak and give it 3 coats of oil and it was
actually not a chore! Vic's, you would have been proud of me, especially as your
suggestion of the paint brush rather than a sponge was definitely a better
option!! She looks almost new
J
The biggest job that
got tackled was the fitting of the DuoGen……A state of the art wind/tow power
generator. Chris had planned to fit
this in Falmouth, but thankfully too mush socializing got in the way as we’re
not sure it would have survived the Gale in the Biscay!! Chris spent hours working with tools
standing on the transom to fit it, but thankfully nothing fell to the marina
bottom.
On thankful
recommendation from Tom and Alice, who we bumped into again in Cascais, we went
into Lisbon, only half an hour by coastal train, to visit the ‘Oceanarium’. The biggest aquarium in Europe, what a
fantastic place. The huge central
tank had sharks and Manta-Rays and then smaller tanks were set up around this to
depict all the different oceans of the world. They even had the areas above the
tanks with coastal habitats, including penguins, sea otters and birds.
Manta-Rays in the
main tank
Sharks and
shoals of ??? lets hope we don’t
catch a shark on the crossing
Sea Otters from the
Pacific Ocean coast of the USA
We took a taxi back through the old part
of Lisbon and had managed to find ourselves the only English speaking tourism
trained taxi driver. We didn’t take
him up on his offer of a day trip inland visiting Monasteries, but we do have
him to thank for a very interesting meal.
We wanted a good quality traditional Portuguese restaurant, serving good
meat, having eaten fish every meal recently. We took the waiters recommendation on
everything……’Cozid de Portuguese com Tido’. We still haven’t found the exact
translation, but essentially it was a Pork stew, but not as we know it,
trotters, ear, offal sausages, belly, and anything else except prime cuts……….my
father would have been proud of us.
Did we eat it? We politely
tasted everything!
Cascias light house
from the marina
We thought it was
time to leave Cascias and slipped our moorings and went to pay. Just as we were
about to leave we noticed the Clipper 05 /06 round the world yacht race was
stopping here!! With the first boat
home expected in the next 24 hours. We had to stay as RJ one of our watch
leaders in the Fastnet was on Jersey and we should be their to welcome him home.
A quick call home found that he was in 9th place due to having to off load a
crew member after breaking an ankle on the fore deck. But we still decided to
stay however we would go out and anchor in the bay by the harbour a great
location to watch the boats home. It was quiet and a good place to test our
anchor as it was our first night on the hook. We spent the next 40 hours waiting
for RJ to arrive. During this time we started watching the first series of 24 on
DVD a present from my sister Dawn. (We got really gripped and watched the first
3 CD’s in 24 hours!!). The time of arrival estimations kept going backwards due
to low wind. However when they did arrive around 01.00 on Monday morning the
wind had filled in and their was 30 knots of wind. This made the trip from the
anchor to the harbour quite interesting in the 2.6 meter dingy.
RJ’s was first off
the boat and straight into the open arms of a girly from another clipper boat!!
I shouted out to RJ to put the girly down and moor his boat before… His face was
a picture when he saw us standing their. We shared a few words and let him
finish his celebrations and putting the boat to bed. We planned to stay and go
out for a few beers. However with the wind increasing we decided it was best to
retire to Lazy Dawn to monitor are anchor and ensure we still had a boat to do
the ARC on. The trip back was very wet with waves coming over the bow of the
dingy, we got back both socked but happy we had made the effort to see RJ. We
planned to leave the next morning and get some more miles south after a great
week in Cascias.
Jersey celebrating
their 9th Place in Cascias
Jo, RJ and Chris once
RJ put the girlie down!!