Restless Atlantic Crossing - 10
Restless of Auckland
Roland and Consie Lennox-King
Mon 28 May 2007 23:40
Hello again!
Well we have departed from Horter, Faial and
are making for Ireland! Technically we're at 38:38.89N and 28:23.21W.
We have 15 to 20 knots behind us which is supposed to stay with us for
a few days and we have 1218 miles ahead of us!
The Azores were really neat! Once we arrived
we topped up on fuel and water and cleared customs. The marina was
full (with about 1,000 boats) so we
anchored in the harbor which was quite sheltered. It was rather nice
sleeping without the lee cloth and eating at a table without a 30 degree lean on
it and plates sliding all over the place.
So we did pretty well on our short stay.
Managed to see a lot of the island, learn a tiny bit of Portuguese and do a few
jobs on the boat like checking things at the
top of the mast, an oil change, cleaning, and fixing Gilberts soggy bed
situation! The first stop was the showers and laundry. It actually took 5 men
about 5 minutes to determine which machines were the washing machines and which
ones were the dryers. We did 4 loads of washing and made our first Azorean
friend, the lady running the place who bossed us around like we were children.
It's was funny as she was ordering us to separate the colours and cram more and
more into each machine all in Portuguese! We also
filled up with water, refueled and re-provisioned.
Yesterday we hired a taxi/tour guide and spent 3
hours visiting all the tourist spots on the island. The island's covered in
volcanoes, some of which were active
only about 40 years ago. Apparently one we went to was erupting for a year on
and off (in the 1950s) and at one
stage a new island came out of the sea and then overnight disappeared again! A
few other craters and cracks and hills also appeared and some of the villages
got buried in ash but nobody died! However the population pretty much halved
after that because villages were wiped out and people generally didn't want to
live on an erupting volcano. Seems pretty sensible to me!
The islands here were also big on whaling and
there's little whale spotting stations all around the place. They last caught a
whale in 1992!!! So we went to a spot where the whaling boats would drag
the whales to and then cut them up and ship the meat off to one of the other
islands. It was like a big marina berth and boat ramp cut into the
rocks. Pretty impressive if you're an engineer!
After our tour of the island, Gilbert
and I painted our sign on the foot
path. Apparently it's bad luck if you don't leave your mark somewhere and
so the marina is covered with all these painting of all sorts of different boats
on different missions.There's now a big blue and white one that has a big
'Restless of Auckland' and a kiwi painted right in the middle of where
everyone walks so we'll get a lot of publicity! It took us about 3-4 hours to
paint and Consie you might want to re-stock your blue and white paint supply
because we pretty much exhausted it. I hope we didn't use anything special but
you would have been proud of the final masterpiece.
So last night we had drinks and dinner with
some kiwi friends we made and then Gilbert and I made the silly mistake of going
to the bar afterwards. Not feeling too good this morning. You'd think we could
have gone partying one of the nights that we weren't leaving at 10 in the
morning the next day! So this morning we woke up around
10, perfect timing really as the boat was all ready and all we had to do
was pull the anchor up and roll out the sails! We had a few minor problems
but we're sorting those out and slowly getting our sea legs
back!
Well I need to go put the fishing line out now as
we're coming up to some good ground I feel so here's hoping. We've eaten as much
steak as we can on our stay in anticipation of more fish I think so don't
want to disappoint anybody!
Hope everyone's well and not missing us too much!
Keep the emails coming!
Love from the crew of Restless (bound for colder
waters!)