It’s very satisfying seeing the reflection of the water in our paint job after we spent months stripping paint off and repainting
#sailing #sailinglife #reflection #sailinghannahpenn #paint #smoothsailing #sunshine
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Our pre planning of heading to Cascais rather than heading further into the Lisboa river served us well on day 81, as the 27nm journey took us 10.5 hours due to light winds (we only adveraged 2.5 knots).
We managed to get the fishing rod out due to our mostly slow sailing. We tried a mixture of single deep diving lures, and also the paravane with feathers and a spinner.
As Adam was making dinner Kathryn started to reel the rod in, but is felt suspisciously heavy. Upon getting the paravane up to the surface Adam walkd away thinking that job was done., before Kathryn said “wait we caught something”.
Normally the paravane should come to the surface when it catches a fish, but either there was something wrong with this fish, the paravane, or perhaps it just bit at the last second?
We caught our first Mackerel scad (thanks Mark for helping us identify).
Anchoring in Sesimbra wasn’t ideal, we arrived just after the sun had set, and the anchorage remained rockey for most of the night, but there were not many alternatives.
Andrew left the boat heading to Lisbon airport on the morning of day 79.
The marina had a quite noisy collection of little crabs that seemed to come out as the tide dropped. They would just sit on the rocks, clicking their little claws together, we assume eating things.
We spent the rest of the morning restocking the boat from a nearby supermarket, doing some last-minute laundry, general cleaning and unexpected boat maintenance (the shower pump out pump ceased up and we needed to take it apart).
Wanting to get out of the marina to avoid spending too much more money, but also not wanting to make our next hop down the coast any longer we decided to head back to Cascais.
The sail was in familiar water and rather short, with only the initial exit out of the river mouth leading us into some slightly lumpy more unprotected water.
We were once again a boat of 2 and spent some time relaxing in the quiet, with no real pressure to be getting anywhere on a timeline (at least not a timeline of a few weeks).
We had been talking of making pastel de natas aboard at some point and decided to give it a go (despite not having any sort of try that would make them pastel de nata sized.
We mostly followed a recipe from wetravelportugal.com, but opted for a rather large dish and made something like a pastel de nata tart.
With the burnt bits trimmed off, and a nice background in place, it looked and tasted delicious!
From Cascais it was only a 5nm sail to our chosen marina near Lisbon, we hoisted the mainsail whilst still at anchor and sailed like a pro out through the other anchored boats quickly unfurling the genoa too
The sea and sky were kind and with lake-like seas, we sped toward Lisbon, this was Andrews’s final day of sailing and it was going to be a fun one, early that morning we had seen a pirate ship approach our anchorage and drop the hook a little way offshore, the ship was huge and could have easily been taken right out of Pirates of the Caribbean! We looked it up online to find that it likely had around 75 people on board, what was funny was that it also had two washing machines and dryers on board too, the luxuries of pirate living!
As we sailed out towards it we tried to get as close as possible to get a good look at it and take some pictures, we waved at everyone on deck.. sadly not a single one waved back!
But anyway we did get some great pics of it
As we carried on we decided the conditions were perfect for Andrew to do some single-handed sailing, with and without the use of the autopilot, so first I demonstrated how to tack the boat and change the sails without using the autopilot to hold the wheel and then we handed the boat over to Andrew to have a go doing everything himself, he did a very good job at being quick enough to not let the boat tack back again after transferring the headsail to the other side whilst not holding the wheel!
We also tried to sail a circle which obviously had some tacking included but really not a bad effort! You can look at our track on the map
After we had had enough of that Andrew announced that he hadn’t been in the water the entire time he’d been on board!! A whole month on board and he hadn’t dipped his toes in! We had completely forgotten about that as the water before this point had been pretty cold oh and he did get covid for a little bit too :0, so we sailed a little further from shore and decided to ‘heave to’ (stall the boat under sail, like anchoring with no anchor) and drift whilst we all had fun jumping in.
However, not long before we were going to jump in we spotted something in the water that stopped any of us from getting in the water!.. jellyfish and lots of them.
I wanted to get a good picture of the interestingly shaped jellyfish so I jumped in the dinghy with the underwater camera and snapped a few of these, apparently, this is a very common jellyfish found off the coast of Portugal with a moderate sting. We think it is a Catostylus tagi.
We probably spent 40mins admiring the jellyfish before we stopped seeing them.. no time like the present we thought so got into a swimming costume and we all jumped in the sea, Adam and I even tried to halyard swing into the water with some pretty funny results… (you can judge who is best)
So 11.5nm later we arrived at the marina, radioed in, and got a space, luckily the conditions were good as the space they had given us was very tight! With lots of fenders out on both sides, we edged our way into the slip and had a nice little relax before going to check in and find the shower block!
We headed into Lisbon via taxi in the evening to have a final meal with Andrew.
On the way back, we did some much-needed exercise after a big meal and lots to drink!
Just sailed past this beauty at anchor
Entertainingly it is a fair bit newer than the boat I am on (Hannah Penn)
2005 vs 1972
#sailinghannahpenn #sailing #boatlife #pirateship https://t.co/pRAAOsZXge— Adam Shorland (@addshore)
Sep 4, 2022
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Day 75 saw us heading to Cascais. This was the moment we turned the first “corner” on the west coast of Portugal.
The anchorage was large and there was plenty of room for us right in the middle.
That evening we headed to shore to explore what Cascais had to offer and to find some food.
Once again, as keeps happening at many of our ports of call, there was a festival happening.
We stayed in Cascais for 2 days, as long ago during the planning of the trip Kathryn had seen a place called Quinta de Regaleria that looked rather awesome, and we had to check it out.
This meant a short taxi to Sintra and a day spent surrounded by more tourists than any of us have seen in a while.
Tourist day! Anchored in Cascais and got a taxi over to Sintra to see Quinta de Regaleira.
Lovely gardens, grottos, labyrinths and historic buildings, but also the most tourists we have seen in the last 2 months.
Sailing to Lisbon tomorrow, not for to go before some more touristy looking around.
#sintra #quintaderegaleira #cascais #portugal #sailinglife #sailinghannahpenn #cruisergoestouristing
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The next port of call on the way to Lisbon was Ericeira.
Parts of this hop were quite light on the wind front and mostly downwind.
We found ourselves gull winging with the Genoa and Ghoster, before switching to the cruising chute for the first time since leaving the UK in its newly repaired sock.
What a joy it was to fly in comparison to trying to hoist it behind the Genoa.
Here it is on the way up (excuse the talking)…
And here it is a few minutes later on the way back down when we decided it wasn’t going to work with the wind that we had at the time.
Upon reaching Ericeira we were only joined by one other boat in the anchorage. Most boats seemed to pass by Ericeira, probably due to its small size, and head straight to Cascais of beyond. The one other boat that joined us for the night we had actually been sailing near since Figuera.
The harbour had quite an interesting dock, lowered into the water by crane when in use, but hoisted out most of the time.
