It looked like it was going to be a windy sail on leaving the safe harbour of Porto so we went with one reef in the main sail and the genoa had a little furl in, and the mizzen up in full.. the perfect set up really as we shot along at 8.5knots with a following swell that got us up to 9 or even 10 knots on occasion.

The race was on to catch up with SV Blue Note! Who we could see on AIS, we were catching up with speed.

A couple of hours or so in, the wind had dropped off just a little so all of the sail went up to try to maintain our speed, and we managed a very modest 6 or so knots for a few more hours

Half way through our sail we were on track to catch Blue Note just as we entered Aveiro.

The excitement however, started to diminish as our speed got slower and slower, the wind was really tailing off as the day drew on and we realised we were not going to catch up 🙁

Instead we finally got to the anchorage at about 11pm and we passed Blue Note on our lap of the anchorage trying to find a space, looked like they had packed up and gone to bed! The race will have to continue another day

The anchorage was packed out with sailing boats and we actually had difficulty finding a good spot so we ended up very close to a car ferry channel

In the morning after a few boats had left we were able to move to a better spot and not feel like we were in the path of all the little fishing boats coming and going

SV Blue Note went on their way and we said goodbye to them as the customs police came along side to check our documents, they were nice and chatty and liked our new paint job and told us about a good bakery, we also asked the story behind the giant wrecked trimaran that we were anchored next to.

Apparently some years ago it was being sailed by its French owners not far offshore from the harbour we were in when it was dismasted, it came in but the insurance didn’t pay out so it lay there dormant slowly being picked at by thieves till all that was left was a hull (or three really!) and it’s engine which the police said only hasn’t been stolen due to it being too heavy to get out of the boat!

The small town was interesting, it used to be purely made up of a naval base and ship building yard, and everyone who lived there worked in one or the other, over time the ship building yard became derelict, we walked around the dilapidated buildings trying to figure out what it used to be, for some time, eventually after translating some signs and finding some paperwork from the 1970s we realized it was a ship building yard

Nowadays it looks like some people use the spaces to hang out and there were some cool looking graffiti sprays on the walls.

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We moved on to find some fresh veg and then headed back to the boat for an early night ready for our sail to Figueira da Foz the following day.