Velas, Azores: Hiding from a low

Velas, Azores: Hiding from a low

Our journey from Flores to Velas was primarily a motor sail, with about 6 hours of “wind” that helped us along the way. Other than that the sails were primarily hoisted to stop us from rocking around.

Though boring in terms of sailing, the wildlife was rather epic on the journey, we had multiple large pods of dolphins, many Cory’s Shearwater birds, Portuguese Man O’ War and some whales in the distance.

We arrived in the evening in Velas, a little while after sunset, and anchored outside the marina, on a mixed sand and rock bottom.

In the morning Adam jumped in the sea to check the anchor and found it to be right on the edge of a sand patch. We were thinking of moving it further into the sand patch in preparation for the stormy low pressure that was approaching, but fortunately, Blue Note had found us a space in the marina.

So up the anchor came, and into the marina we went! We left some of our large yellow fenders on the outside as the space was rather tight. But very happy to be protected for the coming days.

After arriving we walked through the town to find somewhere to eat lunch with the other boats. We came across an awesome-looking eroded archway by the cost and had a little picnic there.

The low pressure wasn’t scheduled to pass over for a couple of days, but depending on the accuracy of the forcast, we could have seen 40+ knots of wind and lots of rain.

Fortunately, the main body of winds passed far to the east and in reality, in our very protected marina we saw at most 25 knots spiraling around and coming from the opposite direction of the predominant wind. Though we still got some heavy rains.

Nothing a good Chinese takeaway and film can’t help with 🙂