Adams Blog: A digital nomad boat experience
Adam drafted this post about the plan to work 10 hours a week during this sailing adventure while we crossed biscay.
Finally, he has edited it (fixing all of the typos) into something readable 🙂
Day 53-55: Reaching Portugal
We said goodbye to our first onboard guest (Warren) on day 52. Just 1 more week until our second guest (Daisy) will also be departing.
It turns out writing blog posts with so many people onboard and also sailing most days is quite hard, hence a bit of delay in these posts 🙂
Baiona (continuing south)
After spending a few weeks in the rivers of western Spain, we needed to continue heading south and into Portugal. We headed to Baiona to provide a good staging area for our next bigger sail. We would be mostly out of the Vigo river and set up ready to head to Portugal.
We tacked all the way out of the river, sneaking through the Islotes Las Estelas in order to get into Baiona earlier than planned. This was quite a busy anchorage, with probably 20 boats or more all anchored up. Once again we found ourselves in the same anchorage as Sailing Vessel Zoe!
The anchorage was alive with fishy activity.
Entering Portugal
Next stop, Portugal!
The next 26 or so miles took us out of Spain and into Portugal (just).
We aimed for Caminha, and a small anchorage on the river that holds the border between Spain and Portugal.
The wind was frustratingly light throughout the sail. But toward the end, we did manage to get onto a straight downwind run and tried out the Ghoster for the first time!
Due to the slow first half of the sail, we came into the river mouth an hour or so after high tide and there was about 3-5 knots of tide flowing out of the mouth.
This led to us motoring in at probably the highest RPM we have had the engine at, doing only 2 knots over land, but 7 knots through the water!
We anchored mostly out of the river flow near the beach on the Portuguese side. The maritime police soon showed up to check us into Portugal. They also advised that we move slightly, so once again up with the anchor to move a few 10s of meters.
We spent 2 nights in the Caminha anchorage, as it was rather lovely, protected, close to shore, and we wanted to break up our sailing.
On night 2 we tried out the boat BBQ for the first time and made some rather tasty burgers.
Welcome to the blog
🎵🎵
Welcome to the blog
Have a look around
Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found
We’ve got mountains of content
Some better, some worse
If none of it’s of interest to you, you’d be the first
Welcome to the blog
Come and take a seat
Would you like to see the news
Or and any floppy seal feet
There’s no need to panic
This isn’t a test [laughs]
Just nod or shake your head and we’ll do the rest
🎵🎵 — Poor take on a Bo Burnham song
But seriously, welcome to the Hannah Penn blog.
You’ll find our Instagram and Twitter content here when posted, along with some longer-form blog posts of all sailing, some land adventures, and other fun or interesting stuff we get up to. Boat things, posts to the nic 38 owners group and more.
Make sure you head all the way to the first page using the “Older posts” button at the bottom.
Or head to Day 1: The River Dart (splash) to get started. Once there you can use the “Next” or “Previous” buttons at the bottom of the post to follow through.
If you are just interested in fishing, take a look at the #fishing tag linked in the sidebar. Also, find the other main categories there, or just search for stuff.
If you want emails when new posts happen, just pop your email address into the subscribe box and you’ll be notified when new posts happen.
Enjoy, and let us know what you think!
Adam & Kathryn
Day 24: Anchor dragging into Hannah
We started day 24 at approximately 5 am in an anchorage off Porthcressa Beach, St Marys.
This anchorage is on the southwest side of the island (pictured below). The anchorage is highlighted in green, and roughly where we were anchored is marked with a red dot.
We heard a loud thud and scraping on our chain. Looking out of the skylight from bed, we saw another mast oddly close by.
At first, we didn’t know what was going on, had we dragged? No! Our anchor alarm had not gone off. Also, we were on the outside of the anchorage. It must be someone else!
Leaping out of bed and onto deck we discovered that another boat had dragged anchor from further inshore into us!
These hungover French sailors on a Doufort 24ft sailboat didn’t notice themselves dragging and hitting us, and didn’t surface until after we loudly knocked on their hull and already had our fenders out. If they didn’t hit us they would have been taken straight onto the rocks or out to sea.
Initially, they hit the bow roller, chain and snubber before gradually turning to come alongside us.
Once up they also got some fenders out to put between the hulls, engine on and tried pulling up their chain with the electric windlass to find it didn’t work. They pulled it up by hand (something we are used to on Hannah!) with some help from us getting the anchor over the bow.
Judging by how quickly they pulled up the chain they probably only had 10 meters or so of chain out, and we were in 10 meters of depth at high tide. They would have been in 8-10 meters of depth where they were anchored.
Minimal damage, just some light paint scratches on Hannahs’s bow as the metalwork, chain and snubber took most of the hit on the nose and we were on deck before anything else could happen, holding the other boat away from Hannahs’s hull.
No pictures or videos of the actual event, but let’s hope it doesn’t happen again…
Nice to know Hannahs’s anchor, a brand new Mantus 45 lbs Galvanized Steel Anchor can easily hold 2 boats.
Anchor Alarms
We are both very glad that we have an anchor alarm that we have learned to trust (after a bit of a rocky start with it, not literally thankfully 😉 ).
We use Sail Grib AA (the android app) on the tablet that we use for navigation.
The alarm is very loud and there is no chance of you sleeping through it, just make sure it has a good GPS signal, or you’ll be woken up by the alarm telling you it doesn’t know where it is!
It’s also what shows us what our swing pattern looks like after a night of anchoring.
