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.
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
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.
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.
After a lovely time in Figueria, Andrew had rejoined the boat after his bout of COVID and it was time to head off to our next port down the coast, Nazaré.
We were a little apprehensive about coming into Nazaré knowing that this is the place which has recorded the biggest waves in the world, but fortunately, our day of sailing saw near 0 swell.
We apparently forgot to start the Navionics track when leaving Figueria, so half of the route is missing below.
Of course there were more dolphins along the way, this time doing something rather interesting… I checked in with a marina mammal expert, and yes they may be doing what you are thinking while enjoying the bow wave of Hannah.
Due to the dropping wind in the evening, we had to motor the last couple of miles around the Nazaré headland and into the marina. Once again, we were entirely engulfed in fog.
We spent one of our free days before needing to get to Lisbon for Andrews flight here exploring on land.
That of course meant a trip to the headland to see the red lighthouse of Nazaré, the museum at the top as well as Praia do Norte from the headland. A shame there was no swell!
Andrew was still hauled up in a hotel after getting COVID in our somewhere between day 58 and 60. But the sailing must go on! (at least a little bit).
We had always planned on spending around a week in Figuera da Foz, so we continued down the coast to our next port.
It was roughly a 36 nautical mile sail which was mostly uneventful, but perhaps we would have been better setting off an hour or so earlier.
We didnt arrive until after dark, as as we approached the entrance to the river, fog decended. You can just about see the enterance to the river and harbour in the image below.
Arrival during fog
Annoyingly the marina in Figuera doesn’t allow pre allocation of berths, so we needed to both moor up at the visitor pontoon to register at reception before then also moooring up in our actual berth for the week. This was extra annoying due to the fog, wind and darkness.
The visitor pontoon was so large you could barely see Hannah hiding away behind the concrete.
Hannah moored up next to the concrete visitor pontoon
We spent most of our time in Figuera with friends and family. Rather than writing in detail about all of the wonderfull food that we ate and wine that we drank, instead I’ll just leave you with this collection of images to make you Jealous. (talking to Andrew here, as he missed out due to covid).
We also did a few boat maintenance jobs while in the marina for a week and while also having access to a sewing machine. We also got some things delivered that we needed to collect!
This included:
Modifications to our V berth pillow, including a new cover
Creation of fender covers out of tracksuit bottoms
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.
