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Porto Santo was probably the hardest place to which to say goodbye so far. After I had got everything pretty much ready the evening before I paddled to the harbour café one last time, sat in the evening sun and had a few beers. Besides being a little sad to go, I was also eager to get to the Canary Islands. This should be a fairly easy passage with perfect winds from the port quarter all the way.
If my journey were to end here for some unforeseen reason, which of course I hope it will not, I think I would be able to accept it and be happy that I have at least made it this far to this very beautiful place. I have done a bit of hiking, some repairs on the boat of course and met new people. I think it would be great to stay here longer but I want to go on and will probably try to go to Tenerife on Wednesday. Here is a collection of pictures that I took during the last few days.
This post now has a little film of my 8 day passage from Vigo to Madeira. I will write a bit about the Island of Porto Santo in my next post.
As is often the case with plans, it all went down the drain caused by a small detail. In this case the small detail was a small tin of sardines which I had the night before departure and I will spare you the details of my sickness all through the night. It wasn’t pleasant and I was totally exhausted the next morning lying in my bunk, feeling sorry for myself and not in the least bit ready for a three day offshore passage. (I know Webb Chiles doesn’t consider anything under a thousand miles a passage but for my own frail self I thought of this as one).
The forecast called for almost no wind and there was just a very little bit of a breeze when I weighed anchor. I had decided to sail off and we were ghosting through the anchorage with only a half knot of speed but still able to steer and I got a bit of satisfaction out of this so we kept sailing out of the Ría. After two hours we had covered two miles and I decided to motor.
I had hoped to be able to sail but there was absolutely no wind. So we motored and even when the wind picked up about one hour before arrival (against us) I didn’t set sail. The waves were very confused and and I just wanted to arrive and not tack into very uncomfortable wind and wave (it was now blowing F6). With this wind the last hour turned into two because our engine wasn’t strong enough but we finally made it into the Ría de Cedeira and all of a sudden all was calm.
It rained a lot in Ribadeo and the harbour turned out to be not as protected as I would have thought. Amy was constantly rolling and banging against the fenders and sleeping was getting harder and harder. I decided to repair my anemometer. After two days of climbing the mast and getting my bunk wet because I had left the hatch open when it started to rain (I was up on the mast and couldn’t get down fast enough), I became very frustrated and gave up.
I have made it across the Bay of Biscay and instead of writing I have made a little film and recorded my own music in my “boat studio”. All this writing, picture taking, filming, recording and editing is great fun but it is also getting a bit out of hand time wise… so entries might be a bit more scarce from now on.
I still need to repair things on the boat and generally need more time 🙂
Absolutely no wind today.. as forecast. But I needed to get to Camaret which is only 35 miles away in order to be able to catch my weather window to cross Biscay. It’s all looking very good for a Wednesday departure.
I had waited out the storm and left with the tide to pass through the somewhat scary Chenal de l’Île de Batz. Once inside it wasn’t as scary as on the chart. The wind was supposed to be variable and very little but we made good progress under sail. After a while it died completely and we motored for a bit but the wind came back. Out of the west of course. But we had the tide with us and no real waves (except for some large atlantic rollers that were a welcome change).
