Author: Paul and Claire

Firstly – yippeee it’s high tide and we can get internet from the nearby bar, our only option, and only at high tide is our antenna high enough to get a sufficiently strong signal for blogging. Posting can take a few hours spread over a number of days. Far from being on broadband we are on ‘occasional if the wind is in the right direction, the tide is high, nothing massive has berthed in the way and the bar windows are open’ band. As it’s approaching spring tides our blogging window is getting wider. So we are currently trapped holding

After fighting the battle of the bilges we thought why not really punish ourselves and raise the cruising chute – another hot, sweaty deck job in high humidity which takes a good half hour…each way     Quick take pictures. Cut for the trade winds in the 15 to 25 knot range this sail is bigger than it looks. This is the first time that it has set well and it has clear potential, however after putting in the physical work to organise lines and raise the sail the wind died again about 4 miles later so all hands went

It all happened 24 miles, and about 4 hours out, south east of Faro….. We have bilge alarm sensors mounted to starboard in our sump tanks yet the extracting filters are all set to port. When healing It all happened 24 miles and about 4 hours, south east of Faro….. We have bilge alarm sensors mounted to starboard in our sump tanks yet the extracting filters are all set to port. When healing it is common for our bilge alarms to sound and the crew usually silence them whilst hopefully announcing which one(s) have been set off so the sumps

The island south of Faro has about 3,000 inhabitants: The anchorage with approx. 50 yachts The fishing port  The High Street One of the most creative front gardens A decorative house The supermarket – tractors are the only transport Town centre   The lagoon where some sailors have spent over a decade   HUGE Tuna nets just offshore  

On our last night in Cascais we had a party on board with ARC transatlantic owners Gerry & Wendy from Duplicat along with ‘going west’ Michael and Heike from Fantasea, transatlantic and beyond.              

After our first Craig David anchor eviction we had two nights sitting about 100m to the east of our first drop. Our anchor had been tested the first night with peak gusts of 39 knots and on the second with Force 7/8 at 4.30am. We went downtown and returned to find the firework train had been anchored in daylight (must have been better organisation as on the previous night they tried to locate the small barges after dark and could not find their mooring buoys so were snaking in and out of moored boats – just!) alongside. Yep, we had

Moving from a house to a boat has many challenges not least wifi needs for a boat full of teens. We sorted out the wifi dongle on the back of the boat and have a wifi access point which feeds all our laptops, phones and tablets. Coruna Marina has good wifi so we are making the most of it uploading photos to the blog, catching up on emails and admin. But using public wifi comes with risks and we were reminded about an essential service we’d forgotten to use since moving onboard. A VPN service which creates a Virtual Private