Truly moved by Craig David

So having grabbed a prime anchor spot just off Cascais town we were about 200 metres from the stage which is set for the 5 day music festival. We were just finishing dinner, the sun was on it’s way down and we planned to go ashore and watch Craig David perform. Then along comes an orange fishing vessel with a local policeman telling us we had to move now as they were setting up the fireworks platform where we were anchored. Of course as we got ready to move the wind picked up through 20 knots, within a couple of minutes securing the anchor it got dark and the wind shot up to 30 knots. Bare poled we were well heeled and storming through the anchorage. We dropped the hook but seemed to backing down to close to another boat so we went round again. With 40 metres of chain we are again relatively close to our neighbours but we were not about to move. We maintained anchor watch, shortened the chain, and there is about 20m clearance all round. Our plans to see Craig David, who is now somewhat further away and it’s blowing F5-7, were canceled and instead we are listening live on RFM radio mixed with some loud movements from the chain. We are now waiting to see if any fireworks are going to fly in this wind. We expect not.

Fenders at Midnight!

We maintained anchor watch until past midnight but somewhere around 1am noticed that our neighbour had slipped more chain and was lying parallel with fenders out. So we had no choice but to also deploy fenders and hope not to close the gap.

Deploying fenders at anchor seems to be relatively common here.

By morning things had calmed and we were all swinging to the chain. We could have passed our neighbour a cup of coffee stern to stern so we moved again to leave plenty of sea room.