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Published: October 14th 2009
Sopromar Boat Yard
Getting the gear box oil changedLagos to the Island of Porto Santo - 450 nautical miles.
We spent our last day at the Sopromar Boat Yard getting the boat readied and the last few glitches with the windows being sorted out at last. Final provisioning was done for what we had anticipated was going to be about a four day passage. Debs has been very busy cooking up lots of individual meals that we just have to slip into the oven and half an hour later, voila!! Instant meal. We tried this out on our Bay of Biscay crossing and it worked a treat and I am sure it will be just as successful on this passage.
We met up with Kel and Kerry from a Hanse 470 called Freedom. We had spent some time with Kel in the Hamble at the start of our trip and it was great to get to see him again and finally meet Kerry. They were heading for med Spain where they were going to winter their boat and later spend some time cruising in the med.
We got the chance to have a last beer with Ross and Sue Ellen, the Aussies we had met who
Quite beer with Rosco
with Ross Martin and Sue Ellen at the Yacht Club, Lagos just before we left were on the hard in the boat yard, getting their yacht ready for heading into the med in the very near future. They are a great couple and we are looking forward to catching up with them when they bring their boat home to Australia in a couple of years.
We left the boat yard and hooked up to the waiting pontoon at the Lagos marina and spent the rest of the day getting final boat checks and preps done. We hoped to leave Lagos about 10.00am on the 8th which of course is a very respectable time of the day to start a passage. I spent some time getting our Sat phone sorted out and being able to connect to the net so that we can get weather files while we are underway and that is a great help to us, not cheap but very effective. It also provides us with an emergency contact capability both for us and of course for family back home should they have to contact us. A handy little tool is that you can go to the Iridium Satellite Phone Web site and send a text message to us for free so if
you want to be able to do that send us an email and we will send you our sat phone number.
We got our final fuel and water fill on the morning of the 8th and a last minute dash to the supermarkets to get a few odds and sods we had forgotten and Haike was able to buy about every fresh bread roll from the bakery which we shared up. As things turned out we were able to leave about 10.30 with A Small Nest leading the way out of the channel and we were in turn followed out by Swagman, crewed by John and Sue’s son and daughter in law, Rob and Lou who had come down to Lagos for a few days R & R on the boat. Rob had brought over an electronic navigation card belonging to John and Sue, for us to borrow to cover the Caribbean Sea which is greatly appreciated.
We got the sails up and there were huge smiles all around when the cry went up that we were heading for home!!!. We motor sailed back along the Algarve coast before turning south west on a bearing of about 244
Dinner time
Spag bol, just the best for the Island of Porto Santo about 450 miles away. Porto Santo is about 28 miles from the main island of Madeira and our plan is to spend a few days on both islands if we can. Both Islands are still governed by Portugal and it may be the last area that we fly the Portuguese courtesy flag before changing back to Spain for the Canary Islands and then onwards to the Caribbean.
We watched Cape St Vincent slowly fade off into the distance, being the last view of mainland Europe that we were going to see for goodness knows how long. Must say it was a bit of a bag of mixed emotions heading away from somewhere that had been such a big part of our lives for the last 6 months but the excitement of being on our way home was a brilliant emotion.
The weather conditions are just beautiful, warm and sunny with nice winds. Nikki volunteered for the first watch and she took the helm about 11.00am. We are going to trial 2 hour watches from 8.00am to 8.00pm and three hour watches between 8.00pm to 8.00am with the rotation of me, Nikki, Debs
and Luke. The next person due on watch becomes the assist watch and we are hoping this system allows everyone to get lots of rest but have sufficient people on deck to look after the boat. We also plan to have dinner together between 6.00pm to 8.00pm while there is still daylight and allow a chance for all of us to get together.
We started sailing about 12.30 when the wind turned favourable and spent the rest of the day sailing under really nice conditions. We had to cross the traffic separation lines which allow large ships to head north or south without impediment and we gave our radar a pretty good workout, assisted by the A.I.S system that A Small Nest has set up. The A.I.S is an excellent piece of kit that shows the name of the ship, the course, speed and the time that the ship will cross the course that we were on.
Willem and Haike kept us up to date on the VHF when there were any ships looking to be getting a bit close for comfort. Both yachts were sailing in pretty close company to allow the ships radars to pick up
a pretty good picture of us and also meant it was easier for all concerned to cross the lanes with safety and the least amount of inconvenience to anybody.
We put the first reef in the main just before dinner and settled back to a very relaxed meal in the cockpit. The watch system was working out really well and everyone was getting well rested but Debsy was having a really hard time getting to sleep when off watch.
The conditions were really suiting us and the boat was making excellent passage times. We decided to stick the 2nd reef in the main about 1.30am to see how the boat would perform in the conditions and she was still sailing well, making pretty good time but was just so easy to manage. This was of course the main aim of the game for us, to allow everyone on watch to feel in control and be as relaxed and as comfortable as possible, especially during those hard few hours between about 2.00am and 5.00am when the old body is really crying out for some sleep.
And so the passage continued, for the next four days during which time
we had winds up to about 25 knots with constant winds about 20 knots, most of which were from about 160 degrees apparent. There was a fair bit of swell about and the seas were very mixed up at times making the motion of the boat quite rolly. Debs had lots of trouble sleeping and this of course made her very tired but being the absolute trooper that she is, she kept on doing her bit and doing her best to make everyone as comfortable as possible.
We tried different sail combinations as the trip went on, generally using the most amount of sail during daylight hours and reducing after sunset and before sunrise. We used a gybe preventer for the first time on the tip and this really worked a treat. We were hoping to try the new gennaker out but the winds were a bit strong for our maiden hoisting and we will have a bit of a practice with it as soon as we can.
We didn’t get to see much sea life during the trip until we neared Porto Santo and then we saw three beautiful little loggerhead turtles in the space of about
half an hour and at one point in time we had about a dozen dolphins playing beside the boat and on the bow which of course makes everyone’s day.
Power consumption has to be monitored very closely as the use of the auto pilot, plotter and radar and at night, navigation lights and the fridge freezer all add up to some serious use of the boats battery supplies. We trialled using our portable generator underway and that seems to work very well, much better than using the engine but not nearly as good as the nuclear power plant that A Small Nest has set up!!!. We have called their bank of solar panels, Wallerawang Power Station as they generate so much power when the sun is out and a great source of power even when it is pretty cloudy.
We may look at adding some solar panels to the boat in Las Palmas just to help out but we will evaluate costs when we get down there. For the time being we will keep plugging away with our generator and hope that works out.
We made it to Porto Santo about 4.00pm on Monday the 12th of
October with A Small Nest only a few minutes behind us. Porto Santo is quite a spectacular island, being quite volcanic it just rises majestically up from thousands of metres below the sea and you are able to see her from miles away as you approach.
The water is crystal clear and we anchored in the harbour in about 6 metres of water and considering it was 32 degrees when we arrived, we were all busting to jump in and have a swim. The temp gauge was showing 24 degrees water temperature which for me is just about perfect so for the first time I was first in the water, doing a quick 50 metre sprint across to A Small Nest and grab a nice cold beer with Willem. Everyone was in the water in record time and it was just the best feeling in the world, with lots of smiles being captured by Haike and her underwater camera, including an attack by a killer Portuguese starfish!!!
We logged just a bit over 450 nautical miles and that averaged out to be 5.8 nautical miles per hour which we were very happy with considering the small amounts of
sail we had up for a considerable amount of the passage. The reality is though we all arrived safe and sound, the boat behaved beautifully and we all felt as though we had done our bit, individually and collectively to contribute to what has been our longest trip so far.
Of course Layni is still a bit young to be up doing watches and taking charge of the boat but she helped out in so many little ways and just to be able to sit back and watch her, tucked up in the cockpit at night, watching the stars and planets and the moon, gazing in awe at the universe and being totally at ease about being out in the ocean was a pretty special thing to see.
Nikki and Luke are evolving every mile we travel and they are both becoming excellent crew members. Both of them are very conscientious about their tasks and responsibilities and both seem to relish being on watch and taking control of the boat.
Debs continues to be the consummate back stop and is always ready to help out with anything or anyone, even at times when she is feeling like
crap. There is no way that any of us could be doing what we are doing without her and even though she doesn’t think she is a superstar, we all know and love the fact that she is.
Considering the very big passages that we have to undertake to get home, having everyone in a positive frame of mind is critical and I think that we are all getting pretty excited about what lays ahead.
We were ushered into the marina the following morning to register with the GNR (Customs and Police) and we then found out that the Harbour authority was going to charge us 27 Euro a night to anchor off the beach!!! It was going to cost the same amount of money give or take a couple of Euros so after registering with the authorities, we went back to the boats, up anchored and moved into the marina.
We have been here for four days now and we have totally loved the warm weather and the warm water with regular jaunts to the beach for a swim in the beautiful warm water. We have been kept busy getting the new sails set up for
their trial run down to the Canary Islands and a bit of general maintenance on the boat. We organised A Small Nest’s new anchor configuration and we joined our old anchor to their old anchor to form one 120 metre anchor. We laid it our along the pontoon and added the anchor tags to show the amount of anchor let off from the windlass and it looked so incredibly long and when you think that this is longer than the length of a footy field, there really is a fair bit of scope for some deeper water anchoring should the need arise.
The marina is a real hotch potch of international cruising yachts with boats currently from Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, France, England, the U.S.A and even another boat from Australia!!! The boats are crewed by differing crews with some being very young families, families like ours, two handers and other mixtures. It really is a very exciting feeling being out on this little island out in the middle of the ocean with so many people from so many different backgrounds who have some many stories to tell.
Layni and Sepka have made a new friend,
a young girl named Mia who is on a yacht with her family from Denmark. Mia is 12 and she and the other two girls are having the time of their lives. She hasn’t had anyone around her age to socialise with for a very long time and I think both Layni and Sepka know exactly what that feeling is like so they are making the most of every second they can spend together. Her Mum and Dad, Michael and Maria have a young son on board as well as Michael’s Dad and Mum who are cruising with them until the Canaries and they are a really nice family heading for the Caribbean and then back up to Denmark in about a years time.
I went over to the marina office last night (Tuesday night) which is the only place with wi-fi access, with all good intentions of posting the blog and attending to some emails but my computer ran out of battery power really quickly and I didn’t have my 240v power source with me. Willem came to the rescue with a 5 litre cask of red wine and a couple of beers and we ended up sitting
outside the marina office till about 3.30am sucking the last of the cask of red out of the pack and finishing off the last of his beers. Hadn’t had a night on the P eye double ess like that for a long time and I was anticipating a mother of a hangover this morning but woke up surprisingly well, must have been excellent quality red.
We did the run around the island this afternoon in the local open aired tourist bus and it was a great couple of hours out. The island coast line is stunning and the weather could not have been nicer. We even found a mountain spring that has been tapped and proclaimed to be a fountain of youth so all the girls gave themselves a bit of a dab with the magic liquid, secretly hoping for a little miracle. I have to admit that I gave the old chrome dome a bit of a rub anticipating a nice full head of hair tomorrow morning, who knows.
We will probably have another day or two here before heading over to the Iles Desertas (Deserted Islands) which are only about 12 miles away and are meant
to be really beautiful. We have to organise our permits tomorrow to allow us entry into the marine park and drop anchor but from all reports the place is well worth the effort to get there. From there we will head to Madeira where we might be able to get a bit of internet to try and keep up to date with blogs and emails.
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Fran
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What a great photo "warm water at last" is! Stay safe gang. Love Fxx