Heading for Canary Islands

After a nice taxi-sightseeing around the Madeira island today, diving in the national park and barbeque on the beach yesterday, we will leave tonight for Canary Islands, probably Gran Canaria. We have had a great time here, but according to Eleutério Gomes Ferreira Rodrigues, our taxi-driver, we have only seen one percent of what Madeira has to offer. Anyway, we have to leave beacause Trond is flying home from Gran Canaria the 4th. The distance to Gran Canaria is about 250 nm, and with the nice breeze forecasted, we will be there on sunday or monday probably.

Madeira

Yesterday we sailed from Porto Santo to Madeira in a nice northerly breeze. Before we left, Jon and Trond painted our name on the wall in the marina, as many other boats have done before us. Anne on "Galadriel" baked bread in the morning, and gave us one for breakfast, and it tasted delicious. "Super-Bernt", the new ultralight and ultrabig windvane on the windtiller, steered us steadily all the way. Approaching Funchal, many dolphins came to visit, and also a big whale came up to take a breath eight metres off our starboard side. Fantastic view in the sunset!



We motored the last miles into Funchal, but found that something was wrong with the engine. We couldn´t make more than 3,5 knots at 2000 rpm, usually we make 5,5 knots at this rpm. We dived to check our propeller, but found it ok. Today we spoke with the danish sailor/mechanic Henrik on "Pi", that told us to change the fuel filters. Jon also dived to clean growth on the propeller, so now we hope that the problem is solved.

We have met many scandinavians here, many of them we have seen before. Nice to meet people that speak an understandable language. Tonight we have planned a beach volleyball contest on the artificial beach. Mainly it will be a Norway vs. Sweden match. Used to the winning role, we expect victory tonight!

Building in the sand

Pictures from the sand sculpture contest in Porto Santo.

Enjoying life on Porto Santo

We´ve now spent some days on this magnificant island. Already we´ve gotten known as the youth-boat among the other boats. One of the first nights we invited most of the other scandinavian boats for a barbeque on the beach, it was a huge success. When we finally managed to get up the day after we hired some mopeds. Please don´t tip the moped-rental about this site, but please enjoy the pictures...(click the link on the right side that says "atlantic islands")




Here on the island a Colombus-festival is starting as i am writing. And Arild has entered a sand-sculpture contest tomorrow. The crew will cheer and support the brave contestant morally during the contest.

Update:
Arild and his team brought home the first price in the sand-sculpture contest! The competition was very tough, mostly because of the last minute participitation from Jon in S/Y Galadriel. This resulted in that both the first and second price went to norwegians! We are the champions!

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Porto Santo

A little post to inform you that we arrived Porto Santo yesterday evening, after 4 days and 4 hours sailing. Porto Santo is a island in the Madeira group, and the distance to Madeira is 30 nm. (If you didn´t know this, don´t be too depressed, we didn´t know either before some weeks ago.) We will stay here for some days, maybe a week. Tomorrow we will rent scooters and drive wildly around the island. We also want to see the house of Cristoffer Colombus, he lived here once and his house is now a museum. The beach here is one of the best we have seen so far, and we´ll propably spend some hours on it.



We had a great voyage from Carcais to Porto Santo. The wind was from north all the time, and was steady between 10 and 22 kt. The two last days we had a clear sky and were really enjoying the boat life. Bathing in a rope behind the boat was a daily ritual. We also made bread in our new owen on the Optimus stowe. The bread was very good, espesially with butter and cheese (though it could have been a slight bit less heavy. always leave room for improvement). We also made improvements in our celestrial navigational skills, taking several sun sights and calculating our position. This is the way the sailours found their way across the oceans, before the time of the GPS.



The fishing is still a great dissapointment, during our passage we had fish on the hook at least twice (we think we had), but never managed to get any onboard. We have today been talking to the crew on another norwegian boat that had caught several tunas and dorados on their way to Porto Santo, we have received some good tips and believe our chances of getting fish will increase from here on. We still have the faith, because there is always hope in a hanging snore(Eggen)!

lisboa - cascais

After some days in the Alcantara marina in Lisboa we started to realize that all other norwegian boats were out in a place just outside Lisboa named Cascais. As we had visitors from Norway and Germany we decided that a trip with the boat was a good idea.

The day after it was time to become tourists and do things such people normally do. We went to the village of Sintra where there are many castles and lots of opertunities to blend with the japanese and german people with cameras.

As we had gotten a tip off the castle on the picture above we decided to go up to it. Like the norwegians we are, we like to walk. almost up there Jon decided to ask a policewoman for directions to the castle. She sent us back down the road and told us that we had gone wrong. So we searched and finally found someone who had walked down through the forrests from the castle. They didn´t tell us how far it was... Short story: we came to the castle just before it closed and decided that we didn´t bother to pay 6€ for an hr in the castle and went back down to the village with buss. It drove just past where we turned after asking the policewoman.




We are now finished with stuff like that and are prepairing for the next leg of our journey.

Viana do Castelo - Lisboa (or "the satelite-phone works!!!)

So we found Lisboa, and sailed past the whole coast off portugal in one go. Only seeing some forrestfires and lights from the cities as we passed. Our visitors came and we now both have an owen for the stove and a satelite-phone that works. Nice to have it fixed before we sail out in the big Atlantic ocean.



Lisboa is a great city and we have spent some days absorbing the atmosphere here. We´ve also met some other norwegian sailors and they are all anchoring just outside the city in Cascais so we plan to sail out there today with our visitors and join the sailing-getto.

After some days in Cascais we plan to head for Porto Santo, the island next to Madeira. It´s five days sailing from Lisboa.

The sun is shining and life does still treat us well. Especially now that we think we´ve found summer.

A special thanks goes to Carlos in Lisboa who drove us around in Lisboa and found everything we were looking for. He even found a new plate for our windfane, and it was free! He´s highly recomended.

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Muros - Islas Cies -Viana do Castelo

Trond finally came to Muros and we decided to leave the lovely little town of Muros and head south to the islands Islas Cies outside Vigo. We couldn´t have found a better place to introduce the cruizing life to Trond. The islands have large sandy beaches and numerous smaller ones, the hills are like the alps only smaller and the hillsides are green with woods and vegetation (ohh and the seagulls clean your table after you´re finished eating.)

The day on the island was by most of us spent sunbathing on the beach. Doing that the local way was a new experience for some off us as we realized the beach was a nudist beach. "When in Rome..." was said and blenda-white buttocks were exposed to more sun than they could handle.

After the day on the great islands we decided it was time to head for Portugal. We arrived yesterday to the nice little town Viana do Costello and are heading down to Lisboa today to meet some visitors. It´s 200nm down to Lisboa and if we sail the whole time we´ll probably be there on wednesday. (100nm a day if we sail both night and day.)

Our first impression of Portugal is great. The most important reason being: they speak english! Not much, but we can finally comunicate something else than "no comprende".

Camariñas - San Fransisco -Muros

We left Camariñas just after our next post and had one of our so far best days of sailing down to the bay outside San Fransisco. Finally it was time to test our diving-equipment. Unfortunately someone was stupid enought to check the temperature on the water. The thermometer showed 16.7 C, Jon claimed it was 17 and David claimed it was 16. Jon took a bath, and David found an excuse to avoid taking a bath. Arild lay down and took a sunbath.

The day after David took the dinghy to Muros to buy fuel. The dinghy stopped and he had to row most of the way to Muros (2 nm). When he got there all petrol-stations were closed and the crew back on the boat got a phonecall claiming that it was much nicer in Muros than in the bay outside San Fransisco. It was.

We´re now waiting for our new crewmate Trond to come aboard. Before we set sails for Portugal.

A typical day

Many people wonder what we are doing on the boat a typical day. Here is todays schedule so far:

10.23 Woke up
10.26 Stood up and found a sunny spot on the deck
11.02 Started thinking about taking a bath
11.17 Thought about taking a bath
11.31 Took a bath
11.40 More sun-bathing
12.14 Started to think about eating breakfast
12.32 Thought about eating breakfast
12.55 Had breakfast
13.01 Took the dinghy ashore to find an internet place