Last week we had a brief look at Villa Real across the river from Ayamonte and got to put the Portugese flag up for the first time. In fact we weren’t too sure when you’re supposed to put the flag up given that the River Guadiana flows right between the two countries. Not only is it unclear at what point you leave and enter each country, there is a time difference of 1 hour between Spain and Portugal. Portugal shares its timezone with England.
In England a few years ago there was a limited edition Magnum icecream that was only available for a short while. It was probably one of the best Magnums ever made (apart from maybe the white chocolate one), so you can imagine my delight when I found a caramel and chocolate Magnum in Villa Real!
Me being reunited with the illusive caramel magnum
We took a walk out of town. To be honest I wasn’t expecting all that much but I was surprised. Quickly the town turned into Pine forest and then we found a path that led to a huge sandy beach. My short time in Portugal made me realise why it is so popular.
Villa Real on the way to the beach
Further exploration of town revealed…
The Portugese national sport…Cow surfing
Chris learns surfing the Portugese way
and a more conventional and pretty town square…
Villa Real de Sant Antonio
After staying one night in Villa Real’s marina and a lovely meal there with Chris, the boys have been enjoying some extra space this week. Just as the sun started to come out and the ash cleared from the skies above the UK, I came back to England to celebrate Becky and Kevin’s wedding in Birmingham. It was a lovely day – in fact the hottest day of the year so far apparently and everyone had a wonderful time and Becky looked fabulous. It is a good opportunity for us all but particularly me to have a detached think about what we do next, whilst enjoying a few home comforts 🙂 It’s nice to have properly running water, a flushing loo and a dishwasher…all things that the other two know I am quite keen on.
Chris and Pete have been basking in sunshine after a day or so of rain after I left and have taken the opportunity to travel back up the river and relax a bit as well as explore the little villages.
A donkey!
The river Guadiana continues to look like chocolate milk, which is possibly fairly normal on certain stretches of river at this time of year. Chris and Pete got more than they bargained for when the boat went fishing. Instead of catching a fish, they caught a big, fat log on the front of the boat! I am reliably told it was “thiiiis big” – as long as the boat and really thick, but as with many big catches there are unfortunately no photos 😉
There is however this photo of the boat actually sailing.
Maid of mettle sailing on a river of chocolate milk
You can see the boat’s tender has come in useful for getting from anchorages to the shore. It is pretty hot in the day so any walks to explore have had to wait until evening time. It seems there are a number of castles and lots of little villages but no swimming because the river is still cocoa pops brown at the moment!
one of the villages on the river
Whilst not looking at castles, doing washing or reading, Chris has been adding to his already tremendous cooking repertoire. The latest bread-based product to be sucessfully mastered is pitta bread, which I assume was used to make kebabs…
We left Mazagon, having spent a few days there resting and fixing a few things. Unfortunately we lost our mobile phone in Mazagon too so don’t be alarmed if you try to text/call us on the World Sim number and we don’t get back to you. Despite searches along the beach and a walk to the police station we had no luck finding it. You never know, it might be somewhere in the boat….things have a habit of disappearing amongst all our stuff!
Anyway, we hope to be able to get a new sim card and keep the same number as soon as possible but in the meantime our other phones are available.
bbq in mazagon
After a brief sail the wind died and we motored to Ayamonte just up the river Guadiana on the border of Spain and Portugal. After a brief stay there we sailed up the river yesterday which was lovely. There was wind but no waves…if you ask me that’s how sailing should always be. We had to be careful, leaving at low tide and keeping an eye on the depth all the time as the channel is quite shallow in places.
going up river
People had said how nice it was here and we were all surprised to find out how right they were. You don’t need to go very far up the river from Ayamonte to see why people spend a lot of time here. There has been a lot of rain in the last week apparently so the water is a bit of an odd brown colour but it is probably the nicest river I’ve been to despite this. Also, at last the sun has caught up with us so that makes us feel much better.
We are now anchored in a remote location. There is only one house to be seen from here and the sound of birds and cicadas to hear. Very peaceful.
We had a good forecast for plenty of wind going in the right direction and having spoken to a few people in the marina decided to go for it or risk staying there forever…
Our route
Getting up far too early to even consider it being morning, we disassembled the gang-plank and finished our last preparations to leave just as it got light again. We motored out into calm seas at about 8am and travelled towards Tarifa where we planned to anchor for a few hours and await the promised wind to blow us right out of the straits.
our short anchorage in Tarifa
Tarifa was nice, if a bit scary when there were big ferries coming in and out of the main harbour. I had my first successful anchoring experience, tentatively exploring the depth so we didn’t run too close to the bottom. After a certain encounter with a rock in Cruas, that we’d all like to forget, these things are important to get right. The water was very clear with loads of fish, so clear in fact that you could see the anchor chain running down to the anchor at the sandy floor. We were joined by another boat that was being sailed by some New Zealanders (Joe and Trudy) we met at the marina in Gibraltar so we left Tarifa in convoy which was nice.
So leaving Tarifa in the early evening we motored for several hours and awaited the promised wind…We were finally in the Atlantic.
I did shift 1 until about midnight. Being only my second proper night shift alone I was a little bit nervous but I knew that I could ask the other two for help if I needed it. For the most part I didn’t need to ask anything until I suddenly heard a message on the radio from a Spanish person speaking English saying “the vessel going from west to east, there is such and such somewhere or other please alter course and follow the other boat…”
It was quite a hard message to understand late at night and no one was answering them either which made me panicky. Given that there’s a big shipping lane coming out of the straits of Gibraltar I hoped someone would answer. The message was repeated so many times (each time sounding more panicky than the last) that I began to wonder whether it was a message for me! Then,in my slightly tired, 1st night shift alone-type state I couldn’t remember whether I was going from West to east or east to west! ‘Ahhhgh’I thought. ‘ok so there’s nothing in front of me that I can see and as far as I can work out this can’t be for me, but I think I should ask someone given the panicky person giving the message’. Eventually I woke Pete up and asked his opinion on the matter. We decided to carry on given that we weren’t in the shipping lane and there was nothing obvious. A similar message occured later in the night this time with “There is a fishing boat in front of you…” I double checked with our big flood light just in case, almost blinding myself with the reflection of it on the boat, but saw no fishing boat…phew.
By the end of my shift I was shattered from the exciting radio messages and running around on deck putting some sails up when it looked like it might be getting windy and taking them back down when they were being annoying. By the time Chris took over I hadn’t had time to look much at the chart and the quick and roughly packed sails (much harder on your own) were a bit messy but we were sailing all the same! We will have to look at the misbehaving main sail that seems not to want to go up every time any more.
Chris napped a bit on the floor during his shift and did a few whilst Pete and I tried to sleep. It was quite noisy and starting to get a bit rolly so that was a bit difficult. I think the excess adrenalin might not have helped either. He also did some clever stuff with poles and the jib sail (at the front) to stop it making a racket.
Getting back out of bed and outside at about 6.30am I saw the sun rise behind the clouds (a bit like that time in Derbyshire when we waited and waited to watch the sun rise and then it just got light 😉 ) Anyway, the morning proved to be much more exciting after that. At about 7am, just after Chris had gone to bed I was helming and not a lot was happening. The waves had got slightly bigger but not too big. I heard a bit of a splash and saw a dolphin really close to the boat – much clearer than the one I saw on the way to Ibiza. It went on to swim with the boat at the bow and knowing how much Chris had always wanted to see one swimming at the bow I rushed to wake him and Pete up to see it. On getting back out to the cockpit one dolphin had turned into about 10! They were amazing. I couldn’t believe how fast they could swim or how close they got. They seemed to be enjoying following us and some were clearly loving jumping out from the waves back towards us at times.
Our escorts
The wind got gradually stronger and the sea rougher as the day went on and we realised that we were travelling too fast to arrive at our planned destination of the Guadiana river in Portugal to get the tides right. This meant slowing down for a bit. We decided to try to ‘heave to’, which means setting the sails and tiller turning more into the oncoming waves and drifting slowly sideways with the wind. This succeeded in making us almost side on to the waves and slightly nauseous (Pete having been struggling with sea-sickness even before this), so not completely successful. However it did slow us down which was the main thing. During this time we quickly realised that the idea of sitting like that for another 8 or so hours to wait for our chance to get into the river in the light would not be good. After an uncomfortable hour and a bit of food we made the decision to aim for a different port, facing the fact that we would probably have to go into somewhere in the dark. The options for that were quite limited especially since all but one or two places in the pilot book warned against entrance at night “unless familiar with the area”. So the Guiadiana was out on two counts: because it was too risky to enter in both the waves and the dark. Mazagon in Spain was really our only option as it had quite a lot of depth and reasonable night entrance. We hoped to get there in the early hours of the following morning.
Pete helming
The afternoon and early evening is a bit of a blur. Chris and I took turns to helm and rest whilst Pete tried to recover from the dreaded sea-sickness inside. It really was much nicer outside until it started to rain heavily. That in itself was impressive as it created a sort of mist over the water and seemed to dampen the waves a bit. It looked a bit like a computer generated sea at that point if that makes any sense. I needn’t have worried about getting a bit wet from the rain.
We had to change our course to go toward Mazagon which meant having the waves more on our side. As they were beginning to get larger and splashy this was not an appealing thought. The waves were the biggest we’d seen yet, possibly up to about 4 metres and some of them were pretty steep. The hardest thing to work out is whether they will be annoying or not. Some of them looked big when you first saw them but then turned out just to be gentle rollers, others that looked small decided to whack into the boat and send a lot of water crashing over your head and over the boat. Though we were clipped in all the time this was quite disconcerting, very wet and made quite a loud bang when you were inside the boat. I woke up with a start quite a few times whilst in the cabin. It was worrying really to see the walls of water coming towards you whilst helming and not being too sure what they might do. In fact, when they were at their largest I was so concerned I turned away from them so they were behind us so we could think about what to do. I really didn’t want to turn back towards them. We had no option really but to find a way of dealing with them. The best way was to turn with them on our side when they looked harmless and then keep an eye out for the bigger more potentially nasty ones and then steer away from them and surf! That was quite fun but fairly tiring and occasionally damp! Our life-jackets got so wet that two of the automatic lights got activated causing them to flash on and off…not good. That will be a phone-call to Baltic for advice or a new set of lights…boo!
The entrance to Mazagon was tricky. Chris skillfully sailed us in with the waves being a bit of a pain, though by then they were smaller. Seeing the lights to get in the correct way through the channel required 3 sets of eyes and even then was quite difficult. We arrived at about 2.30am and were soon pounced upon by the Spanish Gardia who made a much better effort of searching the boat than the ones in Barcelona – even asking to see under the floor and amusingly shining a torch through a hole in the cupboard without opening it. They even had the cheek to say the boat was a bit messy. How rude!
Spanish police complete with utility belt...Chris was impressed!
The important things...Chocolate stash (in pink bag) and our faithful biodramina
Our new cupboard fixings, step securing bolts, sealing of the main hatch and cup holders had passed the test at sea. The crew were left feeling worn out from all the excitement.
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Waiting on the weather on April 10, 2010 by maidofmettle
Hard to believe that we’ve been in Gibraltar for over a month now! It seems that the Meditteranean does not want us to leave. As you will soon gather, the idea of leaving on Tuesday didn’t work. We realised pretty early on in the morning that it was going to be far far far too windy to go anywhere and actually have a nice time if we’d left then so we didn’t. Lucky too as it turns out. Apparently, a sailing school boat went out that day and were knocked down by the wind sending an indetermined number of people overboard. I only have this as secondhand knowledge so hard to know how much the Chinese whispers had changed the story but there were supposed to have been gusts up to 60 knots out in the bay that day. I’m very glad we didn’t go anywhere.
Anyway, it’d be good to go to Portugal or at least get out of the Straits. Any ideas of getting straight to Madeira at the moment seem a bit unlikely until the weather settles. It’s pretty frustrating that the wind either seems to be too strong or not there at all. Also we are losing sleep because the wind has been howling for the last 2 days and gets louder just when you want to get to sleep. The thwak thwak of the ropes on the mast is pretty loud and irritating though Chris claims to be getting used to it.
A harder thing to deal with is getting psyched up mentally to leave in addition to getting ready with water, food etc and then not leaving…It seems more difficult the longer you stay somewhere too. Places become familiar and the idea of leaving them for somewhere new, less appealing.
We had a nice Easter Sunday yesterday and today have set to tidying the boat and food shopping in a vague hope that we might travel somewhere tomorrow. Having said this, today’s weather has been very very very windy. Being quite near a big rock is handy in some ways in that it protects us a bit from the wind in certain directions but also manages to magnify strong winds to give us massive gusts that make most of the boats swing around in their moorings. We are hoping that these nasty gusts will stop by this evening and allow the sea to calm down a bit…well.. a lot really!
This morning we took part in the classic bank holiday Monday tradition of going for walkies. We decided to walk to Europa Point which is the most Southern part of Gibraltar. It was incredibly windy there too. So windy in fact that a man was literally blown sideways on his motorbike. He wasn’t hurt but sensibly decided to turn back.
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