So last post I told you about the tradition yachtees have painting on walls. Today we finished our new painting on the wall. Martina is the best painter so we gave her the task of putting a bit of color on the concrete. So here by I present to you our beautiful work!

Our masterpiece.. Naah just kidding, just something i drew on the wall..

Here comes the proper version..

Painting…

More painting..

Fixing the details

Next to the old painting..

Our true masterpiece, the face on the sail is our own Viking house-god..

The proud painters and designers with our new logo..

There you have it, we’ve painted on the wall again, hopefully this one will still be there in 11 years time.

So we’re still hanging and chilling on sunny Porto Santo! After just calming down after our hard sail from Porto (yup super exhausting) we decided to rent two scooters and check out the island..

My drivers license don’t allow me to drive anything funnier than a car or a moped but here I could without any trouble rent a 125cc scooter and drive away in my swim-trunks and flippy-floppies.. I though out nice things to put on my Darwin-award application when zooming down the roads doing 75km/h. I have to be honest, it was hell of a fun and I wanted to extend the rental time for a year and do no more then drive the twisting mountain-roads in the sun listening to “born to be wild”. Martina sitting behind me on the scooter was not as thrilled about my new found love and we returned my precious the next day. We had time to do some shopping and go snorkeling on the south west end of the island.

Underwater selfie…

Martina scaring the camera…

Skipper’s fins are as long as him (almost)..

Ida 3 meters below the surface..

After spending a couple of hours playing in the surf and waves we drove the mountain road around the island enjoying the scenery.
Porto Santo is not as lush as its bigger sister Madeira, the greenest place is the golf-course witch can bee seen from the sky (or from Pico de Castello).

After returning our scooters we decided on taking a hike up on Pico de Castello, to look at the garden on the top of the mountain and look at the view from the top.

It’s a bit up from the sea up to the summit..

But when you’re up there it’s worth the hike…

Trusty’s crew at the top of Pico de Castello

Walking up to the pico we got an entourage of dogs following us a bit of the way protecting us from other dogs and the dangerous lizards that have invaded Porto Santo.

Our possy, badass dogs..

Porto Santos true inhabitants..

There is a long tradition by yachtees to paint on piers on the Atlantic-islands as Horta (on Faial), Las Palmas (on Gran Canary) and on Porto Santo as well. What the difference between graffiti and this is people can spend hours discussing but hey you paint your boats name and your name and what year you where there. Last time Trusty stayed in the marina we painted the wall and today we started painting again. Tomorrow we’ll finish the painting and we’ll show it to you before we leave for the Canary islands.

Our old painting. The new one is till in the making..

When we leave Porto Santo we’ll sait sail for Graciosa (slightly north of Lanzarote) and I don’t know when we’ll have a stable Internet connection again. We can update with our location and how we’re doing using our satphone but we can’t upload any pictures and stuff like that. I promise that we’ll try and find places where we can give you some pictures and longer updates.

I’ve finished some projects on our to-do list and we’ll give you a post about that tomorrow. After we’ve updated our weather tomorrow we’ll decide on when to sail for the canaries or what to do. The good thing about being where we are right now is that we don’t have to rush anything anymore. We’re leaving for the Caribbean in mid November and before that we don’t actually have to be in the canaries, we actually don’t even have to be there (tough it’s helluva lot easer to shop for the crossing on in Las Palmas compared to here) to cross the Atlantic. We can start our crossing from here if we have to and that makes us more relaxed than we’ve been before on our trip. Now we’re out on the islands and now we’re just taking our sweet time doing what ever we want!!

Kind of…

Porto, a city looking right out of Assassins’ Creed with its six bridges, dozens of different architectural styles, small streets, plazas and Port-wine. If Ubisoft is looking for a new city for the game they can just do it in Porto, no one would complain. But we’re not here to talk about games. No we’re here to talk about sailing, yachting and being a dummy.

Our stay in Porto turned out mostly as we wanted it to, we played tourists for a couple of days and then we set about doing the hard work that needed to be done. We started working on our new dingy lines and finished that, our secret gift for Fairwinds was completed as well and we made a description on how to use it (we’ll post it as soon as they have gotten it). Being in Porto is like participating in a commercial for romantic vacations, every time we took a stroll down the river a wedding photoshoot took place with the city as a backdrop, at every restaurant there were couples looking deep into each other’s eyes and all that.

Stocking up on food for a month, we’re gonna need a bigger boat..

Did you drink any wine then?, a curious reader might ask. Sure, we drank some, we had a good 30 year old Tawny at a restaurant, bought a couple of mid and low price bottles and went to a wine tasting and bought some more. Well, needless to say we did like it and now we have stocked up for the rest of the trip. (Word keeps telling me it’s unnecessary to write out needles to say.. hehe)
So if you’re staying in Porto and want a free Port Wine tasting just go to Churchill’s and say you’re staying in Douro Marina, but if you’re not actually staying there you might want to buy a bottle just to keep your conscience clean.

You have to keep reminding me to bring my camera more when we’re out being tourists then you’ll see more pictures.

50 shades of blue…

So Porto to Porto Santo then?
600 something nautical miles of hindquarter wind just keeping watch, quite sunny and not much traffic. We let Aries do the steering and pointed our bow towards 220 degrees, after the wind had stabilised (about 5 hours in to the sail) we were done trimming our sails and didn’t change them until we rolled them in when we arrived. Easy sailing, we rolled out our genua to leeward and used a spinnaker pole to stabilise it reefing in a couple of square meters thus stopping the sail from moving from side to side in the wave motion. After that we set our jib to windward and used our old pole stabilising. It’s really dummy sailing, you don’t have to do anything almost. With the AIS the only boats that surprise you are other yachts without IAS and fishing-vessels.

Land hoy!!! Porto Santo!!

As the miles on our gps slowly ticked down, we set our routines with three hours watch keeping and six hours of free time. After a while you are fully rested and start reading too much, I’m almost done with the Game of Thrones now (I’m past where the HBO version is right now so give me your monies or I’ll spoil the shit out of it 😉 ) and we have to start digging in our library soon. Our library is under the sofa so we have to lift mattresses, pillows, wooden lids and lots of pilot-books and other stuff before we actually get down to our books. Well enough about books…
When the gps told us 50 NM we got our hopes up, and during the night we saw the light from the lighthouse giving its three flashes every fifteen seconds way ahead in the dark. With dawn came the silhouette and soon came the last two hours of motorerhm I mean steaming in towards the marina. With our moorings tied up and our papers looked at by grumpy harbour-police (they are surprisingly nice but they look badass with their berets, guns and polished boots) we sat down in our cockpit smiling in the sun.

What my eye spy when I climb the pier..

Porto Santo is a big step for our cruise; it is now we actually leave the mainland of Europe until we come back from the west side of the pond. Plus from now on we’re only staying on island as well so bye bye Europe!!

Now a week of just chillaxing on Porto Santo awaits and lots of swimming (it’s ‘round 24 in the sea), scooter driving, beach walking and seawall painting. When I post this we’ve been here a couple of days so I know what is going to happen in the next blog entry already.. I might even have some notes about what it’s going to be about… might even have done some of the photo-shopping that’s needed to be done as well…

Look how far south we are!!

Ok TL;DR version.. Porto, port wine, bridges, a city looking like out of a Assassins Creed game, splicing ropes, tourists, weddings, set sail, 600 NM, same wind direction, nothing to do, reading, arriving, harbour police, blue water, hints about spoliers and sunshine.

Hanging out in the sun.. (Martina, Ida and Skipper)

(edit, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porto_Santo_Island the island we’re on)

.. no one can hear your boat rocking..
Sorry to tell you all in this way, it should have been better prepared with champange and a youtube clip about us leaving the safety of the european continent setting out for a loooooong time on different islands.
But one can’t always plan, well we had it planned we just forgot to tell the blog about it. All of a sudden the winds were right and we just set out.

Writting this I’m standing watch waiting for a gribfile to drop in to my inbox with the latest weather. Last time i looked in Porto it looked great but that was early tuesday morning and who knows what the weathergods bring us now.
You’ll get a nice post about porto and what we did there and how nice portwine taste if it’s aged and much more but you’re going to have to wait until we reach the safety of Porto Santo before that. It’s kind of hard writing a blogpost while bracing yourself agains the boats motions as well as keeping my laptop from falling of the table.. 🙂

Well only 360 nautical miles left until we can shower again!!

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Leaving Coruña heading west, actually getting some wind in our sails, although we try to only move Trusty a couple of hours each day. That way we have time to get some sun and swim a bit. The first night we anchored in a small cove, though being cosy it had a bit of a swell-problem. People talk fondly about the ocean rocking you to sleep, but try having the waves rocking the boat so you almost fall out of your bed. Fun, right?

Hercules lighthouse, the only lighthouse from roman times still used today.

So we didn’t get much sleep that night so we set off the next day heading southwest down to Laxe, a small town by a wonderful beach. Anchoring in the bay, we were sheltered from most of the waves. Trusty was almost still the whole night and we all slept well. The town seemed a bit off-season lazy and relaxed and after stocking some more canned-beans, albondigas in sauce and strange looking meat-stews we spent the rest of the day on the beach.

Sitting on a beach is fun and games but it brings a new enemy as bad as the saltwater: the sand. Well sand is no problem, I love spending the days at the beach when I’m in Spain, the normal charter tourist say, you just shower and throw the towels for the maid to pick up when you get home. Well, when in a yacht, and not a big one, there is no shower. The only shower is the sea bearing the boat.

Trusty’s new buddy, Fairwinds.

There is no house-cleaner to collect your towels and you’re stuck with sand all over the place. Sure it’s just bringing out the vacuum cleaner and clean, right? Erhm, we don’t have one, we don’t have power for one so we’re stuck with the sand, until we clean it up by hand that is. (Note to self, next time I’ll have a boat with a room for sandy salty clothes that I can rinse with a hose: a sand/salt lock)

Well after spending a day in the fresh air and getting a bit of sun on our pale bodies we headed south towards Playa des Rayes, it’s a small beach in Ria de Camariña and according to some guide websites it’s one of Spain’s top ten beaches.
Sure, it’s cosy and sheltered and you’re all alone so I can see why people love it but it wasn’t that spectacular. Best one so far but a beach is a beach, it’s full of sand, full of sand lice and you have to walk into the water. I hate walking into water, jumping is so much better.

Beach, the 10 ten one…

We’ve been tagging along another Swedish yacht called Fairwinds, they have the same background as us, Swedes working in the restaurant business in Norway, so we feel quite at home with them. They are heading for the Caribbean as well but are going to take a different route. Right now they are a bit shorthanded but will get a full crew at the end of the month.
Fairwinds have a curse, a dingy curse… Recently they lost their third dingy so we’re planning on giving them a little gift as soon as we get to Porto and can get all the parts. Right now we have a couple of projects we’re going to work on when we arrive in Porto.

1. A “rock the boat break”. It’s a piece of plywood on top of an anchor that you lower in the water next to the boat witch will slow down the rocking motion of Trusty as we lay at anchor.
2. Our secret gift for Fairwinds.
3. A new pivot stand for our solar panel, the wind catch the panel and lifted it one stormy night. It still kinda works but now we need to sort it out.
4. Well measured lines for hoisting our dingy and a hoisting rig for the outboard engine.
5. Cleaning and washing out all the sand from Trusty’s underbelly

Dawn outside Muxia.

We will take pictures and guide you through our errors and successes as we improvise our way around these projects. Well maybe not the cleaning part, that’s easily solved with a hose of freshwater and our bilge pump but the rest might be fun.

We waited out the low-pressure sitting around the Azores giving us bad winds and as soon as the wind died we set off steaming down towards Porto, 30 hours later (all engine) we reached Porto, in Portugal, setting a new record in hitting fishing-net-buoys in the dark. Ok, we only hit a few and missed most by one meter or so but in the dark of the night you can’t see them coming, just hear the thump as you hit one. Not one got stuck and they all floated afterwards so I guess we didn’t do much damage.

Chillin in the sun.. Trusty style..

The cruise down was nice except for all the fishing-boats lurking around the Portuguese coast with no AIS. Spotting fishing-vessels in the dark against a populated shore is not fun. There are a couple of thousand lights and three of them is a boat heading towards you, finding Nemo (or Waldo) is easier, but if you look long enough you spot that some lights are moving…
Apart from that nothing actually happened. Dolphins? Yup. Beautiful sunset? Yup. Sun and clear blue sky? Yup, at least until the next day, then it rained a lot..

So now we’re in Porto, sitting here planning our crossing to Porto Santo as soon as the weather systems are back to normal witch should be soon. I’ve been reading Game of Thrones so I guess we don’t want to stay here in Portugal for too long, because Winter is coming…..

P.S. Us girls, relative newbs to anchoring along gorgeous beaches, still quite enjoy them. (Me Per disagree, beaches are overrated, I’ll take the dinghy and a reef anytime..)

… Porto, updates, pictures and stuff will be here in a day or two..

I’m almost done with the AIS post for dummies and will post it soon but I need some examples to go with it so now we’re heading back out to sea again. Our plan is to hop down the Galician coast and maybe do a bit of sunbathing, snorkeling and other fun things you can do on a yacht at anchor. The direction finder will surely work because of a low-pressure that sits nicely between the Azores and Madeira giving us nice sweet southerly winds, perfect when you’re heading… you guessed it, south..

Hopefully the arrow will draw it’s direction towards the east or the west or if I can get my wish fulfilled, north, enabling the crossing out to Porto Santo to become a breeze (hehe pun intended). Until then we’ll stroll down the Iberian Atlantic coast dropping our anchor where we can find shelter from the waves and wind.

To sum up Coruña for you, it was wonderful. Coming from the cold, uncivilized, rainy British Isles  down to a town that’s alive with people, restaurants serving something other then Fish & Chips, affordable wine, beer, food and well not diesel but well anything else. In MarinaCoruña, the marina where we’ve been staying they have a program for handicapped people enabling them to sail small dingies, kayaking or just staying out on the sea in the sun. They have a great time and it’s nice to see the effort the people working with them put in (I guess getting payed to have fun in the sun on the sea is not a bad thing) 5 days a week.
The city it self is a mix between small alleys full of small restaurants, shops and pubs and big 50-80s concrete monsters but it works. If you stroll in the town at 22:30 on a Tuesday the town is full of life and people eating and talking, the way a city should be.
Honest to say since this was the first place I could take of my raincoat, put on my shorts and get some sun on my feet my judgment might be clouded but hey, I don’t care.. It was nice, but now we all want to see more.

We’re excited to see more what this part of the world has to offer, may it be small coves with clear but coldish water, lovely beaches with white or black sand, fish caught from our dingy or just nothing more than what we had in Coruña so be it then..  We’ll have a nice time finding out, unless the icebergs creep up on us. I know I should be safe now and the dreams haven’t brought them up lately but they might just be sneaky, I won’t feel safe until I’m sitting in a chair at Happy Hour Island Bar and have a reef between me and the Atlantic and a Rhumpunch in my hand. Then only will I be able to relax…
(Pictures of Coruña will come when I connect our cameras and open up photoshop to give them a good size.)

In the morning of our departure we set out towards the breakwater of Dublin bay after calling up Dublin VTS on channel 12. We knew there might be waves, we knew there might be wind but we didn’t really expect what met us. In the shallow waters of the bay the waves towered high (at least that’s how it felt as I stood next to the mast hoisting our mainsail) and the wind blew salty gusts of seawater on to us when we clang to Trusty and double checked our lifelines.
It wasn’t that bad in real life but one should never make a good story bad by sticking to the truth.

Heading into Cork.

So south we went doing or best to stay cheerful as the Irish Sea hit us with waves, wind and tidal currents. Deciding that we would stop for a couple of nights in Cork we had a good run down the coast although sometimes doing what felt like 5 knots trough the water just to look at the same lighthouse for hours and hours.. Passing the two forts heading in to the Cork bay was pleasant and as we navigated in to Crosshaven we felt like home again. Crosshaven is so much better than Dublin in my opinion, well to be honest we were kind of in the most boring part of Dublin and just the walk to and from the marina was a real soulkiller. Moored up in a marina in Crosshaven it felt cosy and if it weren’t for us wanting to get a bit of tan on our pale hides we could have stayed there longer. Well after restocking our moral-boost candy and eating our final fish and chips for a while we headed out again on our quest for sun and warm waters.

First sunset, Celtic Sea.

The first part of the leg was nice. Steady winds from the west that gave us good speed and comfortable waves as we headed down the Celtic Sea towards the English Channel and Biscay. The first night and the first day was kind of the same. Sailing, motoring a bit when the wind died, set sail again, reef down when the wind picked up again and repeat. After the second night the wind died completely at dawn and the sea was calm. The big swells were there but no small waves and no wind at all but instead the sun greeted us. Finally, we thought as we headed southish aiming for Spain, the sun has come to greet us and will follow us all the way to the promised land of rhum and reggae tunes.

No wind today..

Well we had sun, dolphins, whales, sharks and no wind for a whole day but after that the sun abandoned us for some other place I guess. As we looked towards the sunset, the shipping lane loomed closer and closer and we knew we had to pass through it. Waking up the next morning the calm still sea was gone. Now we had an east-south-easterly gale hitting us with at least three different wave patterns spraying Trusty and her crew with salt and wind. It took us a whole day bashing through the waves to get from one side of the shipping lane to the other and sometimes it felt like our lady got beaten up by a heavyweight slugger.
We all felt relieved when the shipping eased up and we could point our bow a bit away from at least one of the wave-systems and stop the constant hammering.

Lazy Monday on Biscay.

After that it was smooth sailing and then smooth steaming the last bit down to Spain. As the fog lifted we spied the Galician coast far out in the distance, finally, land, we cheered and burned some more fossils as the wind-gods looked at some other sailor in need.
We might want to make a sacrifice to the ocean-gods soon, any fair virgin who we can throw in to the sea? None? Hmm.. wonder if some alcohol and bacon will do. I’ll have to google that I think..

Coruña is a nice place to stay a couple of days. It’s warmish, even though our boat neighbours say it’s the coldest place in Spain, quite cosy and the city is living at night giving it a more homely feeling than Dublin. A man on a boat from Holland looked at me and commented on my pale figure, why so pale in Spain, he asked. Well, I replied, we’ve been in Scotland and Ireland for a month now, this is the first time I’ve worn a t-shirt in a long time. He laughed and reassured that as soon as we started heading south from here it would change..

Sunset Biscay, note the ship silhouette.

So, I leave you for a bit and we’ll tourist a bit here and I’ll make a post about biscaya, ais and reefing for dummies soon.

TL;DR version… Dublin, cold, much wind, much waves, Cork, cosy, just enough wind, no wind, sun, no wind, a lot of ships, much wind, uncomfortable waves, dolphins, wind, no wind, Coruña, moored up nice and cosy, we pale and white…

Now we’re finally in Spain, it’s cloudy and cold here.. bummer..

Well the crossing went well and we’ll give you all the details after a shower, sangria and a good nights sleep.

Sun, no wind, sun, no wind, sun, no wind… We’ll at least the first day on Biscay that is the mantra. We encountered a big big pack of dolphins that played around Trusty for almost an hour. All is fine and we’re just taking our time down to La Coruña after a quick stop in Cork.

More updates coming as we reach Spain.