As the season comes to an end, I need to start getting creative with my cooking. I go through what’s left on board that will spoil or expire before next season. Luckily there’s quite large, well-stocked grocery stores nearby if needed.
Fried rice
A package of hollandaise sauce becomes an excuse for eggs benedict one morning. Canned pineapple, fish sauce, and a lot of extra rice quickly becomes fried rice. The final dregs of maple syrup and a couple of really ripe bananas make for banana pancakes. Powdered potato flakes make for creamy mashed potatoes with a roast pork tenderloin. Clearly we do not starve on board…
Pink peppercorns
And there’s so much local food things! Pomegranates grow by the side of the road. Lotta turned me onto the peruvian pepper trees by their apartment (Schinus Molte) which are currently drying and readying for the pepper grinder next season, as well as the rosemary that is planted as a hedge (I always grab a couple of sprigs when leaving their place).
We are not marina people. Our boat is heavy. We have a small engine and no bow thruster, so maneuvering in tight spaces (ie. in and out of slips or berths) is not easy. Marinas can be expensive, hot (boat does not face into the wind), and crowded. We usually prefer to anchor. However, that’s simply not a good option for winter storage. So here we are in Marina de Lagos for the winter.
Ozzie – one of our neighbors
This marina could not be a better place for leaving the boat. It’s in southern Portugal where the weather is quite mild. It has a long entryway and is virtually protected from all swell and nearly all wind. Gates are secured from public access, and there’s a winter population here living aboard, so theft is generally not an issue.
Boat leaving Lagos marina through footbridge
Living aboard here in the marina is socially exhausting, but wonderful. It’s like living in the middle of the United Nations with so many countries represented. Everyone has boating in common, and everyone is happy to help, offer a solution, commiserate, or simply relax with a drink.
Cocktails on s/v Zabava (Valeriy, Elena & Ozzie)
The marina is situated in the middle of town (population 90,000) and one can walk or bike to nearly everything. I shop every other day for groceries as needed, and especially relish the Saturday morning farmer’s market.
Farmer’s market
Most boats, like us, are here for 6 or 9 months waiting for the spring to sail east into the Mediterranean. Other boats are here for just a few weeks provisioning and waiting for weather windows to head west to Madeira or the Canary Islands, followed by crossing the Atlantic to the Caribbean. We’ve had so much fun trading information with these boats on anchorages, marinas, expectations, etc. I love learning more about where we’ll be sailing next year, and it always feels good to pass on information to someone else. And the list of friends keeps growing!
Norbert, Steffi and Joeline on Kaimana getting ready for the Canaries
And with all the new friends we meet, we have Mads and Lotta just up the street as well. We see them every few days for dinner or drinks, and they’re always so good with information or advice about the area. And they are a perfect excuse for movie night!
We thought we had a 3-hour motor to get to Lagos. We had put up our main anyway to dry it out in the sun. Suddenly we had at least 10 knots on nose plus choppy seas and a foul current that slowed us down to 2 knots. In an effort to get comfortable, and get some last season sailing in, we decided to head south to get a better angle on the wind and the waves. It meant tacking and going a slightly longer distance, but it was a nice sail.
Kalyra coming into Marina de Lagos
It was bittersweet to come into the Lagos marina to end the sailing season. However, Mads and Lotta (our sailing friends that live in Lagos) were there at our slip, waiting with bubbly and apps – never have we had a welcome like that! (And probably never will again, the standards are much too high now.)
Lagos Marina
Though we’re done sailing for 2022, we’re still going to be on board for a few weeks putting things to bed, cleaning, packing and, more importantly, touring about this beautiful area. Lagos is one of the more popular places to winter a boat, and we already know 5 other boats here. There will be a few more posts before I finish the season.
A whole flotilla of boats left Sines early in the morning, most, like us, trying to make it south and east while we still had good northerly winds (the winds were scheduled to altogether die and then come from the east for a week). Of course we had a windless morning and motored for several hours. When the wind finally came we got up to about 8 knots, a fabulous finish to this season. Sigh, and then there were squalls.
Pre-squall sailing
The first couple of squalls were a little bit of rain or a little bit of extra wind, all coming from the west. Then I looked behind us. Ominous black clouds were coming from the north. And just like that the wind went from 12 to 28 knots……and we had full sail up….ugh. Trip was able to round up, head into the wind to slow down, and then fell off again to blanket the jib enough with the main so we could furl the jib. Unfortunately we were going to have to gybe the full main to come around the point to get to Sagres. With some screaming, a lot of cursing, and a lot of strained muscles, we managed the gybe without damaging the main or the boom, and headed east to Sagres.
Post squall
Sagres was a beautiful anchorage with great holding in the 20 knots we were still getting. There’s room for 100+ boats, I can only imagine how crazy it gets in the summer. There were only 8 of us or so (many from the morning’s ’flotilla’ had pushed further east to Lagos or Portimao).
Sagres dinghy…..pre-escape attempt
The next day we picked up Anna and Clyde (they had lost their dinghy in Cascais) and headed for the beach. We wandered up the beach a bit, and then found a spot for afternoon drinks and apps. After a while, eagle-eyed Trip suddenly jumped up – our dinghy was drifting out to sea! I yelled for Trip to pay the bill, and I ran after Clyde, who was already running down the beach. Luckily an old man walking the beach had caught our painter, and calmly handed it to Clyde before continuing his walk. Clyde and I caught our breaths, Anna and Trip arrived, and we decided it was time to head back.
Sagres
Before we left for Lagos and the marina, Trip wanted to change the zinc on the propeller. Unfortunately, cold water + fins that would not cooperate going on + a lost dive weight + unexpected current meant Trip was in the water for almost 90 minutes and a bit hypothermic as he came up. He was able to get the job done, but took a hot shower, I made hot chocolate, and he dug out his warm clothes. Body temp came back to normal.
It was a bit of a crazy departure from Cascais. We got up early, only to discover that our anchor had dragged 200+ feet the last few hours. Luckily we were at the back of the anchorage and therefore hit no other boats. Even more luckily the anchor came up cocked at a crazy angle riding on the swivel, and we were able to see exactly what the problem was: As the winds eased, the boat had begun swinging with the tidal current again, sometimes up to 180 degrees. during one of those swings the swivel bent and managed to hook the anchor, pulling it out and not letting it reset. The swivel has not been doing its primary job anyway (preventing twist in the chain), so it will be coming off at our earliest opportunity.
Marine Traffic screen shot – all the light blue arrows are NATO warships
Traveling the coast is now a predictable pattern. We usually aim to make 50-ish miles a day given the amount of daylight hours we have (we try not to enter unfamiliar harbors in the dark). We leave around 7 in the morning, knowing there won’t be wind till the afternoon, so we need to motor. The wind picks up, and then we have fabulous sailing in the afternoon, doing sometimes up to 8 knots in 20 knots on a beam or broad reach.
Sines
To get to Sines, we had to cross the Setubal Canyon. Because of the fear of contacts by Orcas, most boats these days are traveling in shallow waters (less than 25 meters), hugging the coast. This adds ALOT of miles to travel to reduce risk as the coastline goes way in before going way out again. We opted not to and sailed straight for Sines. Very soon into the passage we saw three large military vessels. Looking up their details on AIS, we saw that they were NATO warships. With everything going on between Russia and the Ukraine right now, these convoys are currently very active. We later realized that there were 17+ ships in the canyon, and it was also speculated that all of their activity kept the Orcas at bay. (More about the Orcas at the end of the post).
Found the brewery!
Sines is a small fishing harbor tucked in behind a massive cargo ship and LNG port. It’s also the birthplace of Vasco do Gama. It has the most beautiful beach, and enough room for about 12 boats to anchor, as well as a really nice, small marina. Most importantly it’s protected from both the wind and swell, giving us a bit of time to rest before moving on.
Orca damage to boat rudder
First we wandered through the boatyard, where we saw up close the damage that Orcas had done to a boat rudder. The rudder was completely stripped of its fiberglass, and the stainless steel frame bent severely. Yikes! We wandered through town a bit with Anna and Clyde (they were in the marina), and settled in at the local brewery for lunch. Good food, good beer, and a great view.
Kalyra at anchor in Sines harbor
***More about the Orcas…..They live and travel following the tuna between Gibraltar at the entrance to the Med up the coast of Spain and Portugal, into the Bay of Biscay in France. Beginning about 3 years ago, they began making contact with sailboats and specifically destroying their rudders. No one knows why. The most plausible theory that we’ve heard is that tuna populations are dropping, which means Orcas will also hunt whales. They bite the tail to prevent the whale from diving and escaping. Orcas are phenomenally smart animals, and speculation is that sailboats are being used to ‘train’ younger Orcas as the rudders of newer boats could look like a whale tail. Our boat is: 1) painted with red bottom paint (looks nothing like a whale), 2) has a cutaway full keel with attached rudder (looks nothing like a whale tale or tuna). Hopefully this makes us less of a target. Bottom line is that it’s a scary situation, but hundreds and thousands of boats pass through these waters without incident, and we hope to be part of that group…..
Sunday night the winds started to calm, and we risked a dinghy trip over to Carl on Selsea, a French boat also heading south. We had met Carl and his wife Melanie back in Leixoes, and it was great to see him again to catch up over a cocktail.
Cascais
The winds calmed down even more on Monday for us to have one last day ashore before heading south again. The original plan was to head back to Belem, but that plan got scrapped when we discovered that the monastery was closed to visits on Mondays. Instead we decided to poke around Cascais some more and headed for the waterfront on the other side of the marina.
‘Graffitti’
The walk to Boca do Inferno (Hell’s Mouth) let us linger through neighborhoods of beautiful old homes. Sadly, the closer you got to the water the tighter the security became and soon we were surrounded simply by gates and walls with no views of the homes.
Cascais
The water thundering into Boca do Inferno was pretty impressive, and the walk along the water was wonderful. Our walk also took us past magnificent, old summer homes that were now museums as well as through beautiful parks. We were rather glad that we hadn’t rushed back to the big city and instead spent more time in Cascais.
We had two days of winds blowing in the 20’s, gusting into the 30’s. It was a solid anchorage and we weren’t worried about the boat, but days like these are extremely wet and uncomfortable for the dinghy. I picked up expensive cheese and iberico ham, pork rillettes, and a lot of red wine to get us through the weekend.
And there’s always projects. One of the things we noticed was the amount of moisture that came through the hull during the big passages. Book pages have developed mildew stains, and a few electronics like the portable USB power bank were rusted out completely. We took everything out of the cabinets so Trip could check the chainplates for any structural weakness. All looked good, so we cleaned everything up, threw a bunch of old or damaged things away, rebedded the chainplate covers, and packed up again. One less thing to do at the end of the season….
Belem is a western neighborhood in Lisbon, but it has so much going on that we decided to give it its own day. We started at ’Quake’, an immersive museum experience about the earthquake of 1755. Mixing traditional museum displays, alot of CGI, and a bit of a carnival ride, you sit in ’church’ (the earthquake happened on All Saints Day, and the Portuguese being Catholic were all at church) and the earthquake is simulated. They did a great job of teaching about the historical facts, as well as teaching modern day preparations, as Portugal is a seismically active region, and earthquakes are still quite common.
Monument of the Discoverers
After Quake, we had lunch of duck rice (delicious) at a little, upscale restaurant, then we walked the main boulevard down to the Geronimo Monastery, where explorer Vasco de Gama is buried. The interior is supposed to be amazing, but the line was much too long to wait. We moved down to the river to see the Monument of the Discoverers. For such a small country, Portugal produced quite a number of maritime explorers that have made history.
Belem upscale lunch counter
As usual, we were running out of time and there were still so many things to see. We also needed to get a few practical errands done, such as visit a chandlery. Luckily, our walks were taking us directly past marinas, and we found a chandlery without going to far. Trip picked up everything he needed, and then it was back to Cascais for a cocktail (or two) with John, the local OCC port officer.
Lisbon is just a 40 minute train ride from Cascais, and it’s a pretty ride along the banks of the Tagus River. After a first stop at the new food hall for a breakfast of coffee and the best egg custard tarts we’ve ever had, it was off to wander the hilly (every town in Portugal is uphill in all directions, I swear) Lisbon streets.
Creative way to add shade to an alley
We turned a corner and ran into new cruising friends Anna and Clyde from Viking Goddess. We had known they would be in Lisbon as well, but what were the odds of running into them? They had signed up for a city tour in the afternoon, so we decided to wander the city together that morning and then join the same tour.
Lisbon
Lisbon is the capital of Portgual and is a huge city, but once again felt very walkable. There were cafes everywhere you turned to satisfy the local craving for a coffee and a cigarette (a habit we’ve both been able to avoid). We didn’t have much of a plan, just wandered the streets enjoying the views. We eventually turned back toward the river, and started looking for a restaurant for lunch.
Anna and Clyde rehydrate before the city tour
The tour was rather remarkable. Our tour guide was very passionate, and rather than just walk us past buildings and recite facts, would sit us down and re-enact parts of history like the famous earthquake of 1755 or the Carnation Revolution of 1974. He did not shy away from difficult subjects like life under a dictator (women did not get the right to vote till 1974!) or the fact that there are no antique buildings in Lisbon (as you would expect in other tours of Europe), because everything was reduced to rubble during the earthquake. The tour was a bit exhausting, but really made me want to learn more about Portugal.
Bruno – our Lisbon tour guide
We needed another drink after the tour, so found a little cafe around the bend, and rehydrated again. Then it was back to Cascais.
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