It's been a while since the last update and a few e-mails concerning this.

All is well on board, though the weather has been rough since the last post in January. In fact the weather here in Algarve has never been so crappy since they started taking notes of it. Rainy, cold and windy with average winds in the 20-30 knot span and two gales. The latter of them indeed got 'baptized' by the Mets. Xynthia as she was called was short but ferocious here with sustained winds of 50 knots for a few hours and she peaked at 57 knots according to one of our neighbor boat's wind instrument.

During this time I myself spent 5 weeks in Sweden, selling my small business there. Isabelle thus had to deal with the storm on her own, which she did with splendour, assisted by a couple of friends here in the anchorage.

Röde Orm had a cosmetic damage on the starboard side rubrail due to chafe from the mooring line, but that's just a couple of hours work to fix. Not everyonne was as lucky, as 5-6 boats dragged anchor/moorings and ended up on the beach. The beach mostly consists of sand around here but a couple of boats were unlycky enough to get washed up on the stone wharf and an other on those few rocks that exist around the anchorage.

Just one, a wooden motorsailor, got severe damage though, the rest got away with some scratches as far as we know at ths point. I've posted a couple of pictures on the Flickr account of the beached boats.

It's an 'El Nino' year, snf to no smll part this 'little boy' is held responsible for the extreme weather the northern hemisphere has encontered during this winter. In Sweden, the Baltic Sea was 'deep'-frozen over 40 centimeters of ice making over 20 freighters and ferrries get stuck for days in the channels otherwise cleared by ice-breakers.

As an interesting aside, the most powerful and modern of the Swedish ice-breakers, 'Odin', was this winter rented out to a scientific expedition to Antarctica. This, due to the very mild winters in Scandinavia the last few years.

As soon as the weather gets a bit more like a promising spring-weather-like we will continue our voyage.

The main reason we chose to spend the winter in Algarve in the first place was because I intuitevely knew I would have to go back to Sweden to finish this deal with my business.

Now, as a Free Man, I am eager to get going.... our friends on 'Zephyr' left the Cape Verdes a few days ago for the Caribbean. Since they are going o leave their boat there on the hard, and go back to Jersey to work, it could well be that we will catch up on them at some point. No hurries though