The Scouts are a really amazing organisation. They teach young people the world over, many skills that they will use in life everyday. They have a curriculum that teaches personal skills and more specific bush type skills such as camping and making fires. One would assume that the curriculum for such useful generic skills as these would be the same the world over, we have discovered that there is a slight variation in Portugal. In the rest of the world every Boy Scout and indeed any non boy scout can map read. In Portugal no one, not delivery drivers, shop keepers, chandlery staff or even policemen, who you would have expected to have been boy scouts, have the ability to read a map. This has lead to Fiona & Iain wearing the soles of their shoes thin as they search Lisbon high and low for some specialised kit that they will need as their adventures take a turn in an unexpected direction.

We entered Lisbon for a second time and took off our tourist hats and donned the hats of serious buyers of goods that only a large town such as Lisbon would hold. We’d done our research and found addresses for the specialised dealers, we’d even obtained a map with all the major road names on and, as always, we’d written a list of all the things we wanted to achieve.

The first location on the list was opposite the station, happy days, from here the owner put a dot on the map to our next destination. Onto a tram we got a duly arrived at ‘the dot’. No shop here, so after searching all the surrounding roads we finally found what we were looking for. This shop then sent us to the other end of town to another ‘map dot’. When we arrived nearby we thought that we’d seek the assistance of a local policeman, he’d either be able to read the map and tell us exactly where we are or point is in the direction of what we were searching. He failed on both of these but did get us to walk in a 2 mile circle. This happened time and time again and after walking to what felt like the end of the earth all we’d managed to achieve was to get hot and sweaty, seen some parts of Lisbon that few Lisbonites have seen and had the realisation that there is a significant lack of map reading skills in this fair country.

You may ask; what it was we were searching for and why the urgency? In a nutshell we think that our plans have changed quite significantly. We’re not the best people at making big decisions and have always joked about do we turn left or right at Gibraltar, as in, do we go to the med for the winter or the Caribbean? The plan had originally been to turn left into the Med. We’d loaded Ruffian with all the charts of the Med, all the kit of coastal cruising with the occasional 500 miler and thought about where we’d spend the months of December, January and February when the med ‘shuts down’. So with the boat prepped for the Med we are now planning to turn right and make the big step across the pond to the Caribbean via Madeira, the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands. This is why there was some urgency in getting to specialised suppliers of SSB radio’s, solar panels, charts, etc that we hoped we’d find in Lisbon.

With all the suppliers and shops visited in Lisbon we returned back across the river to Siexal to where Ruffian was anchored pretty much empty handed. No one had any of the kit we sought, no one had called us back with delivery dates or prices and our feet were throbbing with the pounding that they’d had, thanks to the lack of local map reading capabilities. It was time to brew up a nice cup of tea on Ruffian and work out our next move. There was one barrier left between Fiona & Iain, and Ruffian & Tea, this barrier was low water and Thug having dried out in black stinky mud. No problem said Iain and driven on by the thought of tea, he jumped into the mud up to his knees and got a foot massage from a few very unsuspecting mud crabs that quickly scampered away. Once washed, back onboard and tea in hand many irons were put in fires to facilitate this new development in the adventures of Ruffian.

After the big left right decision and the ‘irons being put into fires’ it was back to ‘life as normal’ on Ruffian, albeit a very social one with both Emma & Stuart on Amorosa and Justin, Trish and ‘The Lads’ on Selkie. We were told that before we leave Spain and Portugal we should stock up with things that are cheap here, primarily red wine, to this end we have had some extensive bargain wine tasting sessions with the crew of Amorosa. On the table was the 62cent offering from Lidl, the 69cent vintage from Pingu’s and at the expensive end of the 1 litre wine market was a 75cent masterpiece from Jumbo’s. We are pleased to announce that the winner was the 2011 offering from the Pingu house of wine. So before we head out into the Atlantic proper for Madeira in the next week or so, we’ll have to seek out a Pingu store in Sines 40 miles south of Cascais which we hope to sail to tomorrow.

Lisbon offered up some amazing ancient architecture….


And some modern very mediocre buildings. But would it hold what we were searching for?


We finally found some free wifi in a cool courtyard and capitalised on it. Does this make us tramps?


Well done FTL for getting over your vertigo. All we need to do now is to master base jumping.


Larry & Porto weren’t scared of heights at all.


The old trams transported us around town and through time.


Emma reads the scariest book in the world, ‘Heavy weather sailing.’ or to those fans of the book ‘When good seas turn bad.’


Poor thug gets all tied up yet again before the upwind beat back to Cascais.


Justin & Trish with ‘The Lads.’ We have no idea how they manage these bundles of energy on a boat!