SY Scrabbler

It's 25 years since we first sailed across the channel together so it was great to have my friends visit over August bank holiday. A couple of nights anchored off Culatra, swimming, drinking and eating. Great sailing back to Ayamonte with dolphins swimming around the bow. Hope we can do it again next year!

After two wonderful days at Casa Amarilla with Eddi and Claire Scrabbler forced us to perform a funny and hasty escape. BBQ, lounging by the pool, swapping "farmer's" stories and admiring the garden makes it very easy to slip into landlubber mode. We could see Scrabbler dancing but heho, she always does. Over lunch we spotted her on the OTHER side of the river, sailing quite fast down toward the sea! Off we went and actually had to chase her a bit. Eddi had fun watching! Naughty girl, she re-anchored herself right in the middle of the river, the wind picked up and blew along the valley with F6-7 and so she went crazy on her anchor chain. Rubaiyat was much better behaved. Like a rock, steady, no hanky-panky. Ah well, we caught her of course and set sail, like she wanted us to, and sailed down the river to finish our little holiday with a tapas crawl on the 2017 Ruta de Tapas in Ayamonte.

She is dancing the wind dance every night! During the day there is no wind. We have not sailed properly so far. But at night it blows and just look, what she does! Crazy girl. But the boat is cool inside and we sleep like babies.

We are lazy, lazy, lazy. The sea is lazy as well. Lovely for swimming. Liz and Dave are here now and so the girls swim, the boys tinker, the BBQ is working hard - all good! We are still on the same Galp bottle I bought years ago in Lagos. We are getting worried! How does that still work? We grilled and roasted and even baked sooooo many things and still have gas. What does it live off? Strange...

We escaped the farming life and are bobbing at anchor in one of the little paradises of Portugal. What more can one say? We sort of remember still how to do it. All the essentials at least...BBQ, fridge, getting friends over, swimming....

But not so much at sea. We sailed Scrabbler to her new Spanish home and set off to purchase ourselves a landbase. After ten and more years of gypsie live and homelessness we decided, it would be a good idea to have an off-the-grid landbase. Like a boat on water! Just a bit bigger. We went bigger because initially we planned to do this together with sailing friends of ours which we knew for many years and had lived together twice for shorter periods but in more cramped conditions. Sadly this experiment had to be terminated by us after a mere four month after we increasingly felt to be financing their lifestyle and ended up with a lot of the work. Shame, as the set up was good and it could have worked. Lesson, yet another one..., learned the hard way.
Anyway, this is, what occupies us at the moment but of course the sailing is still playing a major role. Watch this space and in the meantime, come for a visit!

Almost every morning we have these cute visitors dancing around our boat. They truly dance whilst flying! Maybe it is a courtship ritual. It sure does look amazing! And every now and then they rest on Scrabbler and give us the eye.

Whilst James is having a day in the office I am exploring the river using my favourite toy, the Oru. It slices lovely through the water and the river current are no problem at all. Raced Jax in her Bird yesterday and won!

hard at work at tonights dinner. Flame-grilled lamb chops on Mediterranean salad! Yummy!

alone on the river to very close by bird activity just to find THIS! The mother of all rafts we have ever collected. Trees, bamboo, twigs...no dead sheep though, like somebody else had this summer. We had to launch Storker to do some serious cleaning up. It had built up several layers deep and took quite some time. We have the feeling, that the bamboo is spreading quite badly along the river shore. Well, it does count as a pest and it certainly strives here! At times we looked at a whole forrest of bamboo during our walk!