In Cascais, Portugal - since Sept 22!
29 September 2017
Hi Mom, Kathryn sent out a safe arrival message but you are correct in that I have not put a new blog entry in. I typed several during the 6 days at sea but could not ever get a HF radio connection to transmit them.
We had a relatively pleasant, zippy passage from Angra, flying the Asymetric spinnaker for the first few days and hitting 8+ knots sometimes (average about 7.2?) and then went down to a 2-reefed Main plus the jiblet, as the winds closer to land were much speedier. Passage took 5.5 days, very fast!
And now we are in Cascais Portugal. Cascais is a short train ride away from Lisboa. We arrived early Friday morning, closing the coast while it was still dark and anchoring in the bay just after dawn. Here is a picture of our "passage-is-complete!" victory beer (taken at about 8:00am). We moved into the marina on Sunday. It is expensive until the low season starts on October 1st, but we decided to splurge a little bit. We were going to stay in a cheaper place just up the Targus river from Lisboa proper, but when we went to visit (by train/bus) found it to be isolated, and much of it was silted in and Katface would touch the bottom at low tide. Cascais is a much better location. Very nice town with quite a European feel to it; + many cafes and shops.
I visited the Spanish embassy and was told no visa is possible to visit Spain before December 15. We are going to have a conversation with the local immigration official here at the marina later today. He had some ideas when I talked to him last. We are spending a lot of time discussing what to do next and what the rules allow us to do, but have not decided anything for sure. Will likely be here for a week or two more at least, awaiting boat pieces to be sent back from their servicers.
Yes, have also spent a lot of time addressing boat issues. I made some shipping containers and shipped the leaky hydraulic cylinders for the baby and back stays to a shop in Palma de Mallorca. I really hope I get them back. I heard after that I should have sent them to the factory in France but i already decided to send them to Spain, so we will see. I hate pieces of the boat outside my control.
I also sent a piece of the charging system back to the factory in England to see if it can be mended. That took a day as well.
The engine reached about 500 hours so I splurged and hired the local mechanic to do the service. Part of it was to replace the mixing elbow (400 euros - stupid Yanmar). Anyway labor cost here is less than half that in Annapolis. Also found a small leak in the water pump and so we are waiting for a small part to put it back together.
There were also some things i did not like about the running rigging that i found during the last passage and before as I get time on the boat. Looks like I lucked out and found a really good rigger. He visited yesterday and found several things to mend, agreed that the jib halyard is on the wrong position on the mast head and thus i could not use the proper position for the asymmetric halyard, and pointed out some obvious stupid things i could not see. (like all the jib cars have been on the tracks backwards since I owned the boat - they even have arrows on them that were pointed the wrong way). He will be back next week to climb the mast and perform an inspection and fix some of these issues. I have my fingers crossed that there are no bigger problems up high.
We have had some chance for recreation. On Friday we celebrated our complete crossing of the Atlantic with dinner out and a bottle of Italian wine (20 euros! - a big expense). There was a festival of lights where they turned off a lot of the normal lighting in the town and had projectors put "lights/art stuff" on the walls of buildings and other places. We visited that on Sunday night. It took two nights to get ahead enough on sleep to stay out late enough. Also had nice Indian dinner, (not Portuguese food, yay).
As soon as we get a bit ahead on the boat projects we are looking at renting a car and making a little tour of the countryside. There are some castles and beaches and parks to walk in fairly close.