Tuesday 15th April

With the silting up of the marina at Ayamonte (we were sat in the mud at low water at our berth) we couldn't leave until after at least half tide to head up the river. We left it until 2 1/2 hours before high water to leave and had only 40cm spare as we passed the abandoned pontoon just before the entrance.

Out into the river we let a ferry go by before being whoosed upsteam by the flooding tide onwards towards the bridge. Colin had been up the mast to measure it's height, adding on the section between the top of the coach roof to the waterline and some generous rounding upwards gave us a height above of 19.5m which with at least 20.5m clearance on the bridge should see us under no problem.

As we got closer we heard the schreech and whine of the suspension wires on the bridge building in crescendo as traffic crossed. It wasn't a nice sound.

Then we were under, difficult to see exactly how much clearance we'd had but it didn't matter, we were under. We unfurled the genny to take advantage of the F3 wind from the south, that along with the tide kept us over 5kts. The wind came and went as we wound our way upstream and eventually we gave up and used engine to complement the tide of around 3kts.

As we headed further inland the banks closed in a little and the land became more hilly. We passed tiny villages of white houses and solitary houses perched on the banks. There was the occasional moored or anchored boat but it wasn't until we reached Foz de Odeleite that the numbers increased. We upped the engine revs to make sure we arrived at our chosen spot before a tide change with another 5nm to Alcoutim. It was easy to know we had arrived at the villages with lots more boats anchored, moored and alongside the pontoons on each side of the river; we chose a spot downstream rather than heading further up.


View from where we dropped anchor

Dropped the hook at 16:30, the tide didn't turn for another hour so we needn't have rushed. Engine off we settled down to listen to the twittering birds and as night progressed it became very, very quiet along the river. We set an alarm to check we turned ok at the 1am tide change and all was well.