Passage to Porto

 

We left Mandy at the fuel dock in Punta Lagoa to begin her first solo international travel ordeal since she was 14. Taxi, coach, plane then sister taxi to home. All went swimmingly and she now has her level one solo international travel certificate.

The cook and I sailed down the Ria to Baiona, a nice protected anchorage and good jumping off point for our 50 mile journey the next day to Póvoa de Varzim, a large town just north of Porto.

On the way we passed Octopus, Paul Allen of Microsoft's megayacht, parked in the bay outside Vigo.  Another world. I wonder if that needs rebooting every day.

So it seems lots of other people had the same idea about Baiona because at sunrise the next morning about 6 other boats left the anchorage with us. At one point I could see 12 sailing boats all heading down the coast to Portugal.  It was a lovely journey. The sun rose over the cliffs and burned away the clouds and it turned out to be a lovely sunny day.

So we decided to do some practice for the next Carrington event coronal mass ejection which could wipe out all the world's gps satellites. We got out my beautiful sextant that Mandy bought me for my birthday and tried to do a noon sighting.

The theory is quite easy. To get your longitude you have to find the time difference between your local noon and noon at Greenwich. That is when the sun is at it's highest point. Once you have the time difference in minutes you just divide it by 4 to get your longitude. The skill is in finding the sun's highest position on a roly boat. So after hours of discussion and taking sightings we ended up 360 miles out of position!!!!! Not very good, even for a first attempt, but we know where we went wrong. It made for an interesting passage though and to all the other boats around us made us look like we knew what we were doing. It's defo a skill that we need to practice before going across an ocean.

We arrived in Marina da Póvoa de Varzim around 6pm and came in behind 5 other boats. All the marina staff where so efficient and friendly. It was chaos and he still managed to come and escort us in, in his rib. It was a bit of a squeeze to get parked up but we managed to get in without scratching the boat or embarrassing ourselves.

We had to go to the Capitania do porto to pay our €70 Taxa de farolagem, lighthouse tax. Fair enough, it's like getting foreign sailors to the uk to contribute something towards the RNLI. But the picture in reception was something else. That's one way to make you pay your lighthouse tax.

In town of Póvoa de Varzim they like their tiles, maybe it's all over Portugal. Pictures, street art, church art and all the houses were tiled differently.

On to Porto tomorrow, well Leixos, just 12 miles down the road.