Oct. 22nd, Position 35°16.596N/11°10.899W
After seeing Monique out at the station, right after lunch Andy and I went to the supermarket to get the stuff for the trip, while Rutger cleaned the boat and topped up the water tanks.
It's been 2 days now since we left Lagos and are about half way to Porto Santos, a small island just 20nm NE of Madeira. We didn't spend much time in Lagos so we thought it might be nice to make an extra stop over at Porto Santos.
Just after we left Lagos, we were visited by the Portuguese Coastguard.They called me over the radio and soon after they came over in a dinghy. It was just a routine inspection and they were very polite and friendly. They didn't search the boat or anything, but checked all the documents, licenses, safety equipment and then left again. Over the radio the skipper told me I had to report to the maritime police at Porto Santos or Madeira to buy a tax... I have no idea what kind of tax he was referring to .. I'll see it when I get there...
There is a bit more wind so we had a good sail so far but every now and then we also have to motor a bit. The weather is great, sunny and the nights full of stars until sunrise.. :-)
The storm that was forecasted does seem to move NE after all, but still,I don't want to take any risk. The forecast in general could be a bit more specific. On the navtex there was a gale warining for the area between 25° and 7° W and parallels 35 and 45; that is a huge area, about 600 by 600 nm... Anyway, we're at the far south of this area and lows always move to the North, so we'll be fine.
It's very quiet and peaceful in this part of the ocean. Occasionally a freighter or tanker passes, but in general we have no pings on the sea-me. So we can actually switch the sounder on to watch out for other vessels What a difference with before, if we turned on the sounder then it looked like as if constant Morse code messages were coming in...
So, a good moment to write this short update, killing time of my night watch :-)
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