Dark Horse Schooner: October 2014

October 5-6
Flies! Flies! Flies! This is the third time we have been inundated with FLIES! The first time was when we were crossing to Sines, we were sailing dead down wind, spinnaker was up, sun was out, it was warm and then all of a sudden, there were 50 or so house flies inside and on the coach roof, also lots of little fruit like flies. It took days to get rid of them all. We had them again on our way from Sines to Portimao, and then today they appeared all of a sudden when the wind died. But where are they coming from? We are about at least 30M offshore. Are these special migrating house flies? Are they hatching on the boat somewhere, this seems unlikely as Kivu has also been invaded by flies. If anyone has any ideas as to where these flies are coming from we'd love to know. The next problem though is getting rid of the things. How do you get rid of house flies, quickly without using fly spray. We arrived in Faro during a confused tide. Thank goodness for our engine as we were doing nearly 3000 revs and only making way at 4.5knts at times, which is not normal for our boat, 3000revs would normally give us about 9-10knts, when we weren't trying to enter at an ebbing tide.
Day two in Cuturan, which is the dune island off of Faro. We actually went ashore today and had a quick lunch and a walk to the Atlantic beach. Just a nice day. The highlight was a chameleon on the path on the way back. It was very windy, blowing about 26 knots at times. As long as it is not that windy tomorrow morning we will be heading to Gibraltar.

October 7th
Set off as the sun rose, hardly any wind, though we expected it to pick up later in the day as it had the previous few days, unfortunately for us it did not. We were able to fly our spinnaker for most of the late afternoon into the night, but shortly after 10pm the wind died completely and we were left with just the motor propelling us along. The highlight of our day sail was a very large pod of bottlenose dolphins visiting for a bit. When they first joined us they were bow riding about 4 dolphins deep, a pretty remarkable sight. They stayed with us for about a half hour, watching us, jumping, arguing among themselves and singing. It was wonderful! I know we all look forward to seeing more dolphins throughout our travels!

As is our routine now, John did the first watch and I went to sleep. We do not have a set amount of time for our night watches, we just wake each other up when we feel tired. So, at 12AM I was up and out and John was catching some Zzzs. When I am on night watch it generally involves making a bottle for Adam and putting him back to bed, an occasional visit from Lucy, and listening to podcasts. At the moment I am really enjoying listening to the TED talks NPR podcasts as they are both intersecting and don't require too much concentration to get a lot out of them. My guilty pleasure is of course the Archers Omnibus, and for those of you who do not know who the Archers are, it could be described as a radio farming soap opera. I have always found listening to others talk comforting, perhaps this is because it reminds me of when I was little and would borrow audio books from the library and squirl away listening to them on my Walkman in my bed when I was supposed to be sleeping. In any event, podcasts certainly help to while away the night hours. As does star gazing and phosphorescent watching.

October 8-11
We arrived about 9AM, we slowed our speed way down in the night as we did not want to go through the Straights of Gibraltar in the dark do to the large amount of container traffic. We were surprised at how industrial the Gibraltar Bay was, there were many tankers anchored, and a large refinery just on the Spanish boarder.

We are staying in the Queensway Quay Marina and it is our first experience of stern on mooring. It was very nerve wracking coming in as we had to come in stern first which is not something Dark Horse really likes to do, but John handled it all very expertly and we came in smooth and slow.

We set about exploring the town after formalities were completed. So, now to set about getting our sails from the UK delivered here as well as our wind vain and stocking up on comfort foods from the UK.

So, we have been here for four days now. We've tried to get some work done on the boat but we are finding it difficult to find people, so our idea of getting a whole bunch done before we head off to the Canaries is having to be re-evaluated. We don't have anything that desperately needs to get done but at times we do get overwhelmed with our to do list.

Aside from the jobs list we have had time to head up the Rock on the cable car, see the maracas, walk Main Street, the shopping hub of Gibraltar, and visit their new park numerous times. We've rented a car and should pick it up tomorrow morning. We plan to do a bit of camping and sight seeing away from the sea. I am particularly interested in Alhambra.

Girls are great, Adam is growing lots and has moved from being the happy go lucky guy to being happy but also frustrated that he cannot do more or do what he wants. He is crawling all over the boat now, nothing is safe, and he is cruising around the saloon. Lucy's top two front teeth are just starting to come in now and Ruth is looking forward to when she will have a wiggly tooth.

That's all for now.

Happy Thanksgiving 12 October 2014

"Get up! Get up! It's raining, close the hatches! Quick!" is what I woke up to in the wee hours of the morning. We have had our first rain in about a month and we were not prepared for it. We had left clothes outside, all the hatches were open and the weather board (our door) was not in so the rain was just pooring into the boat. But thankfully John heard it quickly and we got everything squared away before we got too soaked. I really like listening to the rain through the hull of the boat. It is a lovely meditative sound, rhythmic and soothing. Which might be why Adam slept through the night?

It rained most of the morning which meant for a very slow start. John took apart the port loo again looking for the blockage from Ruth's experimenting, but still it is not working, so he thinks it is probably the pump, which is such a shame as these loos were brand new. While John was Mr. Plumber, the kids and I went to Morrisons to get our Thanksgiving feast supplies. No turkey this year, but we did find a lovely piece of beef ready for roasting, so we had a roast beef dinner with yorkshire puddings and apple pie for desert. It was a nice dinner, I was really pleased with how well everything turned out as I cooked it all, and normally when I cook things don't go as planned, (typically dinner is a few hours late due to mis-timing or burning or just general incompetence).

Irregardless of what we eat or where we are on Thanksgiving, this holiday always brings home to me the distance that is between us and our friends and families. That is one of the biggest problems when you leave your hometown to live international; you create a sort of international family whom you think about, care about, and find yourself thinking, if only I could get everyone in the same room together just for a few hours, what incredible conversations would happen, what laughter there would be and how truly happy I would feel, and how distant and separate I feel right now. However, if I had just stayed in Halifax, never left, continued on as I was living when I was 20 years old, I would never be sitting here with my extraordinary husband and three lovely children in Gibraltar about to embark on a trans-Atlantic crossing...really I think a bit of loneliness is worth putting up with for an adventure like this.

Good Morning! We’ve awoken to another beautiful sunrise on Dark Horse. This time we are in Portimao, Portugal and are planning to leave in a few short hours for Faro. There are supposed to be some lovely bird life rich dune islands to anchor by there.

I know that I have not been posting much detail on this blog, John seems to be better at keeping the FB page up to date, I am finding it hard to make the time to write. We started a ships log so I am going to copy and past much of it in to give you an idea of what we’ve been up to. I apologize for the poor sentence structure, etc. but at least it gets something up on the blog.

Sept 11 to 23

Overnight passage from La Coruna round Finisterre, flat to start with then force 5 - 6 on the nose. Fishing boats all over and very aggressive. First night picked up mooring buoy and bbq on deck with Kivu crew. Second day, late to rise (8:30). John and Jamieson, of Kivu, tried to fix the fridge, which seemed to work but after picnic on local beach the commutator appears to have failed again. While at the beach Adam took his first trial steps while being supported by Mom or Dad. Girls played and swam. We completed the day with another joint meal with Kivu of foraged mussels from local beach cooked on the Cob. We stayed up very late. Third day very late to rise (9:30), and then off to Roman Catholic church with Eloise, Alexia and Jamieson, Carel suffering from a migraine on Kivu. After church a wander around town and a drink at local cafe. Rest of the day spent resting, fishing and tidying on Dark Horse. NOTE sand is very difficult to get off the boat. Tried hovering, but I keep finding where I hoovered there is sand again after a few minutes. A damp cloth might work? On the fourth day we spent the morning doing school work, and it took quite a long-time do to poor attitudes from the girls, hopefully tomorrow will be better. In the afternoon we went on a long boat ride up to the top of the ria. The scenery changed a lot as we went, as did the smells. At first the air was very salty like the sea, but as we went further up the ria it smelt more and more like the forests that you find inland. Plenty of eucalyptus trees around and other non-native evergreens. Once at the top we tied the tender up and went for a walk along a track that we think was put in to allow for the hydro electrical plant to be built. The trail led us to a lamprey re-introduction site. We picked flowers for our friends, Eloise and Alexia. On the way back we tried to stop in at Kivu, but the family was already gone to town. The girls were very disappointed and threw their flowers to the sea. We had another late dinner and the girls and Adam went quickly to bed. On our fifth day here we went into Noia, walking over the bridge, the town was not that special, but we did find a very good supermarket and a playground. The weather turned while we were at the playground eating our ice-cream just purchased from the supermarket. We had to take shelter from the rain under the eaves of the grocery store. When the rain stopped we made a dash back to the boat laden with our groceries, thank goodness for Adam's pram, without it we would have struggled to have brought all the goodies back. When we got back to the beach Kivu crew had left us a message in the sand to come and visit them on their boat, which we did. Unfortunately we stayed too long and we had a very wet and choppy boat ride back as the low that we had been waiting for had started to kick in on our way home. We were all rather wet and poor Adam was just a wee-bit scared. Thankfully we had hot water to have showers in when we returned as John has figured out how to heat the water with the generator. Dinner of prawns and rice, then everyone to bed. It rained pretty much all night and this morning, the sixth day of being here, it continues to rain and blow. We had been planning a picnic with Kivu but it is really not the weather for it, so we are doing school and reading and playing for now. Hopefully this wind and rain will dissipate soon.

Sept 24 to 26

Arrived here, Porto, in the early hours of Wednesday morning. Tied up to fuel berth and waited for the office to open. When it did we had three guys help us onto a pontoon, it was the easiest berthing we have had thus far.

Sept 26 to 29

Two nights in Cascais, anchored. Figured out how to use the wifi booster and had an excellent Skype video conference with my parents in Halifax. Though when we tried the connection later in the day it would not work and continued to not work until we left, not sure why, perhaps the bar we were connecting to changed their password, or they have a limit on how much customers can use per IP address. Afternoon on the beach with Kivu crew on the 27th. Unfortunately we were met with a squal in the late afternoon which kicked up a short swell. When things had calmed down we tried to head back to the boat, but timed it a bit wrong and got a knocked by a wave, poor Ruth and Adam took the brunt of it, but we carried on back to Dark Horse, leaving Kivu crew on the beach, waiting for a better time to leave. Thankfully we could have warm showers when we got back and a quick dinner of beans and hotdogs and hot chocolate made everyone very happy.

Sept 29 to Oct 01

Arrived here, Sines, about 7pm after having cruised in company with Kivu. Excellent sail! Flew the cruising shute, with the great big Lloyds stalion on it, turned out to be in fairly good nick and combined with the staysil, another excellent discovery, we were cruising 8knts most of the time. Caught two great big makerel aswell and had them for dinner. Second day after a visit from the Marine Police telling us we need to pay a 2Euro light fee, we went ashore after school, found a wooden xylophone and chimes on the beach, set up as a sort of outdoor play thing for people. The town beach area called Vasco de Gama Playa appears to have been rejuvenated, but the planned terraced gardens have not been put in, or money has dried up. We never found the harbour office for the fee, we did find the Fishing Office and the fishermen were all tucking into their grilled sardines for lunch. Smelt yummy. We eventually had a BBQ on the beach with Kivu crew and the kids were in and out of the water until the sun was setting. A lovely day for all.

Oct 01 to 05 to Portimao

We set off from Sines at 830 with Kivu. Not much breeze but we had the sails up anyway to help keep the pace up. Neither John or I were really into the motoring, but we did end up seeing basking shark, lots of dolphins, including some swimming just off our stern for a while. We were planning of stopping just around Cape St Vincent, but the anchorages were untenable due to swell, the wind had picked up at this point and we ended up having to sail and then motor here. Got to the anchorage about 2200, not too bad. Girls went to bed then and we soon followed. 2 Oct woke to a beautiful sunny day and lovely beached just off our port side. Did school and John tried to fix the loo, Ruth having taken all the toilet roll paper off the roll and put it down the loo so she could use the roll for something. John also explored the starter engine battery, as last night it was boiling and giving off a very strong melting plastic smell. Not sure why this has happened though could have something to do with the alternator. Girls, Adam and I played on the beach with Kivu girls and I even went for a swim, water is surprisingly warm here, or maybe I am just getting used to it. Kivu girls came over to the boat after the beach to make Karele her birthday cake, as it is her birthday tomorrow We plan to stay one more night and then we will see what happens. After a bit of a disturbed night, Adam was awake and crying for about an hour, we awoke to another lovely sunny day. A Thomas Cook cruise liner sounded its' horn as it entered the river, making sure that if you were not already awake you would be. Completed school in record time, girls were eager to do some writing, which was nice. Adam is now able to climb the two steps from the hallway to the saloon and he is in and out of all the cabins easily. Nothing is safe now. After school was finished we headed into town and found a grocery store. Then went to a museum about the sardine industry here. For 80 years Portimao was the center of sardine production in Portugal. It was actually quite a nice museum and interesting to see, even though most of the exhibit was in Portuguese. Other than the sardines there was also information about the largest stone age settlement in the area and the influences of the Romans and Moors. All in all we quite enjoyed ourselves, especially since we were the only ones there. There is something comforting about an empty museum. After returning to the boat we cleaned and awaited the arrival of the Kivu crew for pre-birthday dinner drinks. The girls, Eloise and Alexia, stayed with us while Jamieson and Karele went for a meal. It was nice, the girls watched a movie and the parents were back before it was over. Lucy and Ruth particularly liked that they got to stay up way past their bedtime. I believe we will be staying here one more night then we are off to Faro. I really want to get some jobs done on the boat, I am tired of looking at the messy port and starboard cabins and unfinished jobs. Today, Oct 4th, was filled with odd jobs, school and a goodbye drink with Kivu crew. While Adam did very well last night, waking at 2AM but after a bottle falling straight back to sleep, he was not cooperating this evening so unfortunately he was not the smiley, cuddly bundle of Adam he normally is. But at least we got to say goodbye to everyone and who knows, we may see them again. I am looking forward to the next part of our trip though. In some ways it feels like we are starting a new, a second chapter and I suppose it will feel like that each time you leave the company of a crew that you have spent a lot of time with.