Why So Quiet?

Well, for starters, we're resting. And we are fixing stuff. And we are seeing all we can of Portugal.

Hey Pat! I think Rob's gone!

Rob Courneya is currently touring Portugal with his wife, Mary, and is having a great time, or at least he will, til the country runs out of beer. They are up in the northern part of Portugal and will head to Paris soon and then home to St. Cloud where Rob will, gasp, go back to work on September 13. We miss him already.
Pat is currently in France where is he traveling with his two daughters and plans to visit La Rochelle and pay his respects to DuFour, who built Remedios.
Tom, (ok, me) is currently in Cascais, Portugal where I am doing some boat chores and projects and making sure the beer in this town doesn't go stale.

When Pat gets back here to Cascais in a week, we will do more boat chores here and repairs and then move the boat back to Oeiras, a nearby town with a cheaper marina. Pat will stay in Oeiras while Tom goes north to visit some more of Portugal for 10 or 12 days.

We will both be back in Oeiras around Sep 25 to get ready for our spouses to visit during the first two weeks of October where we will go our separate ways and see the sights. We will bid our spouses farewell around Oct 16 and head out to sea around Oct 20. We will most likely head to Madiera, then a couple stops in the Canary Islands before we head to Florida around Nov 1 or so.

But enough about us...

To match our dinner with the French, we arranged a dinner with the Brits. Here we are in Oeiras with Ted and Kay, who are sailing around and happened to meet us in two different ports. We thought it was fate. They are from a town close to Birmingham, England.

Dinner on the outdoor deck at Peter's

And he was just getting going!

We filled an evening with sailing, storm, and poop stories. As for storms, we were invited to their boat for after-dinner coffee where Ted showed us the place on the floor of his boat where he laid and prayed during a Force 10 storm with 60 knot winds. Kind of made us feel like weenies about our Force 8 experience but perhaps that was his point. Here is Ted during another one of his funny stories.

Oh, the poop part... We were discussing the relative merits of different waste storage and removal systems when Ted told us that some boats have no holding tanks. Given that pumping your toilet overboard in a marina is bad form I asked him what he did when coming into a marina and nature called - too late to pump at sea and too close in to pump now. In his best British accent he replied " Well, that's when you just have to clench your butt cheeks in rather tight now, isn't it?"

Here is Ted's, I suspect, long suffering wife Kay, sometime after the poop story. We hope to see them again as we head further along the cruising path. Here is a link to their gps log

http://blog.mailasail.com/moorglade

Captain C gets high

Now for some fixing stuff. Just after we landed, our anemometer quit. This is the guage at the top of the mast that tells us which way the wind is blowing and how hard. I tried to tell Pat we could just use his beard but no go. So someone had to go up and take the old one off so we could source a new one. Now the truth is, both Pat and I have been to the top of the mast on differernt occasions. I offered to go up, but we agreed Pat was the better mast monkey because when he gets up there he can actually function whereas I just cling to the mast with both arms and whimper like a treed cat. Here is Pat at the top of the mast and lest you think I got off easy, who do you think had to winch him up there????

That orange square is my towel

Here is what the boat looks like from up there, and yes, we remembered to send up a camera... The boat next to us is from Gdansk, Poland. After I get the new part, I hope tomorrow in Lisbon, we get to do this again next week.

Life in this part of Portugal is awfully nice. There are lots of cafes, restaurants, great views, narrow cobblestone streets and shops, and plenty of museums and historic places to visit. Here are some sights from the area:

Cascais during the day with the bandstand for concerts

Same place at night with LOUD music

View from my first dinner alone - Pizza!

Our day in Lisbon when we went to get Mary at the airport

My new favorite guitar player who plays and whistles for Euros

Pat found this neat building while out running with his camera

What a neat view!