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Day of rest

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Sunday - 10 th  June I could use some fresh zumo full of vitamins. Their blender is powered by a bicycle.  The day started out nice, with warm sun and French toast. Alex saw our neighbour Scott on the blue catamaran first thing and invited him to join us on an excursion to Sintra, which he accepted. So that’s our next port of call.

Surprise at every turn in Lisbon

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Sat 9 th of June Beautiful day on the riverfront in Lisbon.   We decided to catch the train to Lisbon. We loved it the last time we were there in 2009. It couldn’t be easier to get there from Cascais: €5 each round trip for a 45 minute ride. Not bad, along the coast, viewing the beaches and coast walkway. There is a lot of graffiti and it appeared that some of the neighbourhoods along the route are a bit rough. A coastal clean-up is in order.

Bicycle ride to coastal delights

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Friday – June 8 th Fortaleza de Jorge Alex had bought a new mast light and new wiring and we needed a new windex. He was moving the AIS antenna to the mizzen mast because the signal it pings was interfering with our VHF radio. We kept getting a sound like a mic PTT being pushed incessantly. Very annoying. Plus, he would connect the spare VHF to that antenna; if we had trouble with the main VHF, we could have a second VHF via the antenna on the mizzen as backup.  

Bad day in paradise

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  Thursday – 7 th June The head is not supposed to be on deck. As we headed to bed the previous night, I heard, “Oh no”, shouted from the head. That’s always a bad sign. Our main toilet had jammed and would not flush. Lucky for us, we have a second head on board.

Settling in in Cascais marina

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Today is Sunday and I can't believe it's been a week already since we arrived in Cascais. Where to begin? There has been no internet in the marina so writing blog posts has been a challenge. I've also been too busy to actually sit down and write.  

Passage to Cascais, Portugal

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Staysail is up. We're sailing along at about 8 knots.  We departed from Leixoes at a leisurely pace having calculated that it would take us about 27 hours or more to get there. So if we left at 9 am, we'd be arriving at about noon the next day, a Sunday. Perfect. Nothing much gets going in Portugal before 10 am especially on a Sunday. We would be spending about two weeks there getting our standing rigging replaced, a big job. A really big job. We'd be assigned a berth near the yard.

Hopping down the coast - First stop Leixos

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Leaving Baiona just after dawn in cold mist. We had accomplished all we'd set out to do in Spain for this year. We said our good byes to the Lagos family and to Oscar Calero and Noelia at the MRCYB, leaving them a copy of the Spanish-English boater's dictionary by our friend Kathy Parsons. Showers along the coast of Portugal.

Movie set

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Pyrotechnics simulate boat fire at the fuel dock. Glad we were not downwind. When we were in Vigo, we were treated to entertainment one day. The RCNV staged a fire aboard a boat at the fuel dock using pyrotechnics. The guys had to escape the fire as the fire brigade arrived to put it out, all while what appeared to be very amateur crew filmed the event. They had to stage several takes.

Dolphins in the marina

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At the Monte Real Club de Yates in Bayona, the dolphins have learned that there are scores of mullet breeding and living in the marina waters. So the dolphins have been swimming into the marina and diving around the boats in their slips. We saw maybe five dolphins circling around. Smart little devils. BTW, that's the new passarelle Alex is building for the Med. It consists of a ladder, a sheet of plywood, and non-skid decking squares. It comes apart so we can use the ladder as a ladder. A creative way around something that can cost thousands.

Friends in the right places

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Aleria heading out the Ria Vigo toward Baiona. Photo by Alberto Lagos.  Nice photo of Aleria by Alberto Lagos. After we got all the canvas in place, we took off from Vigo as the afternoon wind was filling in. We hoisted the sails and quickly realized the sheet had been incorrectly led from the staysail. First fix. We were lazy and decided to sail along slowly without the yankee as it was not very far from Vigo to Baiona. We dodged several ferries and a powerboat came straight at us. We soon realized it was Alberto coming out to take pictures of us sailing out. He took some great shots though we felt bad we hadn't raise the full complement of sails. When we arrived in Baiona, we were assigned a berth right next to the President's yacht about as close to the clubhouse as we could be. Easy to get in, too. Someone had made a welcome sign that was secured to the dock in our slip. Oscar Calero, the manager of the club, was there in a flash with a bottle of wine and gre

Life underway

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Adios Punta Lagoa. We packed up, put the house in order, got a friend to house sit, voted in the referendum, got a train to a Dublin, spent the night in a hotel watching the results come in full view of hideous posters while waiting to get up at the crack of dawn to get a Ryanair flight to Vigo.

Sargassum warnings

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Seaweed, Sargassum, sargasso, Heterokontophyta ... different names for the same thing - more than a nagging nuisance, a potentially serious health hazard. It has been clogging beaches in the Caribbean, causing distress to locals and loss of tourism. The boats in the Volvo Ocean Race struggled in the Sargasso Sea this year. VOR even compiled the best  video footage  of the sailors struggling to stay free of the weed.

Down to the wire

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Vineyard looking good. Well, we had some work done on Aleria in Vigo over the winter.  Now we are in the final throes of getting ready to sail the next leg of our slow circumnavigation of the Mediterranean Sea. It's a sea, not an ocean. I've never known the difference, until now. My sense is that a sea has places to stop all along, whereas an ocean requires a crossing -- but who knows. Like the Caribbean Sea, you can sail from island to island to get across it.

New movie - Adrift

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Stranded and fighting for survival, Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin star in #AdriftMovie , in cinemas June 28. Watch the official trailer here.  As the two avid sailors set out on a journey across the ocean, Tami Oldham and Richard Sharp couldn't anticipate they would be sailing directly into one of the most catastrophic hurricanes in recorded history. In the aftermath of the storm, Tami awakens to find Richard badly injured and their boat in ruins. With no hope for rescue, Tami must find the strength and determination to save herself and the man she loves.

The Camino Voyage – An Epic 2,500 km Modern Day Celtic Odyssey

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The Camino Voyage , a full length feature film by Dónal Ó Céilleachair (pronounced O’Kelleher) of Dónal Ó Céilleachair, left us wishing it wouldn’t end.   We saw it in a special screening as part of the Celtic Camino Festival in Westport, County Mayo. The theatre was packed with Celtic Camino Society members from many countries, including visitors from as far away as Vancouver, Canada, the US, Holland, Spain, UK and all over Ireland.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is Growing Exponentially

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Plastics floating on the ocean surface Ocean plastic can persist in sea surface waters almost indefinitely, eventually accumulating in remote areas of the world’s oceans. A scientific study has determined that the plastic patch between California and Hawaii is now three times the size of France and accumulating plastics at an astonishing rate. Researchers at The Ocean Cleanup, an NGO dedicated to cleaning up the earth’s seas, recently published ( Nature , 22 Mar 2018 ) the results of a three-year study to determine the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP). The results are alarming.

How many boats are out there at any given time?

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It's a question we are asked often. How many boats are circumnavigating or sailing the oceans at any given time? It's not an easy one to answer, because some go for a year and do an Atlantic circuit, others continue around Cape Horn or through the Panama Canal. They pass through various ports and are counted multiple times, but no one that we are aware of provides a count at a given point in time like a census. As the seasons are different north and south, you'd have to count a date in the summer in the Northern hemisphere and another in the Southern hemisphere.

Reviving the Voyage for Madmen

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Robin Knox-Johnston on his return to Falmouth in 1969 on board Suhaili Last week, we saw The Mercy , a movie about Donald Crowhurst, the amateur sailor who lost his mind and his life in the first Golden Globe single-handed non-stop race around the world in 1968/69. The story of the nine men who took part was first told in an excellent book by Peter Nichols titled A Voyage for Madmen .

Arctic air, ice and temps: a sea change?

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Ice receding in the Arctic regions Yesterday I wrote about sea levels rising faster than predicted. Today, I'm going to summarize the latest in climate change anomalies . Scientists have recorded a warm air intrusion through the central Arctic this winter. In the area north of 80 degrees latitude, average temperatures were 36 degrees above normal. Whereas there were only four such intrusions between 1980 and 2010, there have been four occurrences in the past five years.

Sea level rise is accelerating

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A new study by NASA's Sea Level Change team published February 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that sea levels are rising at accelerating rates rather than a steady increase as previously thought. That means that by 2100, the levels will be twice as high as previously predicted, causing serious problems for many coastal cities. If the rate of ice melt continues at this pace, sea levels will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100. That's a lot more than shown in the graphic above.