Another week in Faro

Last weekend was really nice, with Tomaz's birthday on saturday and very nice and lazy sunday. We swam, read books and had a wonderful evening with pretty sunset and freshly baked muffins.

 

During the week we stayed anchored near Culatra island and were trying to finish boat projects that were on to-do list.

On monday and tuesday we finished work on solent stay (reinforcement plate etc) and I pulled Tomaz up the mast to put stay in place. We pulled up the storm jib to see if existing genoa tracks are also right for it. Luckily they were, so we changed our planned installation of additional tracks for storm jib and the flock. Instead we were going to install genoa blocks to pull the flock down half meter in front of the existing tracks. 

This we did on wednesday and thursday, as well as  changing the lines for the flock - the old ones were stiff with salt and heavy usage.

On friday we first moved to the anchorage the closest to Faro and then installed the attachment rings for spinnaker poles on the mast and did a number of smaller stuff. Friday was not good day for our equipment, because first Tomaz's laptop died and in the evening our outboard died as well, just when we wanted to go in town for some shopping and a dinner. So i had to row. But the evening was still very nice - we had our 3rd cataplana here. They were all great, but i think the first one was the best.

 

On saturday morning we tried to fix the laptop, without any success. Also just cleaning the fuel filter on our outboard didn't help - so i had to row to Faro again. We were meeting our friend Richard that Tomaz got to know on Anything sailing forum. We had a lovely day together and we never ran out of topics to discuss about.

On sunday we managed to get the laptop working again and after doing a full maintenance on outboard that one also started working again. We were very happy about both. While we were finishing some small stuff around the boat in the afternoon the wind got stronger and stronger and black clouds started appearing. It all gave the anchorage and Faro very dramatic look.

 

 

The stormy weather was forecast, and some locals even pulled their boats on the shore.

 

We got a lot of wind and rain in the night and didn't get much sleep, since the boat was circling around the anchor, shaking and moaning, so we needed to check it regularly. We stopped checking the wind speed at some 30 knots, we estimate the gusts were 40 - 45 knots. This time forecast was very accurate. Hope it stays that way, since it is promising some nice weather from saturday on when we want to start our passage to Canary islands.