2nd to 4th December 2017
When we woke in the morning and moved from the reception pontoon to the visitors one, we took a look around and thought: “what a lovely accident”. The marina is in the middle of a pretty section of town, a bric-a-brac market was just setting up adjacent to the marina and the weather was lovely.
I spent most of our first day there fixing the autopilot and checking over the other electronics. All seems well (a couple of passages later), although we wont really know until we have some seas and wind on the quarter again, in case it was a loose connection that was exacerbated by the particular type of boat movement! At the same time I rearranged the battery bank to try and reduce the voltage drop which had been causing some other intermittent errors and preventing one of our Eberspacher heaters from starting without engine/generator/shore-power. A productive day.
Meanwhile, Charlotte and the kids went for a walk to try and find out where some music was coming from. Turns out it was an awesome Christmas fair which they spent a couple of hours with until the sun set and temperatures started to plummet. We visited the fair again the next day to give Arthur and Theo more time on the bouncy castles, playground, and with the animals. And caught up with some laundry, which is getting harder and harder to dry on the boat, at a local dry cleaning place.
Met an American couple and their dog who were on a catamaran called Sea Wolf. A short conversation as we were each going separate ways, but we may bump into each other again in Lisbon. As it turned out, we spoke on the VHF the following day as they diverted to the same anchorage we were using – and wanted to make sure we left space in deeper water as they were intending to leave at low tide the following day.
And, another advantage of a brief marina stop, we had wifi so I was able to live-stream some of the Ashes cricket (via an Australian cricket app).
