Sunday -19 August 2018

Vila Real de Santo Antonio – Chipiona

We wanted to be leaving Vila Real as soon as the tide was high enough for us to get over the bar, but some of our communication with the marina staff was obviously lost in translation. We had asked the office for someone to come to return our deposit and collect the key, but at the appointed time no one came, so we radioed and asked them to come, which they agreed to.  After another 10 minutes I walked up to the hut that they hang out in, and asked to return the key.  They had made no attempt to even start the process, so I had to wait while they opened the office, found the details of the deposit and the exact 20 euro note that I had given them, before making me sign a receipt that I had got it back.  I’m obviously an uptight north European.

By the time we actually left there was more height of tide over the bar.  We had to motor all day as the wind was initially no- existent and then weak and from directly on the nose.  We had a longish journey, and a deadline to arrive before the marina staff left at Chipiona.  This was not helped by the hour’s time change between Spain and Portugal.  We tried to motor sail for a while but concluded that the sail was actually slowing us down, so we put it down again.  During this period, we had been acting by the book and were displaying our motor sailing cone, when I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and on investigation it proved to be the motor sailing cone.  One of the small lines on it that we attach to the boats bigger halliards had parted, and  we now had the cone in the water, easy to retrieve, and the halliard flying from the top of the mast, well out of our reach. We tried a couple of things before concluding that we could not afford more time, and we would be better able to do something about it in the marina.

All across the Bay of Cadiz, we had a regular stream of pot buoys to avoid. It was like a slalom race, and although we had the autopilot doing the steering, at least one of us was constantly on watch and making small adjustment to the course to miss the next pot buoy, floating in the water. Usually you find a small cluster of these, presumably put out by one fisherman, and then there is a gap. Here it was constant, not as close together as some other places, but just seemingly never ending.

The wind increased, but we expected it to be short lived, and chose to stick to the engine.  In hindsight, we would have been faster under sails, but who knew at the time. So we ended up battling into the wind and moderate waves, still rushing to catch up enough time to get to our destination. 

We had spoken to the marina the previous day, and as we were going to be borderline late, we called again with less than an hour to go, and they decided that the depth was not going to be enough for us.  We checked and rechecked our calculations, and spoke to them again, by which time they had found us the deepest berth in the marina, and we had calculated that there would be enough depth, just.

So we entered the harbour, still quite apprehensive about the depth and found that we had another upwind, down tide berthing to make.  Tricia nailed it first time, and when I went to the marina office the guy there, who had been extremely helpful throughout our dialogue, complimented us on the mooring and said that he had seen many folks make repeated failures at the same manoeuvre.

After a long, day we were glad to be safely in port, looking forward to exploring the town tomorrow.

Distance covered today	57	nautical miles
Trip distance covered	1350	nautical miles
Distance covered 2018	2070	nautical miles
Steve (and Tricia)