Isla de Lobos

For the first time in goodness knows how many years we had an anchorage to ourselves. There were about five or six boats anchored here when we arrived but then they all upped and left leaving ourselves for the rest of the night.

Of course, we are not right out in the wilderness and you can see the lights of Corralejo over the water only about two miles away. The water is crystal clear and while looking over the side to see if we could see the anchor, a ray passed. It must have been about three feet across. I am now very unpractised at snorkelling otherwise, I would have been tempted to swim the 8 meters or so down to see it.

We walked all round the island. It only took about three hours but was very pleasant though the whole island is a barren mix of lava and sedimentary rocks. It used to be full of fur seals but these were hunted to extinction many years ago. The visitor centre talks about how the first Spanish settlers here did just that. More recently, there was an attempt to develop salt pans but they were too late as the wider use of refrigeration in the fifties killed the demand for salt and the pans were abandoned. There is a lighthouse on the northern side of the island which is typically Spanish being large with a big building now abandoned. I have long thought that lighthouse authorities could make a useful bit of income letting out their old keepers houses and cottages to people who wanted a lonely holiday spot.

We didn't quite climb the highest hill but got this dramatic view of the path.

On the south east side of the island is a tiny hamlet called El Puertito. It really is a miniature harbour being built next to a rocky inlet and having a few boats moored up. It is far too shallow for us of course but we may explore it in the dinghy. I presume that the original inhabitants used to fish from it. They all look like holiday cottages now though there is clearly no electricity as all the houses have either solar cells or a wind generator.

Through the day, some other boats have arrived and they are likely to stay the night. First to arrive was Pampero of Down who are keen snorkellers. They had a look at the reef that guards the lagoon in the bay here and said it is teeming with fish who follow you around. We are probably going to stay another night and see about exploring there ourselves. Next up a tiny French boat has arrived and are eagerly diving off their boat as well.

I took a swim in the water which was very refreshing. It was a slightly strange feeling swimming in nearly thirty feet of sapphire blue water and able to see the sandy bottom underneath me.

Finally, after having the anchorage to ourselves, no less than four other boats have now anchored – one of whom was Pampero. And so ends one of my more enjoyable birthdays!

N.B.
We are only able to get the intertubes via a 3G dongle at the moment so I am having to be a bit mean with uploading photos. Lots to follow when we have a fast wifi connection.

At Anchor At Last

We have left Lanzarote now and are at the northern extremity of Fuerteventura. We have found a lovely anchorage behind Isla de Lobos. This used to be full of seals, lobo marina being the Spanish for seal. Of course, they have been hunted to extinction a long time ago. It is very nice though.

The last ferry of the day came a few minutes ago and took the last of the tourists off just as the last of the other anchored boats upped and offed. Spanish people tend not to spend nights at anchor. So, we now have the place to ourselves. The funniest bit is that as soon as the ferry had departed a group of four men appeared on the quay with their rods. There is not a quay in Spain which doesn't have someone fishing off it!

This second picture shows a rather nice view of the sails looking up through the forward hatch - taken by Audrey.

Maintenance Stuff

Maintenance Stuff
As noted previously, we have been in Marina Rubicon with a view to fitting a new masthead tricolour navigation light. We have also taken advantage of the excellent chandler here to do some other maintenance tasks. In the meantime, we have also got to know our current neighbours on Pampero of Down who are on a similar cruise to us.

For a while we have wanted to make up a lifting bridle for the dinghy so as to be able to hoist it clear of the water by the side of the boat. Doing this has several advantages. Firstly, it makes it less easy for thieves to relieve us of it. It is also not a good idea to have the dinghy trailing astern in rough weather as it could run forward and get damaged by the wind vane. Tethering it alongside is no good as it then rubs and bangs on the hull which keeps us awake.

The bridle seems to work fine but in the process of testing it, I discovered that the cleat on the mast for the spinnaker halyard had corroded it's rivets right through. One good yank and it flew off. I staggered backward and panicked a bit about where I might fall (nowhere) but the cleat caught me a good whack on my upper lip.

After a lot of searching around, I found the riveter and then drilled out the old one and reattached the cleat. At least it didn't happen when trying to drop the cruising chute in a rising wind which would have dropped the whole thing in the drink!

Now we still have to work out how to do the tricolour light. Suggestions anyone?

Abortive Trip Up the Mast

Today was to be the day that we fitted our lovely new LED tricolour light up the mast. Of course, to do that you have to get up the mast and remove the old one first before even thinking of getting the new one on.

It is only about forty feet up but it feels like a very long way when you are up there!

The frustrating thing is that I could not get high enough up to see how to detach the old one. A bosuns chair has a strop which brings the bottom of the hoist point to about eye level which meant the top of the mast was about a foot above the top of my head and everything had to be done by feel. There is no wind at the moment so it was also getting very hot up there and I had to admit defeat and come back down.

Hopefully a dig around the recesses of the intertube thing will find some suggestions! In the meantime, have a laugh at my backside encased in an orange bosuns chair.

Very Off Topic But ...

It is great to see such a thrilling sporting event and also for the mainstream media to give sailing some real attention for once.

BBC reporting on Americas Cup

That said, sailboat racing has come to a strange pass when they have upper wind limits for the boats to go out. Makes me glad I am a cruiser really.

Oh well, back to fitting masthead tricolour lights now.

Moved into Marina Rubicon

Well, the waves became a bit steep and they had to be crossed! It had to be done.

Seriously, we were intending to come in here tomorrow but after a trip back to Puerto Calero for reasons outlined below we spent a couple of hours being very uncomfortable and then upped anchor and came into the marina. It is a lot more comfortable here. This is a picture of one of our neighbours in the anchorage.

We also had a bit of good news as well. One of the things we are going to do is upgrade the navigation light at the top of the mast. For non yotties, you have to show a specific set of navigation lights when sailing at night. A yacht (We do qualify as such here) has to show a red light on the port side round to 113 degrees, a green one on the starboard side and a white light for the remainder astern. This is done with a single light at the top of the mast called, logically enough, a tricolour. It is supposed to be visible from 2 miles so has to be reasonably bright. For an incandescent light that equals 25 watts which drinks a lot of battery power all night. There have been LED alternatives for some time but they have till now be ludicrously expensive. Just recently they came down in price so we ordered one from our favourite on line chandler - Force4.

Of course, getting stuff delivered to the Canary Islands should be easy shouldn't it? They are part of Spain and Spain is in the EU right? Well, sort of. Las Islas Canarias are not part of the EU economic area despite being part of Spain and using the Euro. This means that all items delivered to the islands have to clear customs. Our light left the UK fine but then got stuck in customs here on Lanzarote before being sent back to the couriers depot in Madrid.

After a lot of toing and froing, we have finally got it and now just have to get it fitted at the top of the mast. Clearly, there will be a long post with photos for that. This is what the beast looks like anyway.

I should like to make a special thanks to Force 4 who have been very helpful and stock a wide range of chandlery. Click here for their website.

Pastures New But Still on Lanzarote

We are finally at anchor after what feels like months since we have been able to ride to our own ground tackle. On checking the log book, I find that we left Playa de la Puntilla in Bahia de Cadiz on the twenty third of July so it is nearly two months exactly. There is a real satisfaction of being more self sufficient when you are using your own anchor. It is usually free as well while ports and marinas always cost money. W are currently anchored off the tourist town of Playa Blanca just at the entrance to Maria Rubicon on the southern tip of Lanzarote. We will spend a few days here before moving onto Fuerteventura and other points south and west.

We had expected a nice downwind sail in the prevailing north easterlies but the wind had other ideas and it turned into a beat the whole way. We also experienced our first Canary acceleration zone. These are areas, generally near the southern end of islands where the wind gets accelerated by up to ten or fifteen knots. In the gentle winds we had this only took the breeze up to the top of force 5 for a while and a single reef in the main was adequate even though we were hard on the wind. Of course the wind also headed us round the point which meant we sailed nearly all the way across El Estrecho de la Bocayana to Fuerteventura before being able to tack back and make for the marina breakwater. Thus for a ten mile passage we covered 17.5 miles on the log. Other yotties will be familiar with this sort of demoralizing statistic! At least the tidal streams are not significant here. When we were still in England, we once logged 35 miles to travel the seventeen miles from Dartmouth to Salcombe.

Proof that we do occasionally hand steer!

The cruising guide is a bit cagey about anchoring here. They warn you that it is a bit roly as there are frequent ferries to Corralejo on Fuerteventura and the marina authorities get a bit antsy if you don't go and moor up in the marina. Just as we arrived, a nice chap from another boat disabused us of this and said the marina were actually very friendly and were perfectly happy for us to stay out here. We will be investigating the truth of this shortly as well as spending more money in the chandler here. One major reason for coming here is that there is a very good chandler who actually stocks stuff we might want. One thing we really want to do is improve the security of our dinghy. We will make up a bridle so we can hoist it out of the water on the level complete with the deck. We will also have to get a way of locking both the outboard and the dinghy to themselves and the dock. In truth, the dinghy is probably not really worth anything but the outboard is nearly new of course and they are favourites for thieves. Sadly, statistics show that most boat burglars are other yotties. We will be moving into areas where theft is more of an issue than it has been to date and we will not be able to rely on being a bit scruffy with other much more attractive targets around us.

In the meantime, we will enjoy our stay here. We need to wait here for a while as we are still waiting for a package to reach us from the UK. I ordered a new masthead navigation light. The existing one uses very thirsty incandescent bulbs while new ones use LED lights which require much less electricity. It also transpires that a bird must have hit ours at some point as it is all wonky. I would rather only do one trip up the mast to replace rather than mend and the replace the light. So, we wait.

More Tourism in Lanzarote

Our second day with the hire car also proved fruitful. We visited our third true tourism site which was the “Mirador del Rio” which is a posh lookout point overlooking the channel between Lanzarote and Isla Graciosa at the northern tip of the island. As with the other attractions, it was heavily influenced by Cesar Manrique so is quite artistic. The views are of course spectacular though we looked with envy at the boats anchored in Bahia Francisco and moored in Caleta del Sebo as we would have preferred to have been looking up at the lookout from there rather than down on them. There was a yellow boat in the anchorage that we think we recognised from Funchal. Next time is something that we keep promising ourselves when we see something we would have liked to do this time but couldn't for whatever reason. We would have been there if the process of getting first a permit to enter the park and then a berth allocated had not defeated us. You are supposed to be able to apply for both of these on line but the forms do not appear on any website which means you are left with having to fax them off – not an easy process when you are on a boat with only a mobile phone for company! Still, we will make it there next time!

As ever, you had to time yourself quite carefully with the mirador so as to contrive to be there between coachloads of Germans or Brits. It seems as if they are the only visitors to the island from northern Europe. You hardly ever hear a French voice or indeed Dutch or any of the others. We were lucky this time as three coachloads of Germans were filing in just as we left.

The previous day we had spotted a nice place for a picnic lunch on the road outside Orzola and we started making our way down there. A distraction though delayed lunch as we passed a hand painted sign advertising wines. A dusty road led us to a small building where a nice man poured us some of his wine. As well as wine he also poured us some cactus liqueur which was more to Audrey's taste than mine. The wine however was very good. They cultivate a range of grapes in a unique manner as described below. The wines range from a heavy white with lots of acidity to some very sweet Moscatels. Moscatel is of course the same as the Muscat grape. They also have a variety of Malvasia called Malvasia de Volcan. This must I presume be related to the Malvasia they use in the sweet Madeira wines though here it is used to make a semi sweet wine and is unfortified of course. They also make some red wine though, perhaps because of the extreme aridity of the landscape, the white grape varieties seem to do better.

Proof that one of us at least was there!

Anyway, we bought a couple of bottles and I had a nosy round and took a few pictures. The northern region is situated around a village called Ye though they only have one quality marque (Denominación de Origin in Spanish) which is for the entire island.

Lanzarote is not very mountainous so the drive down from the Mirador and vineyard was not too precipitous and we arrived and parked ourselves next to a stony path down to the beach. There we saw the waves breaking on the long solidified lava with El Roque del Este in the distance. This is a smallish but steep rock sticking up about five miles off the coast. It gave us quite a bit of work on the night we arrived as it is unlit and we had to pass it. Although steep to, it was completely invisible and I had to take it on trust that we were safely past before altering course to pass closer to Arrecife on the way to Puerto Calero. It is very hard to convey to non yotties the angst associated with passing an invisible bit of stuff that will go bang very loudly if you hit it! Thus, seeing it from landward evoked quite strong feelings.

Lunch was enjoyable and that stretch of coastline is very beautiful.

Our next destination was to be right at the other extremity of the Island. Marina Rubicon just outside Playa Blanca is on the southern end of the island and is where the ferry to Fuerteventura leaves from. We wanted to go there partly to check out the marina as a possible alternative destination but also because there is a good chandler y there. The chandler y is certainly excellent and we spent a wodge of money in there but on things we really did need. Not least, we now have a Canary Island courtesy flag which is now flying under the Spanish one on our starboard cross tree.

Our final destination was the area of La Geria which is at the heart of the Lanzarote wine industry. It is this zone – right on the edge of the Parque de Timanfaya where they developed their unique method of fine cultivation.

Essentially, the problem they have is that there is an awful lot of sunshine and very little rain. So, conservation of moisture is of paramount importance. The trade winds also blow nearly continuously so the vines need protection from the desiccating effect of this. The solution is to cover the fertile soil with volcanic gravel and surround each vine with a low wall to protect it from the wind.

The fertile soil is protected by the volcanic gravel which, nonetheless, allows any moisture to penetrate through it being highly porous. The wall is built out of volcanic rock and is aligned with the direction of the trade winds – typically north east – and so the vine can thrive in what would appear to be a sterile desert! Of course, production is very low by this method, not least since the density of vines is very low. A book I treated myself to quotes that they can usually get 1500 kg of fruit per hectare. This is an awful lot less than in somewhere such as Bordeaux but it is possible to get good quality grapes though.

I bought myself a book which talks about the production of wine here and goes into excruciating detail on the methods of cultivation as well as the history of wine growing here. One aspect of it that really comes out is the issue of water scarcity but also how the volcanic activity of both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has influenced the development of viticulture here.
We are intending to spend a few more days here so may try and book ourselves on a wine tour and talk at one of the bodegas.

Finally, here is a picture of the car we hired!

Visiting Lanzarote

We have been a few days in Puerto Calero now and have got the feel for not being either on passage or in Madeira. We have hired a car for two days and spent today visiting the major tourist attractions on the island.

First, and most importantly for me, was El Parque del Timangaya o Fuego. Like all the Canary Islands, Lanzarote is volcanic in origin. The vulcanicity took a different form though and there is also recorded evidence of major eruptions. For six years between 1730 and 1736. It then repeated the trick again in 1824 when there were huge eruptions. However, these did not take the form of explosive pyroclasitc flows such as happened on Mt. Saint Helens in 1980. The eighteenth century event pushed out large amounts of lava and ash which created the characteristic landscape of smallish cinder cones dotted around. The 1824 eruption was more like the volcanoes of Hawaii in that it consisted of highly viscous lava that covered the original ash and cinder landscape with solid rock though the cinder cones are still very much in evidence.

Having been a geography student and always interested in earth science I was really looking forward to visiting this park. The scenery certainly lived up to expectations with a totally alien landscape apparently devoid of almost any life. You can see the cinder cones emerging from the lava fields though there is now only one active cone – Monte Timanfaya itself. The actual experience was however a bit disappointing. The area is eclologically very fragile and all visits are ruthlessly managed both with a view to protecting the environment but also to cater to a not quite lowest common denominator for the tourist. We eschewed the camel trek and drove up to the visitor center near Monte Timanfaya. There you are herded onto a coach which drives you round a road that takes in the best sights with a minimal recorded commentary in the usual three languages.

The scenery was spectacular though and we managed to get some photos that caught the desolate feel of the place. The things that we notice most though were the proliferation of a sort of lichen growing on the lava flows along with thick succulent cactus type bushes growing out of the ash slopes. It occurred to me that the position of Lanzarote in the desert belt of around 30 degrees north and its very low rainfall has had the effect of preserving the lava in the form it took after the eruptions. When a temperate or tropical volcano erupts such as Vesuvius or Hawaii the rain breaks down the rock to form extremely fertile soil which further erases the evidence of the cataclysmic events of the past.

I think that the way the park authorities could improve the experience for seriously intersted tourists such as us (read geeks really) would be to lay on occasional “experts” tours where someone could take select groups on a more detailed tour explaining the details of the specific geological activity going on under our feet rather than simply pouring water into steel pipes let into the rock to create an artificial geyser. I am sure there would be plenty of takers for that and it would provide some income for impoverished geology graduates working on their theses!

Our next destination was to the north of the Island to see both Orzola and Jameo del Agua. Orzola is the small port from which the ferry to Graciosa departs. It is written up in the cruising guide as somewhere that intrepid yotties might stop. Given that it is a ferry harbour and the breakwater has been extended, I wanted to see if we would consider visiting. The thing that most struck me was how small a town it is and the harbour is tiny. Truly, it would be a very “interesting” place to visit and would truly not be for the faint hearted so I don't think we will be going there. We did however enjoy an excellent local lunch there. Next time we come here we will hopefully be fully armed with a permit for Graciosa so can perhaps take the ferry ride to Orzola so as to see what the entrance is like from the sea.

En route we passed some of the farming works they carry out here.

There are two attractions at the northern end to which we had tickets. Jameo del Agua and El Mirador del Rio. It was a bit of a toss up about which to do after lunch but Jameo won out as it was closer and on the way back to the marina. This site consists of an old lava tunnel which dips below sea level and so has a large pool of salt water in it where a unique species of sightless crab live. It is also famous as being where the local population hid when pirates were seeking to capture them to sell into slavery. Those said pirates were probably Sallee Rovers from the site of our visit to Morocco – Rabat.

Visiting this site brings you into contact with the very influential local artist Cesar Manrique who was born in Arrecife and was extremely influential in the early development of tourism on the island. I think that most of his intervention was for the good. In particular, he worked to stop developers building concrete jungles as was done on the Costa del Sol. He had a strong part in designing the development of the caves at Jameo del Agua. Some of this appears frankly pretentious and it would have been better to leave the cave in a more natural state as this invariably gives greater grandeur to nature's work than human intervention. However, it is still very dramatic and the bars and such like will bring in useful revenue to allow for the ongoing conservation work needed to keep such a structure open and prevent it from collapsing.

This little pile of stones was on the beach at Jameo del Agua but I don't think Cesar Manrique did it. He did the octopus below!

Tomorrow we will be visiting the Mirador del Rio which was designed by Cesar Manqrique and overlooks the channel between Lanzarote and Isla Graciosa. We will also be using the car to do some shopping.

Madeira to Lanzarote (and thoughts on Puerto Calero)

Well, we had a rather frustrating trip to here with it taking four days to complete 312 nautical miles. That included over 110 miles of motoring otherwise we would most likely still be out at sea somewhere.

It seems that we have had our first brush with a tropical storm. Not in the sense of being caught out in storm force winds but the wider effect they have. There is a tropical storm Humberto out in the middle of the Atlantic to the north west of the Cabo Verde Islands. For now the NOAA Hurricane Center provides information here. The practical upshot has been to severely disrupt the winds around the Canaries. We experienced extensive calms after the tenth and in one six hour period only managed to cover 15 miles or so. Normally, we reckon on an average of 100 miles a day. On the first day of this last one we had excellent winds and managed nearly 120 miles which is going like a rocket for us!

Still, we are here and now tucked up in Puerto Calerro near the southern tip of Lanzarote. We may move to an anchorage outside the capital town Arrecife if the winds play ball. You need the prevailing NE trades to be blowing there and a northerly swell or it becomes untenable.

This is a snap I took as we made our final approach and it shows the landscape of the island to very good effect.

This is a very typical marina village but it has good services - not least a cheapish laundry so we will be spending a few days here. We also will finally hire a car and do the touristy stuff on this island. Lanzarote is most famous for it's active volcanoes in El Parque del Timanfaya. They also have an interesting sounding indigenous wine industry which we want to investigate.

Arrived Lanzarote

A rather frustrating passage. We started well with over 115 miles logged in the first 24 hours. That is going like a rocket for us but then the wind died on us and after a day with less than 60 miles logged we had to motor the last hundred or so miles. I'll give a fuller update after getting some sleep.

Last Day in Madeira

Time has been passing and we need to think about moving on. The trouble is that we have been really enjoying our stay here in Madeira. So far the entire archipelago as proven to be a great experience and a real vindication of the decision to go cruising. A combination of great scenery, easy transport and really nice people has made our stay truly memorable. However a combination of things now mean that we need to move on.

So, we will be off tomorrow though not in a mad rush. It is about three hundred miles to Lanzarote so we should be at sea for around three days.

In the meantime, we spent today on the buses though it was nothing like the dreadful seventies sitcom which British readers will be familiar with. You can buy a one day card to give you unlimited travel on the buses of the Island. We started by heading up to a village on the north coast called Faial. The ride up the valley looked quite exciting initially but then we popped into a tunnel – a very long tunnel so didn't see any of the dramatic mountain roads. Still, we were in the village quite quickly and stepped out into a rather cloudy and chilly village. To be honest, the grey rocks and sea along with steep cliffs made it feel a bit like north Devon or Cornwall though on a much grander scale. We were able to see the island of Porto Santo again which reminded us of our stay there.

What we wanted after that was a bus to take us to Funchal which should have been over a very windy road which would pass close to the highest peaks in the island. The sketchy time tables seemed to indicate that the 138 would oblige us and one was due in about 20 minutes. It did duly arrive and started climbing up every steeper roads and round ever tighter corners. However, it then turned round and went down and even steeper road but to almost exactly where we started from. It then joined the main road back to Machico. Sure enough, we entered Machico and then proceeded to Funchal via the Via Rapida along the south coast. This left us feeling a bit short changed but the mountain part was truly spectacular and we are determined that our next visit will either include working out a detailed bus itinerary or hiring a car.

Once again we were in Funchal and after a lunch, we caught the tour bus. It is a very long time since either of us has taken a tour bus and they have not really improved unfortunately. The chief criticism I have is that their multi lingual recorded commentary is very poor and would have been much better had a human been delivering it even if he couldn't do it in ten languages! Still, it was relaxing to sit on it and be driven out to Camara de Lobos. This is a very picturesque fishing village to the west of Funchal.

The view from our lunchtime spot:

Then the view of Camara de lobos from a big yellow tour bus:

Eventually, we started taking ourselves towards the bus station but a voice from the pavement cafes outside the Theatre came from Alan and Claire from Moonstone so we stopped for a chat with them. They have been in the marina in Funchal for a week or so now and have been having a great time. We almost wish we had moved along there despite making so many friends here in Machico. Perhaps the only thing we would wish for is that people would realise that as interesting as boats are, craning round to peer below is a bit intrusive when that below is your home. We sometimes wonder how they would react if we followed them home and peered through their windows.

The final bus rude back was uneventful of course and we are gearing up for a departure now. There is a more pressing one though. A new tropical storm has just developed to the west of the Cabo Verde islands. Clearly, we will not be any where near it but the forecasts for swell show the wave patterns changing in about a week and the normal north or north-easterly swell will be replaced with a south west one for a while. We do not want to be at sea when that hits. This is the first time we have been affected by a tropical storm even if it is in such a passing and small way. From now on we will be keeping a close eye on the US Weather Office the NOAA and their National Hurricane Center will become one of our favourite websites. It can make interesting reading: NHC.

One thing is certain though, that we will be back here again some time!

Life in Machico

We have been really enjoying ourselves here in Machico. Quite a little community between the cruisers has developed. We now have thre french boats here, one German, one American and of course Eva Kullgren from Sweden.

We have been all quite preoccupied with the drama of Eva's engine though. It has been living a very hard life over the last couple of years and needs quite a lot of TLC. The local Volvo Penta agency seems to be quite keen to help her out and over the last week or so they have been working to remove it. Needless to say, we have all taken a keen interest and have shared her ups and downs over this. Suffice to say, that it was eventually removed yesterday to be taken away to their workshop. This was the cue for an impromptu dockside celebration.

Another activity we have been up to is to put our paintings on the harbour wall. This is an odd tradition amongst long distance cruisers. It started in Horta on Faial in the Azores when transient yachts would paint their name on the harbour wall. Now the tradition has expanded to all sorts of places. There are a lot of them at Porto Santo but we never got around to getting a design together but all the others here have done so and we managed to get some spray paint and a scalpel from the local chinese shop and put the following bit of graffiti on the wall here.

We will work on getting a better template so it looks more professional for next time!

We hope to be heading off to the Canaries around Monday or Tuesday.

More Tourism and Some Dramas

Well, we have been here in Machico for nearly a week now. We have managed to do some stuff including another trip to Funchal where we visited a madeira wine lodge – Blandy's is perhaps one of the largest and oldest. We also treated ourselves to an excellent lunch there and finally managed a quick look round the famous Mercardo de Lavradores. The Mercado was a bit of a disappointment and we made snobby comments to ourselves about what Borough Market is like in London! We should probably have gone there in the morning though as all the fish stalls were closed.

The Wine Armazem as they are called here was very good though. The talk was quite lively and included a reasonable amount of information on the history of Madeira wine and how it is made. For those who are oenological nerds like me, the chief interest is the apparently terrible way they treat the wine. As ever, this goes back into the history of the wine.

Ships used to take on the wine as ballast and to protect it they fortified the wine. However, the conditions on the ship were frankly dreadful with constant motion to disturb the wine and constant heating and cooling of the wine as the ships sailed to the tropics and back. The result was of course that a percentage of the wine was lost to evaporation but that it gained the distinctive flavour that they work hard to create today. Essentially, they do this by storing the casks in the lofts of their buildings rather than in the cellar. There the humid air and the sun on the roof keep heating and cooling the wine and so it seems to go to the tropics and back.

The wine has had it's ups and downs of course. The wine faces stiff competition from both Porto and Jerez. Then, in recent times there was a rush to make as much wine as possible with no view to the quality all of which adversely affected the market for Madeira. I can't help thinking that the Flanders and Swan song “Have Some Madeira M'Dear” may also have affected the UK market a bit. Thankfully, the major producers are now attempting to address the quality issue and insisting on only using the local grape variety specified rather than blending it with other, easier to grow grape varieties.

The taste experience was of course great. It is a difficult wine to describe and we only got to try a medium and sweet version. It is quite a lot stronger than either Porto or sherry and doesn't have the musty taste that even sweet sherries gain from the Pedro Jimenez grape or the supple smoothness of Porto. There is lots of alcohol in it though and the sweek fruitiness of the Malvasia grape made the sweet on very nice. Needless to say, we treated ourselves to a bottle and, me being me, I had to go for one of their single vintage bottles which we will use to celebrate the end of the cruise.

On other fronts, we have found that there must be a bit of an electrical short as the batteries are not holding their charge properly. This has been masked for quite a while because the wind generator has been keeping up. We then managed to thoroughly confuse ourselves with measuring the resistance across various parts of the electrical system. With the battery switch set to the domestic bank we see less than full resistance with all the circuit breakers open. Thus, there seems to be a leak somewhere but we can't isolate it. None of the circuits on the switch panel seem to be problematical but there is not much wiring and it all looks very professional and secure between the batteries, the main battery selector switch and the switch panel. Oh well, we will have to see and at least the wind is now back up which means that Henry the Navigator can stay on top of it all.

Still, our problems pale into insignificance to those of poor Eva on Olina of Eva7Seas fame. Her engine is effectively knackered. At some point the head gasket blew and water is in the oil and has been for some time now. The Volvo agents here have promised to rebuild it for her in their break times but have so far run in to all sorts of problems getting it out of the boat. I helped to see about disconnecting the prop shaft but it is apparently totally seized to the gearbox flange. I really don't think that they will be able to rebuild it and she needs to think in terms of a replacement. They might have a reconditioned 10hp engine which is much newer than what she has but we need to see it first really. And so the saga continues.

We are hoping to start heading to the Canaries ourselves around the weekend but feel we ought to put into a marina for a night or two so as to put the mains charger on the batteries first to ensure they are really in tip top charge. It would also be good to get a hot shower rather than just using the beach shower here.

Joys Of A Free Harbour

We have been enjoying staying here in Machico but there are some downsides of a free harbour. The quay is of course a public space and lots of locals and tourists walk out along it. They then have an added bonus of seeing some yachts from much closer than if they went to a large gated marina. For them this is great but for us it means we have a succession of strangers peering into our home. Both of us get very antsy about this. For me, the chief irritation comes when you do something like blowing up the dinghy when you get a line of men watching you sweat away. They are also not shy about doing their best to peer below. We feel like following them home and then staring at them park their car before squinting through all their windows but would probably get arrested for stalking.

More annoying have been the rod fishermen. One of their number succeeded in casting his line over our stern and his line became entangled in the wind generator. Then, rather than politely telling us, he broke his line off and ran away leaving a hopeless tangle round the shaft of Don Quixote. This morning we lowered him down and then with a lot of poking round with a cooking knife and some tweezers we managed to get it all out and are now back pushing the amp-hours into the batteries. Oh well, it is still a really nice spot and much nicer than being cooped up in an all too perfectly clean marina ghetto.

Off to Funchal tomorrow to see the Botanical gardens, try some Madeira wine and investigate the chandler there which carries very good reports.