The Crossing

While in Lagos Chase and Eric where using the tender for exploration. Without a proper dingy anchor chance found the next best thing: Barra's Fortress. Which he now has a growing love for.



Ken McKinley our weather router from Locust Weather has done an excellent job routing us across the ocean twice and through numerous coastal passages. On day four or five his email described squally weather for the next few days. This is one of the twenty or thirty squals that we encountered ranging from a dark cloud that didnt change wind or weather to 41kts and stinging rain.
Eric and Jermemy enjoy one of the tropcal showers on the back bench.

After six days of nice wind and the spinnaker we sailed into a trough. With the breeze slowly dying and the sea state a little lumpy made waiting for wind a little painfull.

Even though the crew of Barra over the last few months has spent all their extra cash on food and plane tickets we are very rich in sunsets!

Bobby Martin enjoyed some of the trip. I think?

Another wonderful sunset with the 2A up.


Nice broom.


The southern crossing is completely different from the northern crossing. We not only enjoyed three Mahi-Mahi and five tuna but also standard clothing and night watch gear consisted of shorts and maybe a T shirt.

Madeira and Porto Santo

Lagos

Barra Goes Abroad

Chase and I just got back from a weekend trip to Seville and Gibraltar. Seville had tons of exquisite tile work, and at one government building they had a series of tiled alcoves with benches in them representing most of the cities in Spain.

The Cathedral in Seville was massive, but we didn't get a chance to go inside, since the ticket lady wouldn't buy Chase's story that he had forgotten his student ID, so we just got to admire the exterior.

The next morning we caught a bus to La Linea, the Spanish town that's just over the border from Gibraltar. The Spanish countryside along the way was covered with windmills and orange trees, most of which weren't yet ripe. We had a lengthy debate at a bus station about what type of citrus fruit was growing on the trees, finally deciding that they were unripe oranges.

As we came around the last bend in the road and started descending toward Algeciras and Gibraltar, the rock came into view - it's pretty spectacular. The land all around it is super flat, ande then Gibraltar just rears up out of the sea.

We stayed at a hostel just across the street from Casemate's square, the landward terminus of main street. It wasn't nearly as ritzy as the hostel in Seville, but at least we got 2 pieces of toast with butter and tea for breakfast. We spent our first day in Gibraltar hiking the Rock. It's very steep, so even though it's not all that high, it takes a while to get up and down.

From the top of the Rock we could see Africa across the straits of Gibraltar, but it was a hazy day so we could just barely make out the shape of the mountains.

The Barbary Macacques on the rock are very used to human presence, and didn't seem to even take notice of us. They treated passing cars more as playground equipment than a threat.

Gibraltar itself was a strange mix of Spanish and English cultures - the police, phone booths, and signage was straight out of England, but almost everyone spoke both English and Spanish, and we heard people mixing the two a lot.

Gibraltar seemed to have almost an island atmosphere, despite the fact that the border was pretty low key. It definitely lived up to our expectations.

Lagos

We're now in Lagos, Portugal. We hauled out last Wednesday and got the bottom painted, now we're back in the water at the Lagos Marina while Stu goes home for a few days. Lagos seems to be almost entirely populated by the British. The marina is full of liveaboards who are either wintering here or just live here, and the town's many bars are full of holidaymakers, even this late in the season.

We had a long, mostly uneventful motor (a brief episode with water pump belts notwithstanding) to Lagos from Porto, in wind speeds ranging from 0 to 0. We did pass the Russian sail training vessel Mir, powering the other direction in the lack of wind with her staysails set.

Leixoes, the marina for Porto, was weirdly hazy. The region is known for fog, but it was unlike any fog we'd seen before - low, hot, and clinging to the ground. Walking along the beach boardwalk from the harbor to the grocery store, we soon lost sight of the jetty walls in the haze.

To follow our journey, take a look at our GPS tracker at this website: http://charthorizon.com/m/cz/map?vessels=Barra&history=Bermuda_-_Ireland&v_scope=all

Fall

It feels like Autumn in Baiona today. There's a hint of wood smoke in the air, A certain stillness. It's warm, but behind the warmth lurks the hazy threat of winter. The sun is low in the sky, even at noon, casting long, harsh shadows from the ramparts of the castle. It's beautiful weather, but it won't last long. It seems as if we're just keeping even with the advancing seasons as we head south for the winter.

Baiona

We've arrived in Baiona, at the southern end of the Rias of Northwest spain. The town is old, with lots of winding alleys, as well as a castle on the headland protecting the bay.

We spent the last few days exploring the various spanish rias, which were all beatiful, although more built up than we expected. Just offshore of the mouth of the Ria de Vigo, where Baiona is located, are two islands which form a beautiful backdrop to the city.