Day 1 was a day of exploring and shopping. First stop was a hardware store. Next a DIY store to look for stuff we couldn't find in the hardware store (we still didn't find everything) and finally "HIPERCHINA"!
Here's an indication of the hardware and other 'stuff' we were after.
Day 2 was a jobs day. Jobs such as these...
The end of day 2 was when I realised we still needed at least 2 more days to complete our jobs plus the best part of another 1 to finish our shopping/provisioning.
I wrote the above yesterday night (Sunday) after we had entertainment Pete from Samsara, an old friend of Bonny's previous owners, Gavin and Geraldine who hailed us a few days ago when passing in his dinghy. We eventually saw him off at 0130! Now im the warm light of a rather late Algarvian morning, I suspect we will need longer still.
This is our current list of outstanding jobs ..
And despite a mammoth shopping expedition by Mick on Thursday and a joint one to the Supermarket on Friday...
we have started to build a new shopping list...
We're in the grips of a never ending cycle of jobs needing more stuff to do more jobs requiring more stuff ... At some point I'll just have to call time and go and be dammed!
But that raises another question - go where? Or at least in which direction? The Azores are almost directly West of here. Normally we would have a perfect beam reach (wind on the side) to there. However, the weather in the mid Atlantic is not normal at present. The Azores High (pressure) has turned into a Low. As a consequence the so called "Portuges Trades" - northerly winds - now peter out about 400 miles offshore then there's a ridge of high pressure with very light variable winds to cross before being confronted with strong westerly winds blowing directly from ...... the Azores!
So if things are still like that when we are finally ready to leave we may need to take a rather circuitous route via Maderia!
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