Leaving Lisbon behind

We’d just had a really good few days with my parents, who’d flown over to see us. We spent some time taking in the sights of Lisbon and nearby Cascais.

The sail between the two takes about three hours and is a good one, although it can get quite sporty. The wind seems to do whatever it fancies at any given moment and big direction shifts are commonplace. One needs to be paying attention.

On 6th October, we weighed anchor in Cascais at 08:20. This was about an hour later than I’d planned, but I needed to catch up on some sleep.

The passage south to Sines was relatively uneventful. We had a Force 3, occasionally 4, from behind, which wasn’t quite enough to keep us moving as we wanted. We ended up motorsailing pretty much the whole way.

There were absolutely loads of dolphins. Several pods joined us along the way, including some whose fishing we appeared to interrupt, not that they seemed to protest too much.

There were plenty of gannets too; my favourite bird. Watching them dive for fish is highly impressive and slightly disturbing in equal measure. The question came up of whether they ever break their wings hitting the water like that. I don’t know, but I can’t imagine they’d get very far afterwards.

We arrived in Sines at 17:05 and dropped anchor where there were 2 other boats in teh anchorage. First impressions were that it was going to be rolly. The other two were rocking about all over the show. We seemed to be getting away with it slightly better, although it was far too early to tell.

Orcas have also been on our minds. There had been reports of sightings and attacks in recent days, both near where we’d left and near where we were heading. From the reports we’d been following, they appeared to be moving north.. apparently.

We’re in the orcas.pt Telegram groups, which have been a very useful resource. There are people in there who know considerably more about orcas than we do, sharing sightings, tracking movements and discussing their behaviour and the advice available. If you are sailing this region id consider that the orcas.pt website is a no brainer.

The advice we’d been seeing was to stay inside the 20-metre depth contour. I’ll be honest, we haven’t consistently done that. Our thinking has been that if there’s evidence of orcas close to our planned route, we’d rather wait than set off in the first place.

When we have gone, we’ve sometimes been in deeper water, weaving between fishing boats and keeping an eye on the reports. We ensure that we are sailing within about an hour of somewhere to get in, although that’s our own judgement rather than any advise.

There have been a few occasions when the reported activity has felt uncomfortably close. So far, we haven’t had an encounter ourselves.

For now, we’re anchored in Sines, with an evening here before carrying on south tomorrow. We’ll see how much sleep the rolling allows.