The big circle – Porto to…Porto!
Our plans to complete the boat delivery from Porto to Gibraltar did not turn out as planned. The boat is still in Porto, and we’re back in Madrid, making new plans. The weather and waves were not at all cooperative, but we did make an attempt to “test the waters” on Monday.
We put together a short video here with some footage of the conditions we experienced.
Early Monday morning, we made the 1-mile trek to the harbor entrance from the marina and confirmed for ourselves that swell and wind wave conditions were greatly improved. Although the Maritime Police had not released the conditional navigational warning (this restricted the harbor entrance to vessels over 15m – we are at 12m), we had learned the day before that another boat (over 15m, so perfectly “legal”) planned to leave heading to Gibraltar, as well…we reasoned that the Maritime Police might not look badly on 2 buddy boats leaving the harbor together. However, the weather was rather atrocious – breezy (20+ knots in the marina) and horizontal pelting rain. We were still pretty optimistic, as we have new foulweather gear and were interested to test the boat in windy, upwind conditions. At about noon, we had a visit from our new buddy boat friend – he had decided to wait another day. If we left, it would be on our own.
We decided to give it a go. We felt that 20-25 knots, even upwind, would be tolerable and great practice for us to get a better idea of Shearwater’s performance in those conditions. After final preparations, we untied and headed out. Initially we put up the main with a single reef, but then decided to play it conservative and shortened sail further to the second reef. As we approached the harbor entrance, it was a little disheartening to see that entrance conditions had deteriorated somewhat from earlier in the morning, due to the strong winds. We eked our way out nevertheless into walls of water, but took no breakers over the boat – we both breathed a sigh after clearing the breakwater and being able to head offshore.
We unfurled the #4 (a very small jib that we had put on the furler) and shut down the engine. It was quickly apparent that the weather forecasts from the several sources we used were underpredicting all conditions – we saw steady 30+ knots true wind, with at least 1 gust to 40 knots (the predictions were 20-25, but 25 was the minimum we saw the entire time and was rather tolerable) and the waves were well over the 9 feet we expected. Shearwater did well, though – not a lot of slamming and when we were able to punch through the melee of waves, we were seeing 6+ knots in challenging conditions. We hand-steered to minimize getting pushed around by the waves – the autopilot while perfectly able to steer the boat, would not be able to see the waves and would make no adjustments to avoid the biggest holes on the back side of the waves.
The idea of 40+ more hours of similar or possibly worsening conditions, especially at night, convinced us to turn around after about an hour and wait for the so-called “Portuguese trades” that are supposed to blow from the north, making for a much more pleasant trip south. The change in plans will mean a number of headaches, but it was the prudent thing to do. We’ll try again in April and cross our fingers for an end to winter (scientific predictions of changing weather patterns seem to be ringing true, unfortunately!).
Days like this are better suited to making brownies and playing cards in the boat…
Yikes!!