Hello everyone! In our last post, we explained how we’re currently doing a lot of upwind sailing and hence moving forward a bit slower than usual. Not much has changed in that respect since we still majorly get winds from the north. As an unpleasant addition, we had multiple days with no winds at all, which obviously isn’t great for sailing either…
We could also test a new limit of Misty Sea: by being 5 people living on board for a week. Turns out it works like a charm! We were hoping to meet our friends from Munich (Philipp, Simon and Franzi) in Aveiro but didn’t make it in time due to the unfavorable wind conditions. Luckily, they could take a bus and meet us in Nazaré instead 🙂
Nazaré is home to the highest waves in the world and is a surfing paradise for big wave surfing (currently, the highest wave ever surfed was surfed in Nazaré and was 26m tall!). Aren’t these great prerequisites for trying out surfing for the very first time?
Nice waves for surfing aren’t nice for sailing though. Unfortunately, our friends had to experience that the hard way on our first day of sailing together and were quite seasick…
Luckily, our three friends were brave enough to give it another try and on our second day of joint sailing, everyone felt well and was able to enjoy the entire day of sailing, including a nice sunrise, lots of dolphins, good food, a nice sunset, some outstanding ukelele performances, and some untangling of fishing threads!
This nice navigation made us arrive in Porto, where we spent two more days with our friends, visiting, doing some beach bouldering, drinking Port wine and trying to escape the heat by going for lots swims!
After saying goodbye to our friends this morning, we left for northern Spain. We’ll probably spend a few days in the bay near Vigo, where another friend will meet us on Thursday.
The Azores high is a high pressure point always present in the north-Atlantic, and is the main driver of the winds in this part of the globe. Air currents spiral out of it in a clockwise motion which sends all those Northern winds along the Portuguese coats… The ones we have been struggling with for the last 3 weeks.
The Azores high actually moves randomly between the Azores and northern Ireland and its position has a great influence on the wind directions along the european coast. After being stuck for several weeks far up north, it is finally coming back to the Azores! It may sounds insignificant but it may signal the end of the slow and exhausting up-wind trip along the portuguese coast, and the return of cruising through south and west winds toward France!
We have one more up-wind trip toward Vigo, but then, we already plan on sailing (hopefully) efficiently toward La Coruna before the 18th of July. From there, we will finally start planning the crossing of the bay of Biscay toward France!
We also have a big update regarding the future of Misty Sea!!! We already mentioned a while ago that we started posting adds for a new owner for Misty Sea. It was great to see how many people where motivated to be the next “chosen one” and thus we could sign a contract much earlier than expected. Don’t worry, Misty is going to be in good hands! This also mean that we know our final destination: our journey is going to End in early September in the Netherlands!
See you soon for some more updates !
Sailing Misty 