Lisbon

We are in sunny Lisbon today, arrived last night! Taking a day off, as the sail has been a bit hard, we’ve covered a lot of miles over the last week. Portugal is very nice, apart from about a million different police forces, each insisting on checking your papers 3 times a day and at night. All the yachties we meet spend half the time bitching about Brigada Fiscal. They are all very curteous and polite and just doing their job and all that, but really, it just doesn’t end! They come on fast boats in the middle of the night, shine some crazy light at you (pretty cool light though, I want one) and then start asking what you doing. Then they bugged off for a few hours, until you are in the marina, and then then whole thing starts again. And apparently they are a lot more relaxed than they were a few years back

Anyway, Atlantic Portugal is very scenic, it’s all sand beaches, little towns and oil refineries, as well as an odd lighthouse. I would have liked to spend a bit more time exploring, but given this is the Atlantic ocean we need to get a move on whilst the going is good. One low is all it takes for the seas to be rubbish for days. Hopefully we should move into the Algarve by the end of the week. Then onto Gibraltar! Very exciting. The whole thing is kinda surreal, here we are, sailing along, and it’s wednesday and what the hell are we doing here I don’t think I have quite realised yet exactly what it is we are doing and that this is pretty much it being done, if that makes sense. I’ve confused myself then. Anyway, so we are off to Lisbon for a day, see the sights, buy some squid. I tell ya, the fish markets are amazing, I think Portugal has the best fish and seafood, the whole country is obsessed with fishing, you can’t enter any marina without passing crowds of people fishing off the quay. Not like polite conventional fishing with some space between fishermen and an obligatory umbrella, these people really are in a crowd, several rows deep, with the people at the back showing the most cunning when casting lines. As they, no doubt, have to, if you can’t even see the water. I am sure there is some sort of hierarchy to your average portuguese quay fishing. Amazing thing to see, I’ll take a photo next time.

Here are some photos of dolphins that came to say hello the other day! A whole shoal of them, swimming with Tingara for half an hour or so. Wicked.

Tags: Lisbon, Plan of action, Portugal