Baiona to Lexoés

The night before we left Baiona, we tried our new device to cook Thai sticky rice for dinner. It looks like a sieve in a flower shape (bought on the market in Camaret) that we put in the pressure cooker. Victory! The rice is delicious, perfectly sticky! It is for sure the start of a long series of good Thai meals!!
It’s sunny when we leave Baiona at 10am, we will endure a good hour of wind force 0 and then the wind arrives all at the sudden and blows N force 4 then 5 all the day (and night). After 2 weeks against the wind this time it’s exactly behind us. The boat is also rolling because of an ugly swell that makes it very uncomfortable for me. Our old wind pilot (Navik) is helpful but steers the boat in zigzags. As we have a long way to go and we’d prefer to arrive before dark, Ludo will steer all day long trying to surf each wave to accelerate. Finally we’ll arrive at 10pm, after 65Miles, which makes a good average speed over 6 knots and our new speed records: I saw several times 10,9knots on the GPS and Ludo swear once he saw 12,7 !! For modern boats it’s a normal speed but for our old Ata Jata it’s almost three times her cruising speed.
On the western coast of Portugal, there are not plenty of harbors you can enter easily and in any weather conditions, Leixoés is one of those. It’s a huge commercial harbor, right next to a big refinery. There are enormous oil tankers and container carriers coming in and out night and day. In a small corner there’s a marina where we decide to stop for 2 days. We take some time to rest, to repair some broken things (compass and binoculars have learnt how to fly but not yet how to land safely!) and to work on our anchoring (we’ve been told in the south, anchoring places are very windy).

Yesterday we went for a tour in Porto. It’s very easy from the marina; you take the tram for a 20min ride to the historical center. For sure it’s a very typical city, protected as world heritage now but it looks a little bit abandonned and dingy, except the very touristic banks of the Rio Douro. The tourists are almost all French, great! Let’s move to another place, we’ll leave for Nazaré tomorrow.