You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave
Every sailing trip, at least in my limited experience, kicks off with high hopes and ambitious plans. And so it was with my first taste of sailing Portugal’s Algarve coast, a two week mid-March cruise with a rough plan of taking the boat from her home berth in Lagos across the Spanish border to Cadiz and back again.
Every sailing trip, at least in my limited experience, fails to achieve its high hopes and ambitious plans. That is of course, in a word, sailing. The unexpected goes with the territory and the stayers in this game learn not just to live with it but to love it. Boat problems, crew problems, weather problems, time flying by unconscionably quickly and a whole host of other hassles and niggles conspire to chip away at those high hopes and ambitious plans at every turn. It’s part of the fun.
We were three-up for this early-season (aka pre-season) sailing fortnight; a very capable and experienced skipper was teamed with a young sailing virgin and a somewhat rusty Captain Ben.
The omens could have been better.
But the omens were on the money!
Weatherbound
Apparently it had been great sailing weather for the entire week before we arrived. Two weeks later, on the shuttle back to the airport, the skipper remarked that it was going to be great sailing weather for the following week too.
Our trip started with forecasts of somewhat unseasonable sou-sou-easterlies, unseasonable in both their direction and their 20kt+ strength. On this coast southerlies have plenty of fetch with which to develop a lumpy sea state and many of the ports and marinas are on shallow sea beds which give that lumpy sea very little depth to play with. Predictions were that many (if not all) ports would actually close for 2-3 days.
With a gung-ho British Bulldog spirit and stupidity Nelson would be proud of we set off from Lagos on our first day in-spite of these forecasts.
We made it as far as Portimão, less than 10 miles along the coast.
We were stuck there for four days.
Though I have to be honest, the weather wasn’t the only reason.
Crewbound
In spite of its more general failings, which I promise I will be getting round to, from a sailing perspective Portimão is actually a pretty good place to be stuck. A snug but still spacious river-mouth, well sheltered by breakwaters and hills to the east, offers both a capacious marina and a couple of very good anchorages. You have a choice for each night and a bit of playing space if you feel the need to freshen the crew a bit (something our skipper judiciously took advantage of).
Both anchorages are on the east side of the river and for our first night we took the slightly up-river option off the beach at Ferragudo which is a bit more sheltered from those southerlies but does require a little mooring avoidance before dropping the hook.
We had a beautifully calm night at anchor and woke to a beautifully calm day. Setting off for our next port seemed like a no-brainer. It remained a no-brainer right up to the point we surfed through the breakwater and found ourselves being tossed about on an aquatic roller coaster. Nothing to faze the seasoned skipper but with an eye on both the rookie and the rusty amongst the crew, not to mention the risk of the next port of call being closed, she decided to abort and check-in to the marina for an overnighter.
Like many marinas on this coast Portimão expects visiting yachts to tie up on their visitors pontoon, in this case an unusually and unfortunately concrete affair with overly spaced staghorn style moorings to tie up against. With one crew who had never stepped off a boat to tie her up in his life, and one who hadn’t done it for a couple of years the skipper was a little twitchy about this manoeuvre given the 20kt crosswinds we were experiencing.
The rookie did quite well as it happened.
The rusty did not do quite so well.
Or as it transpired, failed to negotiate this yacht’s freeboard.
My legs anticipated solid ground (and yes, a concrete pontoon is very solid) probably about a foot before they actually found it and this made the difference between an elegant and confidence inspiring foot-landing followed by a capable turn or two round the mooring, and the bruised and bloodied heap that I actually managed.
Fortunately I’ve been around my incompetence long enough to know how to manage it and I’ve been around boats long enough to know that with a 20kt crosswind that bowline needed securing damned quickly because without way on her she’d be at right-angles to the pontoon before you could say Elastoplast. A split-second damage-report to verify nothing was broken and I was on my feet and tying her up before the skipper noticed anything other than the need to sweat the bowline in a bit to bring her nicely alongside.
My grazed elbow, jolted back and bruised right buttock were impressively teamed with a grazed right knee – I’m still nonplussed as to how I pulled that pairing off, but we were safely alongside and ready to negotiate our next challenge. In the off-season the walkway from the visitor’s pontoon to the marina office had been taken away for repairs. We were alongside but nonetheless marooned.
Time for a bit of dinghy pumping!
Marina-bound
The winds abated somewhat the following day but unsurprisingly the sea-state took a little longer to join the party. We spent two nights in Portimão marina before decamping to the anchorage closer to the breakwaters in readiness for our eventual departure.
Being weather-bound (not to mention a little crewbound) is all part of sailing. Portimão would perhaps not be my first choice of location for an unplanned layover but wherever you are in this world there are stories to be found if you take a little time to look for them.
Marinas are much of a muchness of course; the showers vary, the amenities vary, for tech-heads like me the Wi-Fi varies too. The showers at Portimão may not be the best but they’re far from the worst. Like most marinas there are convenient if slightly pricey bars and restaurants to hand when you need them, and Portimão offers pay-as-you-go Wi-Fi throughout the marina or free Wi-Fi in the confines of the marina office. It also offers some exceptionally friendly and helpful English speaking staff to make your stay easier.
Where marinas do vary though is in the clientele and in this respect they’re a rather curious place, a clubby sort of affair rather like flying business class or being stuck in an elevator at the office. People who wouldn’t strike up conversations with you anywhere else feel totally free to sidle over and kick one off with you here.
Take for example that grizzled liveaboard, forty-going-on-twenty, painfully thin, weather-beaten and bronzed with a surfboard and twenty-something girl in tow; the living of a dream and the slow death of one in a pokey little utilitarian boat that has long sustained the former and probably seen the death of many of the latter. I rather hope it will continue so to do.
Then there’s that boat hardly ever used by its bluewater dreaming owner yet occasionally lent to his friends, yielding a protracted hunt over several phone-calls in the marina office for the keys which the owner asserts they have but which haven’t been retrieved for so long they’ve been filed away securely at the bottom of a dusty safe.
Or how about the middle-class chap with a well-groomed nautical beard, temporarily landlocked by some property deals but sharing his life story with me in the marina office on the pretext of getting a little Mac support having spotted I was using one. He yielded a useful contact if I should need Apple hardware while in Portugal and some berthing tips for Cadiz should we ever make it.
Blighty-bound
Head west along the Atlantic seaboard and you find yourself firmly in the Algarve it would appear the British package tourist once built it and the low-cost-flight business is keeping alive. The pristine beaches of Praia da Rocha are fringed with a well maintained boardwalk which furnishes a succession of bars and cafes where a full English or a cheeky pint of the quaffable local lager (aren’t they always quaffable when you’re on holiday?) can be easily found. Hotels befitting any tourist flytrap line the seafront, the odd casino can be located if that’s your thing and restaurants will cater to your every need; presupposing ethnic Portuguese isn’t on your to-do list.
Looking at the succession of shirtless British sixty-somethings and occasional doddering senior with his sunhat on back-to-front with a moderately-priced-permed wife in tow, I rather suspect ethnic Portuguese isn’t on most of these trippers to-do lists. This is the kettle-in-the-hotel room brigade looking for Blackpool with warmer weather and surely finding it here.
It’s not what I travel for, but chacun à son goût I guess.
Portugal-bound
Head north along the unsignposted riverside though and you fetch up quickly in Portugal for real and what my experience of other European seaside towns has taught me to expect. The expensively renovated quayside offers an expanse of stonework and modern-art statues where modern museums and river-side amenities crowd out the decaying remnants of what this town used to be (why house a museum in a modern, concrete building when you’ve a local one-time nunnery with heritage and history decaying not five minutes down the road?).
Step back from the EU granted riverside though and you’re in Portugal proper. A fading, recession-blighted seaside town many an Englishman would recognise; Saint-Annes-on-the-Sea but without the pound-shops, charity stores and bookies fighting back against the wall-to-wall voids in the shopping centre.
No full-English to be had here, no milky-teas, yet pearls of a different sort can be unearthed. A local coffee-and-cake shop occupied my time and my waistline with a drink and a delicious, not to mention truly vast chocolate pretzel I would recommend heartily to weatherbound crew who find themselves following in my wake.
It was very therapeutic for my injuries!
The Atlantic wants me, but I can’t go back there
Weatherbound is what you make it after all, and to be fair Portimão is no better or worse than anywhere else I’ve been stuck waiting for kinder winds and gentler seas. And it does offer an interesting experience to the unfamiliar mariner, the reality of a recession blighted country, the cloistered tourists who help pay its way and yes, the itinerant yachties taking a break from living their own dreams to watch the rise and fall of the dreams of others.
