14 -16 September 2016

Ilha da Culatra, Portugal N36° 56.64′ W07°  59.62′ to Mazagon, Spain N37° 05.25′ W06°  49.00′

50nm, 10 hours 30

We were sad to be leaving Portugal after such a long time and having grown very fond of the country and its people but we were equally excited to travel on to Spain and to start really exploring the country we had visited only briefly back in July. Mazagon, however, was not to be an auspicious start.

We raised Pintail’s anchor a day later than planned after I miscalculated the tide for our intended departure day! It was 5.45am when we gingerly picked our way through the anchored yachts in the pitch darkness in order to ride the tide out of the estuary. We were accompanied only by fishing boats and secretly hoped that the Spanish would not be as fond of fishing with pots. At 10.15 we crossed into Spain, took down our Portuguese courtesy flag and raised the Spanish one for the second time. We also put forward our watches an hour to Spanish time.

Our visit to Magazon taught us a number of important lessons: that we are not destined to love every place we visit; how very lucky we have been not to have found a dud place in three months of travelling; and that the beauty of this journey is that we can simply move on if and when we want to. It also made us question the method of this blog in recording each of our ports of call because we really have very little to say about this one!

Mazagon, in high summer, is probably a lovely, lively seaside town but by the time we got there it had pretty much shut up shop.

We loved the umbrella fir trees which enveloped the town but they were not enough to keep us there any longer so we moved on for the first time sooner that we had planned.

And without even stopping to take a photo out of the back of the boat…