DAY 1

Foggy morning in Lagos on Portugal’s Algarve coast. Mia, Alex, and mate-in-training Manot are onboard FALKEN this morning, getting started with the standard safety and pre-departure briefings. I’m writing from the hotel adjacent to J Dock, where I stayed last night in an attempt to sleep off the last lingering effects of a cold I picked up back in the USA.

This afternoon we’ll sail. Well, hope to sail anyway. Lagos is sitting smack in the middle of the end of a long axis of high pressure, so there’s not much air moving around in the marina. The ‘Azores High’ is stretched out and has reached the coast here. Typically, you see the high centered further west, and along the coast of Portugal you tend to get northerlies, the ‘Portuguese Tradewinds’. Unlucky for us, we’re not in a typical pattern right now.

This week is a bit different from our normal A-B passages, so we have options. We’re going to end up back here in Lagos after a week of sail training, with a mix of inshore cruising and offshore, nonstop sailing. The plan this afternoon is to head over to Sagres, a beautiful little surfing town right at the very southwest tip of Portugal, tucked inside the high cliffs of Cabo Sao Vincente. We anchored there with some friends in 2018 aboard ISBJØRN, so I’m familiar with the small harbor. Back then, we got the anchor chain inextricably wrapped around some sunken junk on the bottom, having to get the local dive shop guys to come out and extricate us. So hoping to avoid that this time!

Alex, Mia, and I have a long list of lectures planned for the week, interspersed with the actual sailing, so if there truly is no wind we’ll spend a lot more time talking about weather routing and forecasting, break out the sextant for some celestial practice, and do any number of other fun lessons aboard FALKEN this week.

This is our last trip of 2023, and the first that Mia and I are sailing together since early 2020, before Axel was born! It’s nice to be back on the boat together in a professional capacity.

HOLD FAST! — Andy