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
andy@59-north.com
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A last hurrah
Under the dome of stars in a moon-less sky, each of us during our time at the helm used the most rudimentary celestial navigation, keeping a star or two lined up with the mast as a helper to following the heading range. It was a whole crew event to set the spinnaker, reef the mainsail and practice the heave-to in case of man overboard. Alex stressed that the key to success in all of these crucial activities is preparation. It was hugely satisfying to accomplish these tasks through teamwork. We share a constant good hearted back and forth full of stories, one-liners and comebacks that also means constant laughter.
One little bird!
Falken has almost rounded the Channel Islands and is cruising along splendidly about 100 miles offshore. Though several models predicted some slightly fresher winds today, we were met with a consistent 18-20 kts of pure bliss. It seems that from the moment we left the dock in San Francisco, there has been much laughter and conversation amongst everyone. The plan is to gybe in a few hours and begin our approach to Ensenada. As much as I do appreciate the jokes and intellectual musings, I equally appreciate the natural, silent moments we share at night, all of us on watch gazing up above to the shooting stars, constellations, and planets putting on their quiet show.
Birds and glows
The sun brought new wind and we were soon putting up the Yankee (jib) and turning off the motor. During the evening tradition of sharing “glums and glows” that follows the crew dinner, our Mate Ryan proclaimed it a “champagne sailing” kind of day. As Alex noted this evening, life goes by so fast that one of the very best things about his line of work is enjoying the passage of time in the slow lane of an ocean passage. But by tomorrow, the green blobs in the weather sailing app indicate we’re going to pick up some significant northwesterly winds and we’ll take them ever further south to the Channel Islands latitude. We’re all super excited for the knots to climb and to see Falken really run.