Jardim da Alameda João de Deus

If you look carefully at the map, you might see that we have anchored in two places while we were in Culatra and Olhão. That's quite the story. During one of our first nights at the anchorage a pretty strong wind (25+ knots) was blowing. At night we always turn on an anchor alarm on our phone to monitor whether we are snuck aka the anchor is holding. The alarm didn't go off that night and we had a pretty good night. We were both awake around 4 am and we took a look outside to check the anchor. Everything was looking good. Around 7:30 I climbed out of bed because something just wasn't feeling right. I went outside and saw Beautje who had been right next to us somewhere in the distance. The blue boat that had been behind us the whole time, was suddenly in front of us. We had miracously dragged more than 100 meters around the other anchored boats. On top of that, the anchor had taken grip again, in water that was just deep enough for us. I got Bart out of bed and very calmly we moved back to our old spot. We think that we wouldn't have been this calm if we had woken up while we were dragging. Anchored again we put out a lot more anchor chain and set three different anchor alarms on both of our phones for the night. Yet, when the wind picked up the following night I was awake for a good two hours checking our anchor alarm every half hour. The anchor was holding this time. Looks like we have been very unlucky and lucky at the same time.

With just the two of us we have plenty of fun. We went to the Saturday market again, mostly my fun, played with the tide on land, fun for both of us, and we started fishing with a trap, mostly Bart's fun. The fishing trap is one of Bart's accomplishments. After chatting with the local baker/fisherman some more, he hustled a fishing trap for us. This would give Bart another opportunity to get even with Octo 🐙. First, he had to fill the trap with some bait. Bart has gotten really good at catching small seabream from the boat. Within half an hour the trap was filled with 3 small fish. Now we, but mostly Bart, had to wait. The next morning we checked the trap, nothing except for some shells. We had been told that the more rotten the fish, the better. So we had to wait another day. On the second morning, before breakfast, we had caught an octopus! Bart 1 - 1 Octopus.

Sadly, killing the octopus is pretty hard. You have to get him right between/below the eyes. You see the octopus get white as it dies. Afterwards you have to clean it and beat the tentacles for a loooong time to tenderize the meat. After that Bart handed Octo over to me. Following a Jamie Oliver recipe I boiled the Octopus in its own juice with some tomato, anchovies and some other good stuff. Once the meat is tender you fry it in the pan. We ate the octopus with some pasta (twice since it was more than enough for two days). It was really good, although we could do a bit of a better job at tenderizing the meat. Better luck next time.

We didn't expect the next time to be two days later. We put out the trap again thinking we would maybe catch some small fish, nothing big. Boy were we wrong. We thought we had caught a big one the first time, this guy was about three times that size. Killing it went much quicker this time, luckily, and Bart spend a good half hour tenderizing, aka beating, the tentacles. This time I tried a Greek recipe. Knowing we would get some help finishing the octopus the next day from Beautje and Surf Song in Ayamonte, I only boiled "some" of the octopus. It tasted a lot better this time. The next day when our guests joined for dinner, some of them had never eaten octopus before. To make it more appetizing I made some calamari from the ends of the tentacles and the head. For the rest I used the Greek grilling recipe. As expected the calamari was a better hit.

It is always pretty cool to share your catch of the day with friends. However, we do feel we were a bit too enthusiastic and eager with the second octopus. In hindsight it was too big (I couldn't sleep for an hour that night because I kept seeing all those tentacles overcrowding the pan). Plus, even though octopus is very tasty, once in a while is more than enough. We shouldn't get too greedy.Read more