Portimão

The past week was centered around two themes: upgrading our battery system and enjoying the good weather. After saying goodbye to Marloes we spend the morning and early afternoon still docked in Marina de Portimão. Bart and Hilda took the electric scooters to the ship chandlery on the other side of the river to check for new parts and I helped Lajla piece together a fishing line for them. After the sporadic rain had disappeared we motored a full 15 to 20 minutes to our next anchoring spot a bit further down the river. Here we joined the The Americans of Oso again.

Our first morning started very early. We were woken up by horns apparently coming from a pilot boat. We knew we were docked in an area that is sometimes used by cruise ships to turn, but this late in the season we didn't expect it to actually happen. Especially because on the website of the port we saw only one upcoming arrival, which wouldn't be until the 15th of November. It's still quite mysterious where this ship came from. But, at 6:30 we were told that we had to move to make space for a cruise ship, but no worries by 7:30 we should be able to move back in. Still sleepy we lifted our anchor and set off. Beautje took the early morning and decent wind to sail to Albufeira. Us, an English boat who's crew turned out to be French on the last day and Oso came back to the anchorage.

The rest of our days here we spend learning a lot about electricity on board in general, but especially all of the cabling on board Nimrod. We were able to follow and label almost all of our cables. Since the battery system has been fine so far and in addition to that we are complete electricity noobs, we have never touched it. But lately, as the days get shorter and therefore our solar panels soak up less sun, our batteries seem to be having a bit of a hard when we are on anchor. However, since we have a very old battery system, especially the shunt which measures the battery voltage and percentage, we have very little information to go off. This boat job has been pretty fun for two reasons. One, it's actually an upgrade instead of repairing something that broke. Two, so far we seem to learn and understand it pretty well, which always makes it more fun.

We have taken quite a few trips to the boat shop and did a lot of online shopping to gather all of the parts: a smart shunt (which through an app will give us much more information about the status of our batteries), electricity cables, busbars, a fuse, a fuse holder and in the end more electricity cables for our new solar panels. We still have two flexible solar panels laying around for which we are hoping to find a good temporary spot for when we are at anchor. When we arrive in Albufeira, where the smartshunt and busbars will be delivered, we should be able to put it all together.

The rest of our time we have soaked up a bunch of sun. We went swimming a couple of times, had picknicks on the beach, discovered the cute town of Ferragudo and went into Portimão. We hadn't heard a lot of good stories about Portimão as it is supposed to be a town that has faded through time. We didn't experience it as such. We actually quite enjoyed the fact that this town isn't fully tailored to tourists, but instead you can feel and see that people live here.

How could I almost forget. It was here that we woke up, somehow again, to the, in my opinion terrible but sadly anticipated news, that some orange elderly guy had been elected president of the United States... We went over that morning to Angie and Mike (Oso) to talk about it for a little bit how Angie and I had felt pretty sad, but mostly to forget about it and talk about other things like we had done the evening before. They were waiting for a weather window to go to Madeira and together we took the time to get to know each other better. On their last evening they invited us over for dinner and as their upcoming crossing meant the beginning of their trip to the Caribbean, we celebrated in style with some dark and stormy cocktails. That evening we laughed a lot and we are hoping to meet again on the other side of the Atlantic some time.

For us, Oso's departure meant that we had two full days to ourselves which we spend doing fun things: fishing, picknicks, doing groceries (fun for me), swimming, beach time and a lot of reading. These days "waiting" before we would have a spot Marina de Albufeira were absolutely lovely.Read more