Leça da Palmeira

After just one night in Viana do Castelo we already moved on to Leixoes. Why so quick, you might wonder. Well for the last couple of weeks one low pressure zone after the other has been hanging around the Portugese west coast. This doesn't only mean that we are left without any wind on many days, but also very strong winds at some points. It was forecasted that during the night of Tuesday to Wednesday up to 45 knots of wind were about to hit land coming in from a southestern direction. We wanted to make sure that we would arrive early enough in Leixoes, the more industrial and much cheaper harbour of Porto, to get a good spot. So, we left Viana do Castelo to move on to Leixoes.

After such foggy days, we were treated by a gorgeous sunny and windy day! It turned into a beautiful 🌞 s out and sails out kinda day🥳. Of course, we still had to zigzag around the fishing pods. When we arrived we were told we had to stay on the visitors pontoon since all of the other berths had already filled up in the harbour. Maybe the next day some boats would move on and we could take one of their spots. We hoped this would happen, since the visitor pontoon is, as it is often, the first pontoon when you go into the harbor. This time the visitors pontoon also was faced right into the direction of where the wind would come from. Yes, there are 1,5 piers, as they're still building the most outer one, protecting the harbor, but still. This spot did not look like it was going to be a great one to ensure the coming storm.

The next morning it was raining a lot, so we spent the first half of the day inside watching Industry and the Bear. Once it cleared up we decided to spend the rest of the day in Porto. By bus or metro we should be able to get into the centre of Porto in about an hour. As we walked over the pontoon towards the land we discovered two spots had opened up at the end of the pontoon. We looked at each other, turned around and quickly moved our Nimrod into a more peaceful berth. Feeling even better we went into Porto.

While we were away a young Danish couple (Oskar and Ana) and their crew had slipped into the other free berth next to us. We had already met them shortly in Finisterre. We meet so many other Dutch boats along the way, that it is very nice and refreshing to meet people with different nationalities once in a while. They had just come from their anchor spot on the Duoro also to wait out the storm before leaving to Madeira. We spent the day doing some boat jobs. We finally finilazed installing the watermaker, so now we can actually use it to fill our water tanks and we stopped the watermaker pipes from leaking. Fixing this took us about the whole day 😅 But, it works now so we're happy and satisfied. As it was getting later, the wind started to pick up more and more.

After a nice chat with Oskar and some dinner we walked back to our old spot on the visitors pontoon to see what it looked like over there. We couldn't have been happier to have moved spots. Wow. It looked like the ocean swell had fully made it into the harbor. The boats docked further out of the harbor, but also the pontoons were moving up and down like crazy. Another young couple (Artemis) who had taken our old spot, we trying hard to secure their boat again since one of the cleats had been ripped off the pontoon. We offered our help but they said they had it under control. We went back to our Nimrod. I tried to call my parents for the third time that day, we had continuously been interrupted, when Bart told me that the Artemis needed help because they were going to switch spots. They already had 3 people on board, but could use our help to prevent the boat from crashing into the pontoon, as they would be pushed against it, and to tie up their lines. Once they were safely docked we all grabbed the extra fenders we didn't need ourselves to make sure they would also get through the night without damage. Luckily, all three of us did.

We spent one more day on the harbour because the ocean was still recovering from the storm. We didn't feel like going out with up to 3 meters of waves. Instead we did some more boat jobs: we installed the relay that we got in Vigo, tightened the sea rail again and made an attempt to forge our aluminium from Vigo into a topping lift holder (the beam project). Two out of three were successful, pretty good score.Read more