Duoro (Vila Nova de Gaia) ⚓

As we were getting closer to Porto the last couple of days, we, but mostly I, looked very much forward to anchoring on the Douro, not just on our boat, but on our own home, in Porto. As the weather hasn't really been in our favor it didn't look like we were going to do so. One thing we have to consider as we cruise along the coast of Portugal is that many of the harbors and the entrances (barras) leading up to these harbors can close due to big waves. Meaning we are not able to enter or leave a place. As we were making a plan for the coming days the Duoro Barra had been closed for a couple of days now. The Aveiro Barra however, about 35 nm further south, had opened up again. We decided to give it a try. However, this could also mean we would turn around again again since the waves were still between 2 and 3 meters.

We left Leixoes, hoisted the sails, stuck our nose out and quickly turned around again. No wind and still massive waves. We would wait this one out. We went back into the port and dropped our anchor. For the first couple of hours we waited to see if the Duoro had openend yet, since that would be a trip of only 3 nautical miles. Unfortunately, no luck. After reading for a while we decided to try and fix our beam problem again and this we were succesful! First aluminium bending, I always knew I would turn out to be an earthbender, project, done! By this time we had forgotten about the Duoro, but Bart checked for a final time: "it's open". Let's go.

Anchoring on the Duoro also meant we would finally meet Esmee and Dante of the Nova Mahea, one of the few other, even younger 😉, vertrekkers. We had very briefly met on the Vertrekkersdag in March, but a handful of boats has been telling them and us that we should realllly try to meet each other because we would have such a good click together. Well, I don't know what they were thinking...

No, I'm just kidding. We had a really fun evening together. Even though we have had lovely evenings with all of the other very friendly people, it just is different with fellow young ones. At first we thought we would move on to Aveiro the next day, but we rather spend a really fun evening together with the Nova Mahea, some more time in the Porto area and as it turned out a very fun very Dutch borrel with the Nova Mahea, Lotus, Ella and Audrey. During the day Nova Mahea was very generous to serve as our private dinghy taxi to take us to land. We walked about 40 minutes to the main thing of Vila Nova de Gaia (on the southern bank of the Duoro): port houses. No tasting, or way too expensive tours for us, but we did have a good time walking around and having lunch in the park. We even bumped into some cool street art.

It is quite bizar to be anchored on the Duoro, in Porto, in Portugal and to be surrounded by 4 other Dutch boats. It does however make for some very fun evenings. While hundreds of tourists on boats paid hundreds of euros to quickly go up and down the river on their sun set cruise. From the Nova Mahea, we were able to take some beautiful pictures of our home, the Nimrod, peacefully anchored on the Duoro as the sun was setting. It is still surreal this is our life now.Read more