Off to Ireland Together

The last few weeks in Ponta Delgada flew by, mainly because it turned into a real revolving door. I’d barely waved one lot of friends off before the next lot turned up. The funniest encounter was completely unexpected. A Dutch gentleman was standing on the pontoon next to the boat: nice boat, sir, the usual chat, nice bloke, so I invited him aboard. At some point, just as I was about to show him below, his wife turned up too. She said hang on, I’ll fetch our other two as well. Five minutes later I’m standing in the forward cabin, having only exchanged first names, when I suddenly catch the second gentleman’s surname: Korte. Hey, my first boss at Oracle was called Wim Korte too. Flabbergasted, I said: but Wim, you know me, I’m Kees Verruijt and you hired me! Imagine meeting again like that after 30 years! It turned into a few very pleasant days with Wim, Margaret and their friends. Good company for trying out the better restaurants, too. The morning after the photo below, Margaret was standing at the boat: is my passport at yours? No, sorry. And an hour later: can I borrow your bike, because the passport is still at the restaurant! What a relief!

On Wednesday 12 July Arnold arrived. The taxi dropped him right at the marina, so he could walk straight down to the boat. I was still chatting aboard Wings with Frans and Amelie, whom we’d also met in the Azores two years ago. They have a house on Horta, but are now heading back to the Netherlands after all, because schooling in Portuguese for their two daughters has turned out to be disappointing. I hope they manage to get used to The Hague and the Netherlands again!

It was great to see Arnold again. After a tasty burger together at the marina restaurant, admittedly sheltering from the rain under the terrace awning a bit, and the obligatory local beers, the next day we went straight to the Azores military museum, which is housed in an old fort right next to the marina. The Azores have been through quite a lot in the distant past, but little of that has been preserved. It was mostly old junk, so to speak, nothing like, say, the museum in Soesterberg that we visited with Hugo Linnenbank a few months ago. The exhibition about the wars of independence in the colonies was interesting to us, though, because it wasn’t really something we knew much about. Portugal actually tried to hang on to its colonies even longer than the Netherlands did. Perhaps because the country itself was so much poorer? Either way, it led to the same end result, just with far more pointless deaths.

To avoid the queue at ‘A Tasca’ we went early and got a table straight away at this very popular restaurant. I’d been there with Gerard and Peter, but that time we had to wait an hour and a half. Once again it was well worth it — see the photo below of sausage flambéed at the table.

Arnold was a bit unlucky, because I had a fresh attack of departure fever: I wanted to leave the very next day, since the weather was nice and the forecast showed even less wind to come. I thought that way we’d dodge the calms. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out like that… and we might as well have stayed a few more days so Arnold could see a bit more of the Azores.

Until we were out of the island’s lee it looked lovely, but once in the open breeze it was quite a slog to keep the boat moving in the swell. Swell is caused by wind blowing, or having blown, somewhere else, and those old waves travel hundreds if not thousands of kilometres across the ocean. The annoying thing is that it makes the boat pitch, roll and wallow, and lose momentum. So with swell you need more wind than without it to sail at the same speed.

On passage everything went nice and smoothly with just the two of us, but it was tiring. Especially halfway, when we had to spend a day and a night going through a front and were therefore close-hauled, slamming into the waves and swell. It isn’t dangerous — these days we reef earlier and then there’s nothing to worry about. But you do sleep worse because you’re rolling around in your bunk. Ironically the better mattresses on board are actually less pleasant then, because they have inner springs, so your whole bed bounces along with the boat. I also have to get used to all the noises; I want to recognise every little sound. Only once it’s clear which squeak is which line groaning back and forth over a sheave can I get to sleep.

This passage was the second time we used the Starlink, this time without an Iridium backup. Again it worked very well: now and then a few minutes of dropout, but on the whole an excellent connection. For a few tens of euros of “priority mobile data” we could surf the internet to our hearts’ content. Along the way I even set up an extra MarineTraffic station so we could report our own position (and that of ships around us) for everyone to see. The tracking on our own web page was kept up to date too.

With the slow and bumpy progress, Arnold had pretty much “had enough” after about 6 days. I get it — so had I, really! But fortunately the end then came in sight, and after 8 days we arrived in Crookhaven, Ireland, on a lovely Saturday morning. Crookhaven has very obviously become a holiday village, with 3 pubs/restaurants that all turned out to be packed, so we could drink Murphy’s (the stout of the south, from Cork, owned by Heineken…) but not eat. And the fish-and-chips place had no fish, just a (in hindsight) mediocre burger. But it didn’t matter, and the chips were good.