A Glass of Madeira

Marion came aboard in Tenerife last night, 6 November 2025, arriving on the very same plane that Arnold was taking home. Funny, because they even got to say a quick hello: Arnold was still in the check-in queue when Marion came out. Apparently more people are starting to read the blog, because I’ve had complaints about the lack of updates. I’d also just found out from my mother that she couldn’t get onto it. So this morning Marion gets a lie-in and I get the blog up to date. It’s high time, too, because the website turned out to have some technical trouble as well. As an experiment I had decided to put Cloudflare in front of merrimac.nl. It turns out that if you get as few visitors as I do, it doesn’t help and actually works against you. Worse performance than without Cloudflare, so I quickly switched it off again. And now I’m updating the blog in double-quick time, because I’m a month behind!

Let’s start where I left off: Lisbon. I had sailed to Cascais to welcome Koen. It’s the “first” harbour of greater Lisbon when you come round the corner from the north, and traditionally the place for the Lisboetas (Lisbonites? Lisboners?) and plenty of tourists to go and see and be seen. A lovely seaside town with beautiful beaches, a gorgeous old centre, and lots of restaurants and bars. And so a nice marina too, which in summer is just too expensive for me: € 120 a night, for that I’d rather carry on to a slightly less illustrious spot. But in October the winter season has already started and the price is almost halved. Koen arrived, in true Koen fashion. Meaning: not taking the Bolt taxi I had recommended, but a Bolt from the airport to the railway station, and then the little coastal train. Great fun for him, but I was left sitting there wondering where on earth he’d got to. Anyway, it was really good to see him again and we had a proper catch-up. Koen has been through quite a lot in his life, both personally and at work, so it was high time to have a good long talk about all that. Meanwhile I was going back and forth with KM, Rob Wink (the supplier) and Schenker (the manufacturer) of the watermaker; it turns out a new motherboard is needed. After a few days of shopping, small jobs and some nice dinners out, Saskia, his wife, also came to Lisbon. She saw very little of it, because she arrived after sunset and we left the very next morning, mainly because if we’d waited, the wind would have been completely rubbish.

On the passage to Madeira we had quite a lot of wind the first day, almost none the second, and on the third just enough to make it fun. But at least the wind was from the right direction, and so were the waves. Just like in 2019 we arrived at Porto Santo after dark. It’s a sizeable island, about the size of Ameland. Shaped like a slightly bent croissant, it has a huge beach of yellow sand along almost the entire south coast. Being Dutch, you might think: but sand is always yellow, unless it’s muddy? No, fresh sand of volcanic origin is usually black. Watch this space, that will come up again later in this story. So, a perfectly good anchorage. But it was busy, we counted at least 15 boats in the anchorage that evening, so we picked a spot right at the far end of the field, because without daylight it’s harder to see exactly how everything lies. Radar on as well, then you can judge pretty well how far away the other boats are.

The next day we motored into the harbour on the off chance and, lo and behold, there was a spot free on the pontoon. The harbour was very busy too, with some 30 boats on the pontoons and another 30 or so at anchor. A nervous lady immediately came over to tell us that this spot was actually theirs. I don’t let myself get rattled any more and said I’d go and find the harbour master. Be friendly, and since we were only staying one night: no problem, sir, you stay right where you are. The main reason I wanted to be alongside was to see whether Miguel, the old harbour master, would come by. And sure enough, an hour later there he was at the boat. What a beautiful boat, sir, this and that. Funnily enough he didn’t recognise me or the boat, even though back in 2015 he gave Marc, Martine and me an extensive tour and we even ended up borrowing his car to drive around the island. I’ll see if I can put together a retrospective blog entry about that visit. For now we agreed that I’d come by later with Koen. Meanwhile we’d also got in touch with a couple anchored in the harbour, who turned out to be the best friends of Koen’s brother. Funny. We had drinks on their boat. Very nice people, but with a different approach to sailing from ours: they’d hung around in northern Portugal for almost a year and had now been on Porto Santo for a few weeks already, where according to them there was loads to do. OK, I thought, then I’m curious how long you’ll stay on Madeira, because there’s a hundred times more to do there. And Porto Santo is very nice as a stopover, but would I say I find it a particularly interesting place beyond that? No.

Here are some photos of the Utopia, which Miguel has been working on for 18 years now. Will he ever realise his dream of sailing her himself to Ushuaia and on to the southern pack ice? I hope so for his sake…

The next day, in glorious weather but with just too little wind to sail, we motored over to Madeira. Once there, we went into the marina of Quinta do Lorde, just round the corner at the tip of the island. In the southern countries you get two kinds of harbour masters: the ones in the office (usually ladies) and the ones on the pontoon, always men and often available 24/7. These men were not too happy that I hadn’t announced my arrival on channel 9 beforehand, nor booked. We were allowed to stay, though, I’ll give them that. It was the third time I’d been here with the boat, and the shore side has been completely transformed. The first time, in 2015, there was a hotel complex that was largely finished but not yet open. Eerie. The second time, in 2019, there was plenty going on, but large parts were still empty. Now, in 2025, it turned out to have become an up-market all-inclusive resort, with free food and drink everywhere for the hotel guests; sadly not for the marina guests. Still, the beer on the terrace tasted none the worse for it. The next day Koen had arranged a car and we set off to explore the island. In three days I gave them a good first impression of ever-enchanting Madeira. It has become very busy with tourists, but that doesn’t take anything away from the overwhelming nature. Compared to the Canary Islands it’s so green, it practically blinds you. Every hundred metres you climb as you drive up the mountain, the climate changes and so does the vegetation. Very steep mountains, lots of tunnels on the main roads, and very narrow, steep little roads with quite a few rocks on them here and there. Older and wiser, on Madeira we now always take the full insurance when renting a car, so you don’t end up haggling over small dents just before your flight home. On the second day Koen was sadly feeling unwell, so I was, alas, forced to go to a Madeira wine experience with just Saskia. A nice tour of the production and storage site, with a good explanation of the various grapes and the classifications of the wines. And a few bottles bought, of course.

The last day of excursions came with highlights such as swimming in the natural rock pool at Porto Santo, with spectacular waves rolling into the pool. Followed by dinner with Paz and Carlos at the Casa de Capelinha, always a party. Paz drove back to the boat with us, because she wanted to experience what it’s like on a sailing boat. You see, we were moving the boat to the marina at Calheta, where I had been able to book a berth until Arnold arrived. That little sail wasn’t much fun at first, naturally, with nasty waves and no wind. Fortunately the wind picked up later and we could get the sails up, which is always calmer, and so redeem things a bit. Towards the end it was actually blowing quite hard, and we had to enter Calheta harbour with a sizeable sea running. The harbour is rather exposed on the coast, so you have to make a sharp turn at the entrance and then another one. Once inside we got the boat neatly alongside. Funnily enough, that always gets harder the more people there are on board and the more people come to help on the pontoon.

In Calheta we just managed to catch an evening with yet more sailing friends of Saskia and Koen, whom they know from Zeeland. Tineke and Eric of the Maneskin had sailed straight from Porto to Porto Santo, because they were afraid of the orcas that are making the Spanish and Portuguese coasts unsafe. Even on Madeira she was still talking about it as if it were still a threat. The next day we immediately made friends by offering the use of the washing machine on board, because there was a laundry in town but it was a service laundry only, and therefore very expensive. Later we offered it to a German boat next door too, so it’s a quick way to make friends.

Meanwhile, more work on the watermaker: now it turned out the fans on the pumps weren’t working properly either. Since little fans from Sunon (the “premium brand” in this field) only cost €6, it was simpler to order them myself (delivered to the house in Harlingen the next morning…) than to start negotiating with Schenker and Rob Wink again. Arnold’s bag is getting fuller…

There’s also something up with the rudder hydraulics: the rudders are just a bit too stiff for the maximum pressure I can get the system to produce. After some online self-education and consulting Eeuwe, I learn that a pressure relief valve can be fitted with several different springs, e.g. 0-70 bar, 15-100, 50-150, etc. And wouldn’t you know it, I’ve got the 0-70 one and really want to be able to push 80 bar. Hmmm. For now I get by: when the rudders are almost up, I briefly lower the keel a few times, which each time sends a little pressure surge through the system, and that’s enough for the time being.

Then Arnold arrives, and he too only gets to enjoy one evening at the starting point because of the (lack of) wind forecast. But more about that in the next episode.