23rd June - A night at anchor

Originally, we had planned to head straight across the bay from Cadiz to Culatra but, following the news of the orca attack, we now had to hug the coast and the journey would be over 100 miles rather than the expected 79. Fortunately, with Portugal in the same time zone as the UK, it meant that we would have an extra hour.  

We still left Cadiz before dawn, which was an interesting experience because Cadiz port has a number of different entrances and so a particularly large number of navigation lights, most of which are either red or green.  It was only Emma’s eagle eyes that prevented us from heading off down the wrong channel.

In the end the journey was uneventful, the only excitement was when Emma almost lost the Portuguese flag when we crossed the border from Spain to Portugal.  


The Spain/Portugal border

Our destination was the lagoon between the towns of Faro and Olhao on the mainland and the small island of Culatra. We eventually arrived at about 8:15 and found a large, flat and peaceful spot where we could anchor away from any other boat.

For the past hour Greg had been preparing a sumptuous feast, including his own creation of ice-cream pina coladas, and so we enjoyed a very pleasant evening meal as the sun set.  Greg even gave us a moving rendition of Bob Seger's C'est La Vie.

Dinner at anchor


Unfortunately, we also had some bad news as Greg and Richard’s toilet had again stopped working and we also heard that the orcas had moved west into the next bay.  So we would have to deal with them again tomorrow, on the way to Lagos.

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