We arrived eight days ago in Horta, and what a beautiful place it is. And not just the town, the whole island of Faial is just gorgeous. Completely volcanic, but unlike the Cape Verde Islands, this one is lush and green. It gets lots of rain, especially in winter, averaging 1,000 mm annually.
We are rafted up with two other boats onto the dock. Upon arrival at night, we anchored in the harbor, intending to raft up the next day after check-in. After a short time at anchor, Ken decided he wasn’t too sure about the distance between us and the next boat over and decided we’d move a little further away from him. I tried to raise the anchor, but it was stuck. We tried going forward, backward, sideways, in circles, but no maneuver could convince the anchor to come up, not an inch. So we stayed put for the night, and fortunately, no incident with the neighboring boat ensued.
The following day I went to the local dive shop to rent some scuba gear to go down and see what kept the anchor from moving. But they wouldn’t rent me anything. Not really surprising as they are not in the rental business, but still worth a try as some shops, only a few though, are willing to rent on occasion. I’d hoped my PADI credential would help the matter, but no, it didn’t do a thing.
We got a diver the next day, and he freed our anchor in minutes from the old chains and cables stuck to the harbor floor. You’d think the harbor authorities would clean that crap up and not have unsuspected sailors drop their anchors on top of it. According to the diver, 60 euros later, it is pretty common to get stuck in the harbor. Ken took it all in stride. He said he had never had an anchoring problem while circumnavigating the world, so one day it had to happen. The law of averaging.
The marina assigned us a rafting spot, three deep, on the outside. We had to climb over two boats to get onto the quay. Passing etiquette allows for traffic over the front of the boat, never over the back. The next day we moved to the inside, just because the inside boat departed and the middle one would leave town ahead of us. It’s quite a puzzle at times and sometimes a very complicated one. To get in the gap between three boats rafted up in front of you and three boats behind, you’d almost have to move sideways to raft up to the quay. Some boats have bow thrusters, a propellor that allows you to swing out the front. Some boats have bow and stern thrusters, literally giving you the ability to go sideways. And some boats have none. That’s us. We rely on Ken’s good seamanship.
And totally unrelated to this, Rob, a friend of mine in Holland, lives on a wooden, over a hundred-year-old boat and is rafted up seven deep in Amsterdam. Just to get to shore is a journey in itself.
One of our first stops was Café Sport, of all sorts of fame and arguably the best-known sailors’ bar in the Atlantic. I anticipated a rather large establishment with an old fashion large bar inside with old salty sailors on the bar stools telling stories from the old days before electronics and modern gadgets polluted the true art of sailing. Nothing like it. It is just a small restaurant. It is packed though, all afternoon and evening. And so is the newly established covered patio. Next door, it has its own souvenir shop with the Peter Café Sport logo stamped on all merchandise that goes out the door. Many a Café Sport shopping bag moves around the marina, perpetuating the rationale that Café Sport will be in business for a long time to come.
The ARC Europe 2023 boats are appearing in the harbor. ARC stands for Atlantic Rally for Cruisers. ARC Europe is the west-to-east Atlantic rally, sailing from the Caribbean, St Maarten, or North America to Europe. The two fleets rendezvous in St George’s, Bermuda before crossing the Atlantic to the Azores. And although it is a race, anybody with a sailboat of 27 feet or larger can enter. It is more of a social event and a safety-in-numbers thing while coming across the ocean. In the Azores, they’ll visit Faial, Terciera, Sao Miguel, and Santa Marina before returning to whatever country they came from. Many of these boats have also participated in the ARC 2023, starting in November 2022 from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and finishing in Saint Lucia. ARC Europe is the way back.
The marina and the harbor are packed with boats. Not in the least because of this ARC. People are anchoring as regular marina slips have reservations going back two to three months. When we arrived, we asked for one, but nothing was available for two months, now it’s three. We were lucky to get a rafting spot. All around the rafting is three deep, the maximum allowable number of boats in a raft.
There is still no good weather window in the forecast. Winds are coming from the east pretty well for the whole of next week. If we were going to Iceland, we would be right on course, but we have to go quite a bit east to get to the UK or perhaps Ireland. I think we might be here for another week.
We released our pigeon by the first morning light on our first day here. She exited the cat carrier, spread her wings, circled twice above us, and took off. We thought that would be the last of Pedro, but not so. Every afternoon, around four, who sits on the quay beside Windsong? Exactly. Since Ken feeds it every day, mostly peanuts, Pedro has no reason not to come back every day. When we drove around the island on our rented scooters, more on that in the next post, we had to be back by four as Ken had to feed his pigeon.
The tear in the sail turned out to be just a torn seam. Such a relief. Taking the sail down was painless, much easier than I had imagined, and the sailmakers returned it the next day, all nicely fixed. We had it rolled up inside the mast when the winds died for a couple of hours the following day.
And the generator is fixed again. It wasn’t the injector, as I thought it was, but some technicality with the diesel pump. We are cautiously optimistic about the workings of this piece of equipment going forward.
I love the Azores, not in a hurry to leave.