Change of crew

Horta

Sunday morning called for a bit of boat cleaning. Things get a bit schmutzig after a week of living aboard. We didn't do a full deep dive, but the heads and the floors were clean, we collected the laundry that needed to be done and then went ashore. The laundry "room" has somewhat new terms of service than the ones I'm used to. There is an attendant who sees you loading the machines, but then she was the one who moved the washed clothing to the dryer, so all we had to do was to come back after 13:00 to pick up the dry clothing. By my standards (and the price we paid earlier in Horta) 24 euros for 2 loads of laundry was not cheap, but hey, that's the cost of being on the islands.

I looked up the opening hours of Ah Boca Sante incorrectly, so we ended up tracking to the municipal market to find it closed. That called for a change of plans for lunch and, given that we enjoyed eating there a few days before, a change of plans. Irina was very keen coming back to the place that she liked, but yet ran out of the sandwich that we wanted to have. Now we needed to be in Horta at 11:30 on Monday, so our planned voyage to Graciosa, which would have required an early departure, was not to take place.

We stumbled over to Peter/Cafe Sport -- the place where Alice, Frank, Mark and I had our first meal on the islands. We got a seat outside, but overall our experience was not that great. The next items on the agenda were to get food and saline solution for Peter, who has been unable to shake off a cold for the past week. But first we took a "break" in Hotel do Canal for espresso, caipirinha and WiFi. Peter and I left Irina there and walked over to the supermarket.

The apothecary advised me to take Peter to a local hospital to ensure that nothing was really off with his nasal passages, but otherwise was not worried about what he observed and helped me navigate Portuguese descriptions for what seemed like the best solution (pun intended). In the end, Irina did take Peter to the hospital and they didn't find anything dangerous, so life goes on with a clogged nose and ears...

We saw the plane of the next crew fly over Horta. It was simply too much coincidence: there were very few planes and they were supposed to land in 3 minutes. However, it did take them more than an hour to reach Horta. First they had to wait for luggage, and then the streets were closed because of the parade. The irony of the street closure at that time was that the parade was taking place on the water. I just took the dinghy back to the island and Irina called me to make sure that I didn't ignore the loud honking that was coming from the water.

Once Andy, Barbara and Valentin were aboard Salty Ginger, we took a swim, relaxed and headed back to Cafe Sport. This time we were sitting inside (after getting a few drinks while waiting outside) and sinking in the atmosphere of the place we got our guests and ourselves into a proper sailing mood. Seeing the pennants from all over the world does give a certain level of respect for the cafe and its customers who have sailed from all over the world: Europe, Asia, Americas, Australia...

Faial

In the morning the plan was to have a cab take us to the top of Caldeira crater, the oldest and greenest on the island. Our driver told us that it would be much more impressive to take a look at the Capelinhos crater, which is where an eruption took place in 1957. It didn't make any sense to argue, so we had Valter drive us to the opposite side of the island. We asked him to come along and show us around, which he was quite happy to do.

The short story is that seismologists have been monitoring the volcano in the 1950s and by the time the eruption happened, the village of Capelo was evacuated, so nobody died, but quite a few houses were buried under the volcanic ash. As a result of the eruption the island became a few hundred meters longer. As of a few years ago, the area was marked as protected, so it's no longer accessible to humans, but birds are happily nested on the volcanic ash.

The photo below is the location where the village used to be. You can see a few walls of houses that were not fully buried under the ash.

Valter took a scenic route back to Horta and dropped us off at the municipal market, so this time around we could grab lunch at Ah! Boca Santa.

Back in the marina, it was time to get fuel and go. I took Peter and Valentin aboard and we had the rest of the crew take the lines from us. The fuel dock person is separate from the marina and his lunch is 13:00 till 14:00, so we had to wait a few minutes for him to come back. Irina put her feet into the water and started to throw bread. The fish appeared quite quickly and when they were done with bread, they started to nibble on Irina's feet.

Back to Sao Jorge 

We expected complete absence of wind, but to our surprise outside of Horta harbor there was almost perfect wind for a closehauled course directly to Velas. Our guests had a great introduction to sailing on the Azores.

The harbormaster did not have a spot for us, so we had to drop the anchor outside the marina. Given the forecast light northerly wind, it made the anchorage tenable. The anchor dug in right away, but when I jumped into the water I was concerned about how it held: there were huge boulders right under Salty Ginger. As luck would have it, we dropped the hook onto sandy bottom, so the only concern we now had was a wind shift. It was not in the forecast, but we've seen the forecast diverge from reality quite often.

After snorkeling along the rocks near the shore, we took the dingy ashore, checked in with the marina and went to find dinner. Since we had access to the marina facilities, even though we were at anchor, they had us pay for the stay. All of 6 euros.

After dinner as we strolled back to the harbor, we heard someone playing the piano. The pianist was very good, playing improvisations of jazzy songs. Nice touch to a relaxing evening.