Porto Santo Madeira Archipelago

Shortly after we dropped anchor a ship arrived and was manoeuvred into port by 2 tugs.
We were far enough away but the tugs got very close to the yacht anchored by the entrance

Arrival in port inevitably means some cleaning and putting away of stuff, and fixing of stuff that has broken on passage. So, after we’d been ashore to complete the arrivals formalities, and before the evening cruisers’ get-together, I had another go at fixing the port compass light that I thought I had fixed in Kinsale but which had failed again during the passage. In the end that job took a couple more attempts because there were a few breaks/poor connections in the wiring and, after fixing each fault I found, I discovered that when the compass was back together, I couldn’t see if my fix had worked until it got dark. It was all rather frustrating, but I managed to get it sorted out (eventually) during our stay at Porto Santo.

The anchorage inside the harbour was full

As was the small marina

The busy boatyard at which it is remarkably good value to keep your boat ashore

The evening meet-up at the port café was great fun. There were several crews there many of whom are now based in the area. As well as chatting with Beth and Gary (OCC members on SV Dyola), we spent some time talking to Jim, who was sailing with his married friends, Paul and Sally, owners of a Moody 38, Mirage. Amazingly, it turned out that Paul and Sally had crossed the Atlantic back to the UK at the same time as us in 2020 and had been a part of the same HF radio net. Nicky took turns to run that net as her voice is very clear on the SSB but we had to admit to not remembering hearing them. To be fair, our boat name is quite distinctive, Mirage less so.

The beach by our anchorage

Saturday 13^th was laundry day. Whilst we would have preferred a lie-in after the passage, the advice Nicky had been given was to arrive at the laundry as soon as the doors opened at 0900hrs or risk being in a very long queue. Unfortunately, even at 0900hrs there was already someone ahead of her in the queue. Vivian’s washing had been in the queue for most of the previous day, gradually going backwards as other people had queue-jumped when she’d not been around. Even with the 45min delay (for Vivian’s washing to go through) Nicky got both our loads through and was back aboard Blue Velvet by 1130hrs. There being no tumble drier, the next challenge was keeping the drying laundry attached to Blue Velvet whilst the 20+kt wind tried to remove it. At least it didn’t take too long to dry in the strong wind and sun.

Our other chore for the morning had been to exchange the Campingaz cylinder that had expired very shortly after we had departed from Kinsale. Nicky had been told by one of the other cruisers the previous evening that 907 cylinders could be exchanged at the marina office, but the lady there in the morning had said ‘no’ and had indicated that she should try at the GALP garage on the road to the airport. She’d mentioned this to Beth and Gary when she had seen them between laundry loads and they had said that they would speak to José, the boatyard manager (and previously the marina manager). But it was the weekend and there was unlikely to be an answer before Monday. So, with the washing dried, we headed off into town to visit the relatively new Pingo Doce supermarket. It’s about a mile along the coast road towards the town, and a hot, flat, straight walk in the sun, though there is a lovely beach to look at, and some nice boats in the anchorage too! En route we passed a lady dragging a trolley loaded with a 20litre diesel can. Clearly, she’d just visited the garage: “Does the garage sell Campingaz cylinders?” She thought it did and gave us directions (though we already had it from Google Maps), so we took a 15min detour to the garage. It doesn’t sell Campingaz, though it does sell GALP cylinders which look remarkably like Campingaz ones, just in a natty shade of orange. The lady we spoke to said that we could exchange our Campingaz cylinder for a GALP cylinder (which we would then not be able to exchange elsewhere) for €16 or we could buy (rather than exchange) a full GALP cylinder for about €30. Given that we had paid €55 to exchange a Campingaz cylinder in Ireland, the latter seemed like a bargain, but we decided to see how full our current cylinder felt before committing.

From the garage we headed into town and had an enjoyable wander around, as well as 2 delicious ice-creams. And from there we headed back towards the harbour, stopping at the Pingo Doce for supplies of wine and fresh food. It’s a fantastic supermarket and, as well as the essentials, we also came away with some lovely Portuguese tarts, pimenton Padron, and some huge prawns, with which we later, belatedly, celebrated our arrival in Porto Santo along with some fizz.

We made a very late start on Sunday 14th morning, catching up on sleep missed on the passage south. When we eventually surfaced, it was to a message from Paul on Mirage who said that they would be leaving at 1300hrs if we would like to take Mirage’s anchor space in harbour. Oh yes, we would! It had been a rolly night in the outer anchorage and it looked as if it would be getting worse. We’d be very happy to move somewhere flatter! However, the wind appeared to be going round to the southeast and, with Mirage relatively close in on the north side of the harbour, we wanted to see how much space there was likely to be between us and the shore before we gave up our space outside. We took the dinghy in and had a good nosey around, as well as a farewell chat with Paul, Sally and Jim. All looked good so we weighed anchor and took Blue Velvet in just before 1300hrs.

Blue Velvet anchored inside the harbour

A short time later, Mirage’s anchor was up and we were waving them goodbye……before dropping our hook in their recently vacated space. It was lovely and flat but with far stronger gusts from all manner of directions compared to the anchorage outside. Like Mirage we only put out 25m chain, as the anchorage was quite tightly packed. Given the wind strength (or, at least, the gust strength) this didn’t really feel like enough chain but it was all we could afford given the space constraints and the fact that the boats danced around every which way.

The down-draughting wind off the hills made all of the yachts in the anchorage spin
and point in different directions

We spent the rest of the day aboard, watching the Dance of the Yachts and thanking our lucky stars that we’d nabbed a good-sized space in an area where most of the boats seemed to swing the same way: there were a couple of yachts further out which seemed destined to always be within no distance of each other and always pointing 180° out, no matter how hard the wind was blowing or from which direction it was gusting.

It was too windy to dry the sails on deck but it was so warm it didn’t take long with
them hung up in the saloon

Once settled we were also able to tackle drying, folding and packing away our storm sails which we had stuffed in the forward heads when we took them down after the gale had passed.

Pimenton Padrons with sundowners

In the middle of the morning on Monday 15^th, José came up trumps. His gas-man friend arrived at Beth and Gary’s boat clutching a full Campingaz cylinder. Beth called us and for the princely sum of €20 we were the proud owners of a full Campingaz cylinder. Hooray!

With the gas supplies full again, it was time to refill the water tanks and tick off our final post-passage chore which also water related as it was to fix the contents gauge on the aft water tank cluster. The gauge is a TekTank system with a thin tube that runs from the gauge to a probe in the tank and somewhere along its run the tube had split. To fix the problem we had to lift a couple of the floor boards and run a new tube up to behind the electrical panel at the chart table. Once the new tube was connected up it all worked again and after replacing all of the floorboards we rewarded ourselves with some lovely Portuguese pastries. We spent the afternoon on a trip up to the supermarket to do our final shop ready for the passage to the Canary Islands, before heading back to Blue Velvet to enjoy our last evening in Porto Santo.

In the morning, we realised that there were a couple of food items that we had forgotten to buy the previous day. We also needed to visit the harbour authorities to check out from Porto Santo, so we headed ashore reasonably promptly on Tuesday 16th to run the errands. Back on board we quickly stowed everything and headed out of the harbour and turned Blue Velvet’s bow south towards the Canaries.

Porto Santo, Madeira Archipelago