20 Surfing from Porto to Lisbon

In our last post about Porto you could see some footage of the swell which is common in these waters.
In fact we had a lot of swell since we entered Spain way back in San Sebastián, in the harbor or at sea, wind or not it has hardly left us since. We got used to being rocked to sleep like babies and to cook with the ingredients literally rolling though the cabin. The waves can get quite high but even if they aren’t the boat keeps sweeping in all directions and we developed the habit of walking about wide legged even when ashore.

In our last post about Porto you could see some footage of the swell which is common in these waters.
In fact we had a lot of swell since we entered Spain way back in San Sebastián, in the harbor or at sea, wind or not it has hardly left us since. We got used to being rocked to sleep like babies and to cook with the ingredients literally rolling though the cabin. The waves can get quite high but even if they aren’t the boat keeps sweeping in all directions and we developed the habit of walking about wide legged even when ashore.

In Nazaré, at the cape with the lighthouse, waves sometimes reach an incredible height of 30 meters. A 3000 meter deep trough suddenly ending just before the coast do cause these massive breakers popular by surfers all over the world.
Fortunately when we visited the place the weather was calm and the famous lighthouse stood high and dry on its cliff.
Nowadays a worldfamous surfspot, the village still shows its origins as a fishing village with charming old houses, fishing vessels, fish drying racks at the beach and women in traditional costume.

Peniche, another surfers paradise, is famous in Portugal for completely different reasons. During the 60 years of dictatorship the old fortress at its cape was used as a prison for political prisoners and many atrocities found place between its walls.
The Nobel laureate José Saramago has written an impressive book about this rather recent period in Portuguese history. People sometimes walked for days to visit their loved ones just to be denied access on a whim of the guards. The people in Peniche are known for their help to those unfortunate visitors and for their brave uprising in order to ameliorate the food the prisoners received.

The great fear when sailing along the coasts of Spain and Portugal is to be attacked by orcas or killerwhales as they are known as well. No one knows why those animals (they are not fish but cetaceans) single out yachts to bump into and destroy their rudders with their sharp teeth. These “attacks” can even last up to one hour, a frightening experience. Needless to say that whenever your rudder has been eaten by orcas you have to call the rescuers to help you get to the harbour.
We encountered people who had to interrupt their voyage for more then a month while their boat was on the hard to get a new rudder. When our rudder started to turn like berserk and we heard some loud thuds we knew it was our turn and so we made the recommended precautions of switching of all devices, not touching the steering wheel to prevent injuries and minimize the sail to lower our speed. We made an emergency call via the VHF and then I saw a massive kind of fin behind the boat leaving us.
We consider ourselves very lucky that the orca was not very interested in our rudder and after about fifteen minutes left it alone and still working. The crew of the Zeester, at that moment sailing not far away heard our VHF call and got a scare of the incident as well. We celebrated the good outcome together in a very good Indian restaurant that night in Peniche.