The trip from Portimao to Porto Santo is an awkward length – it’s 2 and a half days of sailing. We always strongly prefer to arrive at a new port in daylight, so our two options were to leave at first light and hope that our speed is high enough to arrive before dark on day three, or to leave later in the day, and then not sail too fast so that we arrive in the middle of the night.
We chose the second option, in part to eliminate having to worry that we weren’t sailing fast enough. So of course, the wind picked up to 20-25kts overnight, which meant that we spent much of the day working to slow the boat down.
With deeply reefed sails, we still spent most of the night sailing at over 8kts. But the morning sun moderated the wind, and we’ve settled into a ~6.5kt average speed that should have us off the north coast of Porto Santo tomorrow at first light.
All’s well onboard.
Day Two
161nm
34 07.2N 14 17.7W
