Do Not Drive in Madeira || Sailing SV Goat ep 118

We sailed our Lagoon 400 catamaran from Porto Santo to Madeira, hired a car in Funchal, and learned the one thing nobody tells you about the island everybody talks about. The crossing is short and it has a sting in it: a hundred metres of sea where almost two knots of current run straight into fourteen knots of wind, and the water stands up and breaks for no reason you can see — and then, a hundred metres later, it simply stops. Then the courtesy flag goes up, the cliffs come out of the haze, and the first anchorage has water clearer than most famous ones in Europe. We arrived in Funchal the way we arrive everywhere: no plan, no idea what we were looking at, and a firm promise that this channel does not do tourism tips. We found the market, rediscovered that we don't actually like the pastéis de nata we have been dreaming about for five years, and decided to see the rest of the island by car. That was a mistake. Madeira's roads do not do turns. They go straight up the mountain at an angle that made us genuinely unsure the brakes were up to it, with the blonde coaching me through it one "slow" at a time. So here is the only tourism tip you will ever get from us: take the cable car. Then Câmara de Lobos, where Churchill apparently sat and painted the bay; Santana's famous thatched houses, which are exactly the tourist trap they look like; and a waterfall with no sign, no path we could see, and a route through somebody's backyard that we only found because the blonde had a hunch and Google Maps agreed with her. She did it in white linen. I did tell her. CHAPTERS 0:00 Don't do it by car 0:18 Leaving Porto Santo 1:16 A hundred metres of madness 2:21 Madeira's courtesy flag 2:47 Crystal clear water 3:50 The cliffs and the sea arch 4:43 No plan, no tourism tips 5:37 The market 6:23 Six weeks without seeing people 7:36 A really bad idea 8:34 We almost died 9:49 Italians understood turns 11:08 The tourist trap 11:57 A hint from the blonde 12:40 White linen 13:17 There it is 13:56 The waterfall Next: we leave Madeira for the Canary Islands, and the autopilot dies in the middle of the night. Follow along so you don't miss it. Filmed aboard SV Goat, a Lagoon 400 we live on full time. Vlad supervises, from the boat. #SailingLife #Liveaboard #CatamaranLife #Lagoon400 #SailboatLife #SailingVlog #Catamaran #Madeira #Funchal #CamaraDeLobos #Portugal #IslandLife #Atlantic