Portugal Is the Final Boss || Sailing SV Goat ep 115

Greece marked its fishing nets with something red or white. Sicily improvised — an oil jar, but at least an orange one. In Spain a fisherman once used a life jacket, and the coastguard went full rescue mode thinking somebody was in the water. Portugal uses a single green plastic water bottle, floating flat, invisible to the eye and too small for the radar to see. Portugal is the final boss. This is the week we crossed the border. We left Mazagón at eight in the morning, spent nine hours dodging fishing gear and watching for fins, and somewhere off the coast went from one country to the next — which mostly meant an hour back on the clock and a green-and-red flag going up at the spreader. Then the entrance to Faro, a channel with tides, not much water and a plotter reading single figures. Two days on Ilha do Farol, an island of white houses and a red-and-white striped lighthouse you can see from the anchorage. Then the run to Portimão, which is the one that needed thinking about: the best orca ground sits right there, and about a hundred metres inshore of it the chart goes to three metres, then one. There is no comfortable line. This is the day the catamaran earned its keep. And then the job this whole leg has been waiting for. Our watermaker has been dead since Spain — no showers for a week, buying drinking water ashore. The new pumps were shipped to a yard that said they could fit them and then said they couldn't, so I did it on the cockpit table: one pump full of corrosion with the bearing ring destroyed and the rotor chewed up, one still working and going into the spares box. At half past one in the afternoon the pressure came up to six, and fresh water came out of the tap. Next week we head out into the Atlantic for Porto Santo. CHAPTERS 0:00 Leaving Mazagón 0:55 Past the breakwater 1:43 “The first Bergamasca to sail out of the Po” 2:57 One green bottle — Portugal’s fishing buoys 4:33 Not even the radar can see it 5:26 Inside the Ria Formosa 6:27 Parrots on the island path 7:26 Morning in the lagoon 8:54 The barrier island 10:00 Forty degrees, and no pastel de nata 13:07 Threading between the orcas and no water 13:54 “This engine is toast” 15:10 Rebuilding the pumps 16:11 It goes below 17:01 Bleeding the air 18:07 Fresh water out of the tap Filmed aboard SV Goat, a Lagoon 400 we live on full time. Vlad supervises. #SailingLife #Liveaboard #CatamaranLife #Lagoon400 #SailboatLife #SailingVlog #Catamaran #Portugal #Algarve #RiaFormosa #Portimao #Watermaker #BoatRepair #DIYBoat