Lisbon to Madeira

Outboard, liferaft, stove

Portugal has almost no anchorages on its coast - one of the few is Cashcais just west of Lisbon. It’s great except when the swell comes from the SE. We hung out there for a few weeks waiting for favourable weather to sail to Madeira. We’d just about got used to sailing with only us two adults on board, but the trip to Madeira was our first venture out into the Atlantic swell and a multi-day (and night) passage too. We had planned to have our friend Pontus come and join us for the trip but the covid scare at the time meant he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get back home in time for work if he caught it while away. We waited a long time there looking at the forecasts of waves of 3m or more. We spent most evenings socialising with some other families on neighbouring boats. One night as we dinghied back home, I said to Helen: “I’ll miss this outboard when it eventually stops working - it’s been so bullet-proof reliable for years!” (I think you can see where this is going). 

The next morning we were due to catch a taxi to do some sight-seeing. We piled into the dinghy to go to shore. We got half way there, and the dinghy ground to a halt, while the motor continued making normal noises like it was pretending to do its job correctly. I rowed the rest of the way to shore. Helen and I agreed that I would try and get the outboard fixed, while the three of them went exploring. When you live on a boat, your dinghy is your car, and you really are stuck without it at anchor. 

I quickly established there was nothing wrong with the motor itself, but the prop wasn’t turning. The shear-pin was fine, so it was a transmission problem. A quick walk around the most expensive marina in Portugal told me that there was no-one able to get the parts to fix it, and no-one seemed to want to either. I found some outboards for sale, inside (closed) shops, but no-one to sell them to me. Finally I went into the Yamaha dealer and they were happy to sell me a 10hp motor for about $1000. It didn’t look that big in the shop, but when we got it down to the dinghy dock it was obviously huge, however, by this time I had bought it so I didn’t really have a choice. We put it on the back of the dinghy and I battled to start the thing, it took several pulls, and not little ones. Once it was going it made our little dinghy fly along. When Helen got back she was furious. $1000 was over-budget, it was very heavy to lift up when we packed the dinghy away for passages, and she couldn’t start it at all. She was right of course, but I was too stubborn to admit it at the time. I sheepishly went back to the shop the next day to swap the 10hp and explained that I either needed a different wife, or a different motor. They gave me the worst, barely working, outboard in the world. It was a 5hp 4-stroke Honda they’d obviously got as a trade-in. It looked like a piece of shit with scratches all over the case and it sounded like a bag of nails when it ran. Helen could just about start it, which was better than the 10, so that was that. I didn’t get any of my $1000 back. 

While in the same anchorage, we realised that our liferaft needed servicing - they have dates on the side, and you need to keep them up to date so you can be sure the food, water and any batteries inside are within their shelf-lives. Obviously, the raft itself gets inflated and checked for leaks too. We found a guy on the other side of Lisbon, in Setubal who could service Viking rafts. Rather than trying to get our boat into what looked like an awkward harbour, we opted for lifting our raft in its rack off the stern with a halyard, lowering it into the dinghy (now powered by the world’s worst outboard), and lifting it into the boot of our hire-car before driving over to Setubal. The guy was really friendly, he let us hang-around while he serviced it, showed us exactly what he was doing and let the boys get inside it while it was inflated. He gave us a load of extra water-rations and emergency food rations. We bought him lunch. He made some repairs to the lining of the container, deflated it and packed it all up again. He strapped it back onto the rack (remember this moment for later) and helped me load it back into the car. Back in Cashcais two other dad/captains (thanks to Lasse and Johannes) helped me lift the raft back into place and I tightened up the bolts again to attach the rack to the push pit. 

A week or so later we finally saw a weather window to get to Madeira. We set off with our friends on Malla. The forecast was for 2-3m following seas. I wasn’t exactly comfortable with this, but it was the best it had looked for weeks, and finally the wind was blowing in the right direction. On the first night, we were still in sight of Malla. There was no moon, so seeing outside the cockpit was quite hard. Helen spied the lights of a ship diagonally crossing our path ahead. She called me up to take a look - it seemed unremarkable, so I said we should just carry on and we would pass behind it. It was displaying the lights of a tow - three white lights vertically at the front, and another white light above the green starboard light. However, I couldn’t see a towed vessel. There was nothing on AIS¹. I had another look through the binoculars, and realised there was another just-visible very dimly-lit green light crossing our path a long way behind the first one. I realised with horror that we were going to pass between them and dramatically adjusted our course to port. The towed vessel eventually became visible in the dark - it was absolutely huge, despite the pathetic light it was displaying!

The voyage was about 500 miles. At almost exactly 250 miles from the mainland, and 250 miles from Porto Santo, I was on watch alone in the cockpit at 3 in the morning (a disproportionately large number of unfortunate events seem to take place at this time on our boat). The wind was blowing about 25kts apparent², and we were surfing downwind down big Atlantic rollers. There was a thump and then a hiss, which I can only describe as sounding like we’d just hit an angry whale. It just went on and on hissing angrily (maybe we really had hit one?). I plucked up the courage to look over the back of the boat and realised that the bump was a wave knocking the liferaft into the sea, and the hissing was the thing inflating. Then the stern of the boat started vibrating - the liferaft has sea-anchors under the floor to slow it down and stop it sliding down big swells, the painter³ was still attached to the pushpit⁴ and we were dragging the whole raft down the waves. I called down to Helen and quickly told her what had happened and let her know I was going out of the cockpit, pulled out my knife⁵ and cut the painter. Helen joined me in the cockpit, and we then watched out of the stern of the boat as the liferaft’s strobe light disappeared into the distance and the dark. When I told my friend James about it later he quipped ‘far better that way around than sitting in your liferaft watching your boat disappear!’ I can’t argue with this, but it wasn’t a nice feeling to know that we were 250 miles from land, and no longer had a last-ditch contingency solution. We still had our hard-dinghy on the foredeck, so we agreed that, difficult as it would be to deploy, that was now our liferaft, and if it came to it, we would strike the guardrails and launch it from the bow. Our friends on Malla were faster than us and were out of radio contact, so we just carried on alone in the ocean. I cursed the service guy who had put the raft back in the rack. 

When we arrived in Porto Santo, we notified the coastguard that our liferaft was out there somewhere, in case anyone were to find it and start a search and rescue looking for the occupants. I filed an insurance claim, to discover that I’d quoted the raft’s value at $1600, when a quick google revealed the replacement value at $3000 (sigh). I also discovered that no-one on the islands of Porto Santo or Madeira dealt in high quality offshore liferafts. Which was a problem as we had some more ocean to cross before getting to the Canaries, where such things were more readily available. Ultimately we found an out-of date coastal liferaft in a chandlery in Madeira and I took that, having no better option. I ordered a whistles and bells (ocean-equipped, self-righting) Viking raft to be delivered to Gran Canaria, where we would be departing for St Lucia, engaged a shipping agent (mandatory for importing to the Canaries) to receive it, and then started arguing with Viking about whether or not they should be charging me tax, given that I was exporting it from Denmark to Spain. (Months later they gave me the tax back!). Also months later when the raft arrived (just in the nick of time before our departure on the ARC), I mounted it on the same rack as its predecessor had fallen off. Instead of the single-point quick-release clasp (which failed) I used several webbing straps to cinch it down, and mounted a sharp knife on the back of the casing, to cut the straps if the need arises. I don’t want another one getting washed out to sea! Much later, when I was reading Heavy Weather Sailing I noted that the advice there was to keep the liferaft below deck to prevent it being washed away before it could be used. 

It was the same Lisbon - Porto Santo trip where the diesel stove first started playing up. I’d originally decided to install it as Lucky Girl’s gas locker could only fit the 5kg camping-gaz cylinders which I doubted would be available anywhere west of Spain. I also remembered from our previous Pacific adventures, many boats having trouble either getting gas at all, or persuading people to fill their tanks, or struggling to find adaptors and fittings for foreign tanks. A diesel fuelled stove meant we could run it off the same tank as the engine - and it uses 10ml an hour - fantastic! After a night of Atlantic swell, I woke up and turned the stove on for my morning coffee. Nothing. (oh dear). Out of all the things that have broken on the boat, with the exception of standing rigging, I don’t think anything strikes more fear into my heart than the stove breaking down when we’re offshore. We always have loads of food on board, because Helen is so fantastic at provisioning, but what if we have no means of cooking it? Ok, I guess we won’t die, but it could make for a very miserable few weeks. I checked the electrical connections, and the fuses (all fine). I prodded the fuel shutoff solenoid in the engine room, and discovered that it was cold (normally it's warm if it's open, allowing fuel through). I traced the wire to the back of the stove itself (there’s not a lot of room there, especially when the boat is rolling about). After a bit of poking around, I found a loose wire. With a mobile phone, I was able to take a photo of the circuit board and the screw-down contact that looked like it was missing a wire, which was hanging nearby. I tried for an hour or so in different positions lying on top of the galley work surface with my arms down the back of the stove to get the wire back in, but it was just impossible in that cramped space. My temporary solution was to wire a switch inside the engine room to control the solenoid directly. I was then able to turn the solenoid on and off before and after using the stove, I added ‘fix stove solenoid wiring’ to the blackboard fix-list for when we were at anchor and able to lift the stove out to give access. Lifting the stove out is quite a process, involving 2 people and a few ‘I can’t’s that you may remember from the battery swap and the wood-burner installation in an earlier chapter. Even when it's out, it’s balanced on piles of books on the galley floor, blocking access to the stern cabin. Anyhow, that temporary fix meant I finally got my coffee, although a couple of hours later than I had hoped.

1. AIS: Automatic Identification System - we receive and transmit AIS signals over VHF. We transmit our position, heading and speed, and receive the same information from other ships. All commercial ships over a certain size are required to transmit AIS data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_system

2. Apparent wind: The wind vector (direction and speed) you experience on the deck. It is the result of combining the wind vector caused by the boat moving along with the wind vector caused by the weather (true wind). Examples:
1. Motoring north at 5kts on a day with no wind, you will experience apparent wind of 5kts from the north
2. Motoring north at 5kts on a day with 5kts of wind from the north, you will experience apparent wind of 10kts from the north
3. Motoring south at 5kts on a day with 5kts of wind from the north, you will experience apparent wind of 0kts
4. Motoring south at 5kts on a day with 5kts of wind from the west, you will experience apparent wind of 7kts from the south west

3. Painter: there are no ‘ropes’ on a boat, every one has a name. The ‘painter’ is attached to the front of a small boat and used for securing the boat to things (eg. dinghy painter, liferaft painter)

4. Pushpit: metal frame around the back of the boat

5. I *always* have my leatherman with me on board, and I prefer that everyone does the same when they’re on watch.