Our first island landfall

On 16^th July Saecwen took her departure of Continental Europe. With a fresh northerly wind forecast for several days, these seemed the ideal conditions to continue our voyage south. With Heloise’s brother Justin embarked aboard ship as third crew member we set sail from Cascais, just to the west of Lisbon, out into the Atlantic Ocean.

The moment we cleared the shelter of Cabo da Roca, Europe’s most westerly point, we were hit by extremely strong gusts of wind coming down the coast. We had found ourselves in a classic wind “acceleration” zone whereby the effect of the wind funnelling around headlands and the hills behind significantly accelerates the wind’s velocity – in this case causing it to gust up to 30kn (Force 7 on the Beaufort scale).

Justin poling out the Genoa

We did our best to control the speed of the boat by reefing down both the mainsail (to half its normal size) and genoa, but nothing could mitigate the very rough seas, which were clearly exacerbated by the fact that we were also for many hours sailing right across the canyons of the Portuguese Continental Shelf, which create a major upwelling of the prevailing ocean currents as the deep waters meet the steep shelving of the narrow coastal waters. When combined with the 2.5m northerly swell this created very confused and steep short seas.

This unpleasant irregular motion only really abated after 24 hours once we were fully clear of the Shelf and out into the ocean proper. We all became aware of the sea turning a magnificent shade of deep blue as Saecwen ploughed her way south under full sail.

The next three nights at sea were magical: a steady 15 kn of wind from behind, shooting stars, a beautiful crescent moon rising around midnight, a glowing red Venus a few hours later and dazzling phosphorescence in our wake and bow wave. We had two sunset visits by pods of leaping dolphins – but other than the occasional passing shearwater and stormy petrel, we saw little other wildlife. After our very challenging start of the voyage we all slowly became acclimatised to life at sea – marked by Heloise producing a fine three course supper for our final evening at sea, which we ate down below around the cabin table in full style.

Approaching Porto Santo, NE of Madeira

By midnight on the fourth night we started to see the lights of Porto Santo, a small island 25m NE of Madeira. By 0300 Justin rang the ship’s brass bell – a Saecwen landfall ritual – to mark clear sighting of land via the lighthouse on the off-lying Ilheu de Cima. By dawn we had rounded the northeast corner of the island before anchoring inside the breakwater – 494 miles and 54 hours out from Cascais. Here came the second landfall ritual – cracking open a bottle of champagne, accompanied by a fry-up with the last of our New Forest bacon. Saecwen had successfully made her first Atlantic island landfall; hopefully the first of many more.

Safely anchored in Porto Santo harbour