The sail from Porto Santo to Madeira was an easy day sail past the Deserted Islands arriving at Quinta do Lorde Marina at the northern tip of Madeira just as the sun was setting allowing us to nip to the bar and have a double gin and tonic. It is a place that evokes the TV series 'The Prisoner' which was set in Port Merrion [sic], down to the emptiness and electric golf carts. You can't spend a day I'm Madeira or any island for that matter without trying to get to the top of it. I failed in Porto Santo but here we hired a car and set off for a tour. What an amazing place it is, steep tropical forest with sudden openings allowing views up valleys to cloud draped sharks teeth peaks, and down to nest villages and farms where every bit of land is put to use growing everything from beans to bananas, including sugarcane and taro or 'Elephant ears'. I was particularly interested to find tea growing, which I am sure does, but failed to see any. It was interesting to s...
I left off the last post as we were approaching the island of Porto Santo. We made good time through the night and as you may have read in the Skippers blog (see link on right of the page), whilst I slept we made such good progress that he slowed us down so that we arrived in daylight. During the voyage we had become increasingly alarmed at a current leakage to the hull. Left unattended it will result in a thinning of the aluminium hull and eventually a hole can develop.... not something we really want! We had spent a lot of time trying to work out what was causing it, with several hours spent crawling around the engine and with my head down the bilges looking for a stray wire. The strange thing was that when we heeled hard over to starboard in a swell, the leak detector reported that it stopped, resuming once we heeled back to port. Having failed to find the cause we decided that we would do an exaughstive search once in harbour. Preparing to enter the harbour at Por...
At the moment Tin Tin and her intrepid crew of 3 greybeards are making the final 40 miles to the northern end of Mauritius (pronounced Maurice en Francais) having said goodbye to her smaller associate island of Rodrigues where we spent a few days relaxing after the long voyage through stormy seas from the Australian Indian Ocean outpost of Cocos Keeling.
The islands of Rodrigues and Mauritius were wrestled from the French just over 200yrs ago and one might have thought that in the intervening two centuries that the English language and customs might have all but superseded the French... but no.. It is veritable melange ... although traffic does drive on the left, English is an official language, road signs are in English and a strangely familiar feeling came over me when I came across double yellow lines. Despite these signs of a British presence it appears that French and Creole is the dominant mode of speech, on Rodrigues at least. Looking at the map of Mauritius you will notice ...
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