Sailing Alice

Portugal to the Caribbean Oh man did we have some adventures on this stretch! So as you might know there have been some Orcas that attack yachts along the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic coast. In general the Orcas attack and destroy the rudder of yachts, a costly and slow thing to fix that could well mean the premature end of an atlantic crossing. When we were planning our next stop after Nasare. we heards that the Orcas were attacking boats just in the next port south of us. So we decided to sail straight for Madeira and thereby avoid the orcas. So we set the autopilot to take us straight out into the atlantic. At sunset we heard a Mayday on the VHF from a boat just where we would have been if we continued south instead of twest. The Orcas had stuck again! Later we heard the boat was towed back to shore with a destroyed rudder.  After this we had a lovely sail to Porto Santo (close to Madeira) and had a great time for a couple of weeks. < Mountaineering in Porto Santo Then we ...