Fender Step Bunny

Today the water is smooth, the sun is high in a cloudless sky and we are making a gentle 6 knots in a light westerly breeze. We are sailing along the south coast of Portugal heading east towards the Med. On Jamie's birthday we went for dinner at Don Sebastiao in Lagos where they managed to rustle up a cake which was delivered to our table to the strains of happy birthday played over the PA system and accompanied by a round of applause from our fellow diners.

 

After dinner Beth and Jamie went off to explore the bars of Lagos, and Tom, Caroline and I returned to Juno. I felt completely exhausted. I think the effect of early mornings, long days in the hot sun and fitful sleeping for the past three weeks had finally caught up with me and the next morning i awoke with a thumping headache from a mild dose of sunstroke. Outside it was a scorching hot day on the Algarve and we regretted having taken down our bimini sun shade a few days earlier when the wind was howling on the Atlantic coast. So we turned on the air conditioning, closed the hatches and spent most of the day just reading and catching up with sleep. It was the first day of rest in the past three weeks since we left Ipswich and it was delicious just to potter around the boat and look forward to a leisurely day and the blissful prospect of a lie-in.

Beth and Jamie surfaced at midday having gone to bed at 6am and then it was time for Beth to catch her taxi to the airport to get back to the UK to prepare for her first term at university. She has been great company and we shall miss her quirky sense of humour as well as her duties as fender step bunny. Juno has very high freeboard which means that it's a long way down to the pontoon. To accommodate the short legs of some of our crew we have a Fender Step. This is a small fender in the shape of a step which is suspended from the guard rails and provides an intermediate level between boat and dock. It soon became Beths responsibility to deploy this vital piece of apparatus prior to docking - which she did with great aplomb.
 







Refreshed after another night in the marina at Lagos, we leave for Vilamoura serenaded by Tom on the guitar. We hope to catch up with Sophie in Vilamoura and Mat joins us on Thursday for the leg to Gibraltar and on to the Costa del Sol.