With winter fast approaching, it was time to check the boat into it's winter home, Lagos Portugal. Lagos is a thriving beach resort town with a well protected marina situated almost in the centre of main tourist district. In addition to the annual influx of international guest that spend winter in the marina, Lagos and it's surrounding towns have a surprisingly large population of ex-pat English residents. This was made evident by the advertising of 'Hot English Breakfast' and 'Sunday Roast' in many of the cafe's and restaurants.
We had a few weeks free before we needed to pack up the boat and head home to Australia so we used this time to explore some of the local tourist traps and surrounding towns. We also found ourselves very quickly embedded in the wonderful Lagos cruising community.
The first day trip was really just a dinghy ride to Ponta da Piedade. Ponta da Piedade is an impressive display of the Atlantic Oceans ability to carve into the natural limestone escarpments of the Algarve coast. This is one of Portugal's most popular tourist attractions and it was only a 10 minute dinghy ride from our marina birth.
We also sailed around to the next major port along the coast 'Portimao' and visited its quaint little fishing village 'Ferragudo'.
This was followed by a rather bumpy trip to the spectacular caves at Algar de Benagil. The main cave features a hole in it's roof that filters light off yellow limestone walls onto a soft sand beach inside it. It also attracts thousands of tourist boats and on this particular day, a rather large swell.
On a day that looked much warmer than it really was, we took the dinghy for ride around to the nearby town of Alvor.
Then finally it was time to clean up the boat, give it a good polish and wax, remove anything that we didn't want to weather in the harsh winter conditions and store away everything ready for the next sailing season. At the very last moment, we decided to pull the boat out of the water and leave it on the hard in the boat yard.
We left Lagos on November 17 and headed home to Melbourne
We will be returning to Lagos May 4, 2022 :)