ARC Europe Azores - Lagos Day 2

ARC Europe   Azores – Lagos  Day 2

It’s 4 o’clock on Friday 11^th June, and we are on the final leg in to Lagos. We left Ponta Delgada on the island of Sao Miguel yesterday evening, ahead of the rest of the ARC fleet, as Peter has a flight home to the UK booked for next Wednesday. So what can we say about

the Azores ?  We visited 4 islands over the last several days, starting with Faial, then Sao Jorge, Terceira and finally Sao Miguel, the largest of the islands in the Azores chain. Each of the islands has it’s own unique characteristics, but one common theme we noticed throughout our tour of the islands was the friendliness of the people. Everywhere we went, they were happy to see us, and would do anything to help. An example of this was when we spent the night in Velas on Sao Jorge. As we browsed in a dive shop reading the local weather forecast, the shopkeeper came over and offered to print out the latest weather report for us. He spoke very good English and when asked where we could find a good restaurant not only recommended several, but offered to drive us to the best one, some 8 km out of town. When we got to the restaurant he advised us on the best local dishes and also arranged for a taxi to pick us up after dinner. Other highlights of the Azores were the Vulcao dos Capelinhos on the western tip of Faial where a recent volcanic eruption in 1957 created a new headland in front of a lighthouse, the view of Pico mountain above the cloud line, and the Vale (valley) das Furnas on Sao Miguel, a large garden at the bottom of a huge volcanic crater where warm water bubbles to the surface of the lake and rivers.  

Stu flew home last Thursday and Gary Sutherland joined us a couple of days ago when we got to Ponta Delgada. This leg to Lagos is just over 800 miles so should take us about 5 days. So far the weather has been good, with 15 kts of wind from the NE. With high pressure well established over the Azores, it should be a good run with steady winds.

More to follow

Chris

Fizz of Cowes

This entry was posted on 11/06/2010 at 06:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.