We had another nice, brisk sail down to Nazaré arriving mid afternoon and on arrival we followed the route into the marina. This was something like a queue at Universal Studios as it went around that many bends and twists we almost got dizzy. Glad we had arrived in daylight we were met with a lovely Marinero who yet again insisted on taking our lines and then completely ignoring what we had asked him to do. This resulted in me virtually pole vaulting off the boat to tie on our mid ships while Lee tested the engine’s capacity to go astern at 3000 RPM. The previous brisk wind by this time was now a rather nice 25 knots coming up our tails and pushing us neatly into the berth. Anyway, the marinero was useless but beautiful so was quickly forgiven.
Nazaré in Portugal is rather famous. This is due to the huge underwater canyon called, rather unimaginatively the Nazaré Canyon. Just off the coast of Nazaré in Portugal it is in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean and is said to be the largest canyon in Europe. Having a depth of at least 5 kilometres and being about 230 kilometres long it would dwarf the Grand Canyon. The canyon creates massive interference with the incoming swell waves, making their heights much larger on this particular stretch of coast. As a result Nazaré is famous for REALLY big waves and hosts one the two World Surfing League’s Big Wave surfing contests, with waves reaching up to 30 metres during winter. And that is why the entrance in was so convoluted. It breaks up the mahoosive waves they have there. So after your free geography lesson we shall continue, but obviously there are a couple of nice images below for you to see what I am talking about.
The Nazaré Canyon 
A rather large wave
We had been online and seen that there was a large and well stocked chandlers there, so with that being like catnip to Lee we walked around to have a browse. It was a huge, posh affair we could see from afar and I could see Lee getting all excited like a child at Christmas. It was probably this that made it an especially lovely moment when we arrived and all it had was one tender with an outboard and was very obviously closed for good. Chuckling not so quietly to myself we turned around and went for a walk along the beach and into the town.
Nazaré seafront and town was a little like Littlehampton without the Butlins. Along the front it was full of the usual seafront shops, crocodile lilos and cafes but literally one road back it was like something out of Mad Max. We swiftly made our way back to the seafront where we watched in amazement the locals on the beach. Apparently unperturbed by what was now a howling gale they continued to sunbathe in effectively a large scale, industrial sand blaster whilst smoking and holding onto their children’s feet who were being blown away along with their parasols.
We made our way back to the boat where we had some dinner and then an early night. The next day we were heading down to Cascais which would be our final stop before we jumped over to the Canaries, and we were keen to get going.
See the big, defunct chandlers in the far distance 😁!