Friday 10:30 to arrival, São Miguel, the Azores
We made it. 823 nautical miles from Portimão to São Miguel in 6 days and 2½ hours, tied up in Ponta Delgada at noon local time.
After two days of fighting that cross sea, day six finally handed us the break we'd been waiting on. The wind that had pushed us around eased steadily through the day, and this time the sea took the hint too — the swell laying down notch by notch, the wind waves shrinking behind it, the boat's motion smoothing out hour by hour. The relief was immediate, and you could feel it spread through the crew. Cards stayed on the table for a whole hand for once. And the engine room walk — fluids, belts, strainer, bilge — went exactly the way the five before it had: all nominal, all boring, all precisely where they should be. A quiet, recovering kind of day, the conditions we'd been hoping for the whole back half of this passage arriving right at the end.
The easing carried on into the night. The wind kept sliding toward dead calm as the hours went by — the flattest water of the entire crossing, and on the last night of all nights, arriving right as we needed it least and appreciated it most. Watches ticked by under a settling sea. Then land did what land almost always does for us: it showed itself as lights, not land. Around 5am we picked up the glow of São Miguel low on the horizon, and when the sun finally decided to get up, there she was: a real island, solid and green, sitting exactly where the chart promised. After six days of nothing but water in every direction, the first sight of your destination does something to a crew. Everyone was up, everyone was pointing, everyone excited.
We cruised the south shore of São Miguel taking her in: impossibly green, but more mountainous than I'd pictured, with farmland climbing the slopes in patchwork all the way up. I didn't expect that — somehow I'd imagined an island this remote would be wilder. Instead it looked tended, worked, loved.
Now, the part that kept things interesting right to the end. It is prime time for the ARC Rally to be passing through the Azores and we were feeling it. We'd been trying to line up a slip for days — email, WhatsApp, Phone calls, every channel we had — and the answer was always the same: all marinas are completely full. Our plan B was set and perfectly fine: drop the hook outside and ferry in by dinghy. But there's no substitute for being tied to a dock, and as we came in front of the breakwater, a slip materialized. I'll take a little luck on arrival day. Being able to simply step off and walk — after a week of bracing against the boat's every move — beats swinging on an anchor in an open anchorage with ocean swell by a mile.
We cleared in with the marina and then with the officials, which is required here even though we never formally checked out of Portugal on our way out. Paperwork done, we stretched our legs on a short walk through town and started scoping the place out: a tackle shop, a souvenir stop, a surprisingly impressive public swimming pool, and — of all things — a bowling alley. Not what I expected to find in the middle of the Atlantic, but I'm not complaining.
The boat, for her part, was once again the least dramatic member of the crew. She covered 823 miles at her patient ~6-knot crawl, sipping fuel the whole way, and delivered us with margin to spare and nothing on the fix-it list that can't wait for a calm morning at the dock. That's exactly the story these logs were meant to tell: a proven ocean boat doing precisely what she was built to do, no theatrics.
I'm going to pause the updates while we're in port — likely until Friday, when we head to Horta for fuel, pick up a couple parts and then point her west again for the long middle leg on toward Bermuda. Thank you for following along on this first stretch. I hope it's been half as fun to read as it's been to live. We'll pick it back up once we're underway.
Follow the dot: trackmywake.com/wake/next-chapter.
— Chris & the crew of Next Chapter