After a great night at anchor we headed for Viano do Castelo across the border in Portugal.
The town of Viano do Castello displays its wealth from bygone days of trade with Brazil. The Limia river is crossed by a two level bridge designed by Gustave Eiffel. I don’t imagine his services were cheap.
Our marina offered us a new experience. Carioca draws 2.1m. That means we need that height of water at the lowest tide to ensure we don’t run aground, hole the boat or fall over. So when we calculated that we would have minus 1.3 meters at low tide, we had urgent discussions with the marineiro. Relax he said – you’ll just sink into the mud and will be fine! And so it was. A very weird feeling when the boat doesn’t rock at all.
We had to leave at 06:00 to avoid the muddy exit on a falling tide though!
Off to Porto.
We had a lovely day relaxing and doing a few boat jobs. We are looking forward to a few days downtime.
There appears to be another large low pressure system coming our way. So we will have to make a call on our next leg on Monday when the situation becomes clearer.
Carioca Sailing 
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