Fast pace in Sines

We had no time to loose in Sines. There was still Sagres and Portimão to do, time was running short, and the weather we could now be quite sure it wouldn't cooperate. It was also Tom's first day out. Ironically, we saw dolphins just outside Sines port entrance. When when I say this, I mean 50 m out of the entrance!!! I couldn't believe it. However, and as I have learned so many times in this project, having dolphins and sampling them is a different matter. They were extremely fast and it was obivous they had somewhere to be urgently. This together with increasing wind, made it really dificult. Eventually it became to strong to continue, and we headed back to port. This weather pattern would follow us all the way to Sagres. Fair weather in the morning, with the wind increasing so much during the afternoon, that it was impossible to continue. We still got two samples. Next day I took Neftalí to Pessegueiro Island and he stayed there the whole morning sampling reptiles. And then, again, the wind picked up and it was back in port for us.

Tom wearing his sofisticated system developed during the trip to avoid scalp sunburn!!!

Next day Laura and Heather arrived. Laura did her PhD in the same lab as I'm doing mine, and then proceeded to work as a pos-doc there. Heather is working as a techincian in the lab as well, in the same project as Tom, woth genetics of deep-sea fish. They came in the best time! In one day we saw a nice group of Bottlenose. Unfortunately, the rifle decided to stop working again! I was furious. Even more so that, when we arrived in port and I prepared to disassemble the rifle (yet again) it was fine! I have no idea what went wrong! Luckily, the next day we found a nice group of commons and got 8 samples, and we passed the 30 for Sines before the wind picked up. It was a brilliant day!

The next day Tom left and the rest of us went to Sagres. We had a quite day motorsailing, until we crossed the cape S.Vincent. There the wind picked up consistently until it reached 35 knots. Has we approached our destination with the wind wistling in the mast and the waves splashing over the bow straight in our faces, I turned to Heather and Laura and said: "Welcome to Sagres"!!!