Reaching the magic 30.

Mário finally arrived soon after Mikolaj and 1st Mate left. He soon realized it would be only the both of us for around 10 days. We had a tough week ahead of us. Unfortunately, things didn't get much better. The weather did gave us some nice days, but we saw no dolphins. Time was running short, and we still had the rest of the coast to do. Soon, Nortada would be settling in strong, and we would take use it to sail down to Figueira. One Friday I decided to take one last chance. This would be it. If we didn't see dolphins we would be moving South with the Nortada. It would prove a tough but successfull day. On board with us was Gisela, whom we'd met in a port wine shop and got interested enough to come for one day. We started by seeing a dead floating minke whale, but dolphins were again hard to come by.

At around lunch time, the menacing sight of a cold front coming our way could be seen in the distance to the West. Soon it was on top of us dropping all it's rain. It rained for over 45 minutes, and I was cursing my luck (or lack of it)!!! After it stopped, another patch of rain was coming right in front of us, and I decided to turn back to avoid it. It proved a wise decision! 10 minutes later a group of dolphins on the portside bow. I woke everybody up, and Gisela (who had never seen dolphins) couldn't believe it. We were back in business. It was a small group, and it was quite shy, but we eventually got a few samples. 5 to be exact. This meant we had reached the magical number 30 for Porto. Our perseverence paid up in the end!

We came back to port late, but in a good mood, making jokes and goofing around. By the looks of it, I figured Nortada would be settling a bit later than expected, and we might still have a couple of extra days to try and find more dolphins, who should stay in the area for a while longer as well. We would be staying a while longer after all.

Me and Mário scared with an oncoming rogue wave!
Seriously, it was 1.5 m, almost as tall as Gisela!!!