The botanical gardens
Funchal, Madeira. Being moored in a town is not my favourite place to be – good being near things but always noisy with lots of people staring at the boat! Compounded by music and singing on the promenade until the early hours. Played the tourist and went up the mountain on the cable car, came down in a wooden box (great fun! Really fast and a bit hair-raising), went up in a bus to the beautiful botanical gardens and back in the bus.
Bought small,sweet Madeiran bananas & mended the genoa from Makatea, sailed single-handed by Tom from North Wales! We met Tom in Porto Santo and he is planning to cross the Atlantic, both ways, to be home by the 1st August when he returns to work.
Sunday 4th December. We came out of the marina yesterday and left the anchorage after a rocky night with the wind up & down so it was good to get going. The wind got up as we sailed under staysail alone towards the Ilha Desertas. The closer we got the more ominous & inhospitable they looked – steep, barren, mountain tops pushing up from the sea. The wind did not decrease (but at least we got some protection from the swell) as we cautiously approached the one place where it is possible to anchor. The national park wardens have a house and boatshed here on a tiny piece of land made by a massive landslide in 1894. We were lucky that the mooring buoy set for store boats was free and we tied up to that which felt a lot safer than anchoring in rocks. 32 31N 016 31W. John donned his wetsuit and went for a snorkel (& checked the mooring) and said it was fantastic with huge anemones.
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| Sara Jane from the wardens house |
The wardens invited us for a tour around the next day & we were greeted by a park ranger with blood on his face from a fresh cut, held together with steri-strips and caused by his rifle! John offered to stitch it but they were waiting for a fishing boat to return them to Funchal in a couple of hours. The two rangers have been here for a week shooting goats (128 in 7 days) as they are destroying the habitat of the ground nesting shearwaters. Looking at the cliffs towering above the boat it is hard to imagine anything climbing them but we saw several large goats nimbly trotting along and munching anything green. The rangers will return next year, when there is less greenery so the goats congregate in a smaller area and don’t hide in the numerous caves quite so much, and hope to have culled all the goats in another 12 months.
The wardens are there to protect the very rare monk seals, the Cory’s shearwater and the extremely rare Bublios petrel which only nests on one island in the world and spends 7 months bringing up one chick in a burrow. We were kindly invited to lunch with the wardens, salt cod and rice in a large & battered pot, and slices of avocado. We brought them some beer and wine and had a great time hearing about life on these barren islands which sounded like the life of the old lighthouse keepers interspersed with hair-raising climbs to check birds and many boat trips to the little seal colony, up from 8 to 30 individuals.
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| The wardens house from Sara Jane |
