Just after breakfast we departed from Nararé to the islands of Berlenga. The island is very small and there is only protection from the NW swell. Fortunately, we got lucky and the swell was from NW.
There are a lot of boat trips from Peniche to the island and all mooring buoys are in private use by these boat operators. In addition to pilot books we confirmed this from the harbor master of Nazaré we well, “no mooring on the buoys”.
The additional challenge was that the water depth in the anchorage was 20 meters. We do have long enough chain of 100 meters. Several times we lowered the anchor and each time it was just sliding on the rocky bottom. We tried to put the anchor as close to the island as possible, but we always dragged out to the sea. Finally, we gave up, took some photos, went towards Peniche.
Andrus had read that when anchoring in Belinga someone should always stay onboard as the holding is poor. It would be terrible to notice that boat had departed without the crew after the exploration trip to the island. Otherwise, the island looked like a nice place to have a small trek with a castle and caves. For us this must wait for next time.
We turned our bow towards the fishing village of Peniche. The distance from Berlenga is only 8 nautical miles. There are two breakwaters and we anchored as close as possible to the southern breakwater for getting the maximum protection from NW swell from the western breakwater. And it could not have been simpler as the anchor held on first try on sandy bottom.
There was no swell in the protection the breakwater however the constant stream of fishing and tour boats entering and leaving the harbor was a different story. As you might already guess each one made a sizeable stern wake that swayed us for some time and then the next one came. There was only a small break in the early hours of the night.
After a restless night we departed towards Cascais.