Faja Grande webcam

A webcam overlooking Faja Grande started today - view it here

It must be situated near the church in Ponta da Faja so that the view is looking south to FG about a mile (1.5km) away:-

X marks the spot of our house

There's also a new webcam over Santa Cruz - in the screen grab below, note the SATA aeroplane taking off (boxed red) and Flores' satellite island of Corvo on the horizon with its distinctive hat of cloud (yellow)

The view is looking generally north east over the  town and runway thus:-

These two new webcams are in addition to the one that's been around for a few years over the harbour at Lajes

Library picture from 2012

All these webcams tend to promote a bit of an unhealthy tendency at 5RdA towards obsessing about arrivals and departures - especially when you couple them with the Marine Traffic and Flight Radar websites allowing you to track the progress of the ship or plane you're interested in when outwith the watchful eye of the webcam. It's of importance to us when we're expecting guests or awaiting deliveries from the continent on the fortnightly ship.

Thus, for example, tonight, we're expecting a batch of stuff from IKEA and a new exhaust for the car on the ship due to arrive tomorrow morning and, as I type this, I can verify that the good ship M/S Sete Cidades is on schedule (not always to be taken for granted) sailing from Pico:-

In the air (important for arriving and departing guests), here's Flight TP1828 from Terceira to Lisbon on Flight Radar earlier:-

FR doesn't seem to pick up the small inter-island planes but flights to and from Ponta Delgada can be cross-referenced to the PDL webcam

This can all get pretty absorbing, I can tell you (especially if you go to the 3D cockpit view on Flight Radar). It's just as well I'm retired and have enough time to keep an eye on all this - it's not safe for work.

They've got Google Streetview on Sao Miguel and Terceira now and it won't belong before, if you've ever fancied visiting the Azores, you won't need to bother! There's no such thing as a remote island anymore. (Note to self to not scratch arse on way down to shop to get bread in case caught by Google car in coming months.)

Whale watching

That's the view from our sitting room window and one of the most frequently asked questions is "Do you ever see whales?"

Nope, never is the answer to that so imagine my surprise when I was giving Fernando a lift from Ponta the other day and he said excitedly "Viste a baleia?" (Have you seen the whale?)

"O que? No mar?" (What? In the sea?) I replied, idiotically. "Não, no ar!" (No, in the air!) retorted Fernando - it was his little joke.

Turned out, however, that my response was not entirely moronic as the whale in question was, in fact, a dead one on the beach. Nevertheless, it's an event which has caused as much excitement in Faja Grande as if the remains of MH370 had been washed up on our shores.

Sorry for that rather long distance shot but I didn't want to go that close as I've seen what can happen to dead whales (skip to 00.50):-



In fact, the blob in the photo above was only the forward section of the whale - it's stern half had broken off and was grounded a few hundred yards along the shore (the white thing in the photo below).



The absence of smell or pecking sea birds suggested the thing had already been dead for quite a long time before it washed up on Flores. Fernando reckoned it to be a cachalote - sperm whale.

In times past, a dead whale was reckoned a boon to the locals in terms of food and fuel resources. So much so that, in Scotland, a beached whale is legally the property of the Crown - a prize to be granted to a favoured subject. Nowadays, of course, they're perceived as health and safety hazards prompting some local authorities to suggest that Her Majesty may care to get her galoshes on and deal with her property personally rather than burden the rate payers. Tsk! Some people just olhar cavalos de presente na boca!

Be all that as it may, the foregoing represents the sum and substance of my whale watching experience on this island to date.   

TV Moments

It's more than 20 years ago now but who can forget British television's first lesbian kiss? The heart-achingly gorgeous Anna Friel and a sort of OK-ish other chick nobody can remember the name of now. Here it is:-



Looks a bit tame nowadays, doesn't it?

Anyway, another UK soap, Eastenders, recently achieved another TV taboo first - Britain's first screen fart:-



Isn't that gross? You can almost smell it, can't you?

What would you rather watch? The delectable Anna getting busy with another babe (albeit in a sort chaste early 90s sort of way) or horrible Nancy Carter dropping a whiffer upstairs in the Vic in the arms of her father for Chrissakes?

You're probably wondering why I'm raising this. It's that fibre optic cable and the fact that, since it was installed last October, we can watch YouTube vids if we want to. Everything, from Anna's lezza snog to Nancy's trump, is there if you want it. All thanks to that big ship that appeared off the coast last year towing a cable behind it:-

Lookalike

Surely I'm not the only one to have noticed the remarkable resemblance between Scottish Gnashionalist Party leader Alex Salmond and recently cleared of sex offences Street star, Michael ("Kevin Webster") Le Vell:-

Le Vell                                                      Salmond

I wonder if by any chance they're related? I think Scottish voters should be told (and Sally).                                                       

Regime change

Today was the day of the local elections (eleiçoes autárquicas) in Portugal and I can tell you there has been regime change in the concelho of Lajes das Flores.

The Partido Socialista (centre left - equivalent of Labour in the UK) candidate Luis Maciel has beat PSD (can't remember what it stands for - orange T-shirt lot, equivalent of Tories in Britain) candidate Alice Ramos. This is significant because the PSD has been in power in LdF for as long as anyone can remember - the reversal may be due to long term PSD presidente, local businessman João Lourenço, having reached the limit of his 150 terms in power.

Note the advertising on the www.autarquicas2013.pt website depicted above. At the top is an advert for the Casa do Rei restaurant in Lajes (which I can tell you is very good) while at the bottom is one for Single Ukranian Ladies. Given how closely targetted the first ad was, I'm wondering if the second reveals an equally closely targetted unmet need in the southern half of this island I'm not aware of which the new administration needs to get to work on ja pronto.

Below is the results in more detail:-

Quite a big swing to the PS. Last time, in 2009, it was exactly the opposite (54% PSD/45% PS). The result for the junta da freguesia (parish council) of Faja Grande is also interesting:-

Change of party (PSD to PS again) but not change of people in that outgoing presidente of FG, our neighbour Maria Lidia Oliveira, recently changed party allegiance and is returned under her new affiliation. Which just goes to prove that politics is about personalities rather than policies.

As I was typing just then, there was a motorcade of cars down the road, all tooting their horns and with people hanging out the windows waving flags. Tahrir Square it is not but the Euros do elections rather more exuberantly than we Brits what with the winning candidate dutifully thanking the returning officer and his team for counting the votes. And note these 80+% turnouts - you'd be hard pushed to get 50% out at a British local election.

    

Fibre optic cable

For as long as we've lived on this island (seven years now, amazingly enough!), the talk has always been about the long awaited fibre optic cable to bring us faster broadband.  For a while, it's been promised for "fourth quarter 2013" but I've always said I'll believe it when I see a big ship with a big roll of cable on the back and not a moment before.

Photocredit shipspotting.com

Well I can tell you that such a ship - the MV IT Interceptor (pictured above) - is steaming towards the Azores as I type this. Below is the latest image from Marinetraffic.com showing her course (light blue line coming in from the top) towards Ponta Delgada on Sao Miguel.

I gather that, from Ponta Delgada, the IT Interceptor will then steam west to Faial (the nearest island to Flores already linked by fibre optic) from where, on Friday (13 September), it will begin to lay the cable.

Apparently, a fibre optic cable is thinner than a human hair. Presumably this means it must be frightfully easy to get it tangled up. I'm thinking of bitter experience when I used to troll a fishing line out behind a boat as a child and if one of the spinner things got snagged and didn't spin, then the whole thing was in a bugger's muddle before you could say "terabyte of data". I expect the crew of the IT Interceptor will have got their spinner things properly greased up before they set off from Faial but I hope they don't fall into the same trap the crew of the Great Eastern did.

The GE was an overly large steamship built by the Victorian engineer Brunel which was ahead of its time in terms of mass transport. After disappointments too numerous to mention (pictured above - imagine today mischievous press coverage of an A380 running into severe turbulence on its maiden flight), the GE was pensioned off to the alternative use of laying telegraph cables across the Atlantic because it was the only ship at the time big enough to carry such huge rolls of cable. These were in the days when cables were as thick as tree trunks except not as flexible:-

Anyway, when they were unrolling the cable off the back of the Great Eastern, somewhere in the vicinity of Faial as I recall, they only went and dropped the end of the fucking thing into the sea, 3,000 miles out from Land's End or wherever they'd set off from!

Nowadays, we have risk assessment (to tell you not to do things) and loss adjusters (to tell risk assessors not to do things). In previous generations, you had officers and gentlemen who, having embarked on something appallingly dangerous, didn't give up without a fight. The greatest example of this was Captain Bligh (Tony Hopkins) of Mutiny on the Bounty fame. As you'll recall, his mission was to get bread fruit from Tahiti and take it to the West Indies. But to make it more of a challenge, he decided to go via Cape Horn, failed in that so went the other way to Tahiti instead, suffered a mutiny by Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson), navigated the rowing boat he was chucked in to all the way to Australia, got back to Britain where he was court-martialled (Larry Olivier, Edward Fox). Upon being acquitted, what do you think he did next? If it had been me, I wouldn't have set foot on another boat as long as I lived. But Bligh only set off to Tahiti again and took the bread fruit to the Caribbean!

But I digress, where was I? Oh yes, dropping the end of the cable off the back of the Great Eastern into the mid-Atlantic. I wouldn't reach in up to my elbow to get my car keys back but Captain What'sname of the GE decided to go fishing for the cable 20,000 leagues under the sea with nothing so much as a grappling iron. And he found it, pulled it back on board, coupled it up to the next length and next stop Long Island! Put that in your Global Positioning System and smoke it! I know about this because I've got a book which by coincidence I bought at Heathrow on the way out to the Azores on holiday for the first ever time in Jan 2004. Little did I know so much of the action would take place off the coast of my destination then and have such a resonance for where I live now.

Aye, well, there you go, as we Scots say. I trust the crew of the IT Interceptor will not have any such alarms and excursions. Although I do have a bit of a mental image of them arriving off the coast of Flores and someone loud hails ashore "OK, we've got it here, where do we plug it in?" And a harrassed Portugal Telecom official calls back "What do you mean "where do we plug it in"? I thought you were dealing with that ...".  

That's the sort of thing that happens here, I kid you not. Vamos ver as we Portuguese say but there's another little ill omen apart from the fact laying the cable is scheduled to start next Friday, the 13th. The IT Interceptor's previous name was Atlantida which was also the name of the ill-fated car ferry ordered by the Azores Government in 2007 from the Portuguese Government but never taken delivery of because it allegedly didn't come up to contract specifications. The ensuing acrimony is an ongoing saga to this day too tedious to recount (you think the Scotland v UK posturing is petty?) but see here.

If I were a boy

It's the second weekend of September which means it's Carol's birthday and Faja Grande's annual festa.

For us that means two things, one we go out for dinner and, two, a band is thumping out tunes outside the church till about 4am. It also signifies a weekend when you recognise summer has begun to turn into autumn. Below is last year with a distinctly autumnal hue in the air.

This year has seen a number of differences. First, it's still freakingly hot weather-wise without the slightest hint of autumn round the corner. But more importantly, there's a different band fronting the Faja festa this year.

This year's and last year's bands have in common that they mostly play traditional Portuguese songs but have one - I'm struggling for the words to describe it and all I can come up with is - "western rock tune" they produce. For last year's band (same band - Captain Morgan and his Hammond Organ - for the last seven years), that tune was one by a group I can't remember the name of but it's a continent: as long as I've lived on this island, I associate Carol's birthday with "The Final Countdown." In my dotage, I find that embedding a Youtube video eludes me but this is the link. I think The Final Countdown

But this year it's all disturbingly different. A new band and this year's departure from "My conchita she has left me" and similar Portuguese classics (trad. ar.) is, of all things, "By the Rivers of Babylon"

It gives the word "incongruous" new meaning.

I don't like change at my time of life so it's just as well Carol's birthday dinner at Jorge's provided a soothing balm. The best restaurant in the whole world world just happens to be in  Faja Grande:

As I type this (1.19am), the band are bumping out what we call the "Boomp-Terah Boomp-Terah" song for what may be the 67th time this weekend. But it's sort of reassuring. I'd be far more worried if they were attempting "Let it be" or "If I were a boy".