Lookalike

Has anyone else noticed the uncanny resemblance between octogenarian Australian entertainer Rolf Harris as depicted by the court artist during his trial for indecencies too egregious to mention and Ted "Cheers" Danson?

Danson                                             Harris

Has Ted been accused of anything yet?

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".

Fork Handles

There's a classic BBC TV comedy sketch by "the Two Ronnies" in which a customer (Ronnie Barker) goes into a hardware (ironmongery - ferragens) shop and asks for four candles.

The bloke behind the counter (Ronnie Corbett) goes off, up a ladder, and eventually returns and says "There you are - four candles."

To which the customer replies "Nah, fork handles"



That sort of thing caused ratings busting gales of mirth in the early 1970s but is dated nowadays. I only mention it because I had a fork handles moment with Victor the plumber yesterday.

Victor was installing a new autoclismo - which sounds like a Woody Allen orgasmotron but is nothing so banal as a toilet cistern - in a house that doesn't belong to us but we manage for its owners. But Victor ran into problems when he discovered the seal supplied with the cistern wouldn't fit the sanita - that's the bit you sit on (or stand in front of according to gender and function to be performed). What was needed, said Victor, was an abraçadeira but he didn't have any of the right size with him.

Worry not, said I, I have an abraçadeira of the right dimensions in the house, I'll go and fetch it. Off I went in the car, returned 15 minutes later, brandished it triumphantly and Victor said, in true Ronnie Barker style:-

"Não, abraçadeira"

What I had thought was required and had brought was a jubilee clip:-

But what Victor actually meant was a cable tie:-

   
For once, however, this was not me being a nincompoop - Portuguese appears to have only one word - abraçadeira - for items as diverse as jubilee clips and cable ties: "Well if you'd meant an abraçadeira why didn't you say abraçadeira!"

The point was reinforced when today I went into Avila, Fraga & Filhos - the best hardware shop in the whole world and which just happens to be in Sta Cruz das Flores - to get some cable clips:-

I asked Edgar in AF&F - who speaks immaculate English - what's the Portuguese word for these? He replied:- abraçadeiras.

As it happens, AF&F is self service but if it wasn't, I'd been that close to a multiple fork handle moment, sending Edgar back and forth, Ronnie Corbett style, potentially three times until he eventually brought me the exact type of abraçadeira I was looking for!

In fact Edgar had the last laugh when I asked him what the Portuguese for these was:-

He said he didn't know but reckoned it would be a bucha. Except bucha is to buchas what abraçadeira is to abraçadeiras so I wasn't going to let him off with that. But I didn't know what the English for one of these is either except for "that thing for attaching things to plasterboard that you didn't realise you'd need until you've drilled a hole the size of a South African diamond mine and covered yourself in dust ..."

Edgar checked the computer and discovered it's called a bucha molly. I still don't know the English word for them. It could be fork handle for all I know. It would be about as useful for hanging that blind from plasterboard ...

South African diamond mine

Tomato sandwich (another nautical tale from Flores)

Last Sunday (28 April) was another driech day with strong east winds. Being on the west coast of the island should mean you're sheltered from easterlies but, in practice, what happens is vicious gusts scream down off the cliffs, whipping the surface off the sea. At one point, I glanced out the window and saw a white spot which I initially took to be spindrift but, on closer examination, turned out to be a yacht.

Having been a minor league yottie on the west coast of Scotland in a previous life (though only a coastal day sailor which is a totally different kettle of rabbits from cruising the oceans), I immediately reached for the binoculars and followed its progress, smashing through the heavy seas, beating to windward close hauled (that's yot-speak for something it would be too tedious to explain to non-yotties) southwards (right to left) until it disappeared from view.

About an hour later, however, the yacht re-appeared much closer inshore, coming from left to right now ...

Makes sense, I thought: harbour at Lajes totally untenable in easterly, probably better off in comparative shelter of west coast at Faja Grande even with these gusts off the cliffs (although by now, the wind had moderated somewhat). The fact the yacht had approached FG by first disappearing out of sight to the left (south) and then reappearing inshore going in the opposite direction (instead of heading straight in from the position in the first photo) also made perfect sense to me as a nautical cove for reasons which, once again, I'll spare you. What did appear odd, however, was that the yacht was now closing the coast with only its foresails (the ones in front of the mast) set. To my coastal sailor's mind that breaks every rule in the book and I ascribed it to some mystery of oceanic sailing I was uninitiated in. Curious, however, I went down to the seafront for a closer look.

If there is one rule in the yottie's book (be he coastal or offshore), it's that, whenever you attempt an unorthodox manoeuvre within sight of land, there will be someone on shore peering through binoculars making adverse comments ("What the hell's he doing that for?") Subsection (1) of that rule is that, once close enough in, the same person will drop the binoculars and begin to communicate with you by ambiguous hand gestures. One of these involves cupping his hands round his mouth with no apparent result. Subsection (2) involves a second person joining the first and making gestures which appear to contradict the first person's.

Having proverbially "been there, done that", I forebore from any attempt at communication with the yacht ("I say! Once you've dropped the hook - over THERE would be better! - do row ashore and pop up for pre-prandials!") Anyway, it was one of these days, weatherwise, getting dark soon as well, when I was pretty glad to be able to step back into a car and drive home rather than being on a yacht, keeping watch in the rain taking transits fretting about whether the anchor was going to hold.

The following morning (Monday, 29 April), I happened to glance out the window and see the Lajes pilot cutter apparently attempting to rendezvous with the yacht and take it under tow. Very difficult in a big sea but after much to-ing and fro-ing a line was secured and off they went.

I asked José António at the shop if he'd heard what the story was but he hadn't and, beyond looking at the Lajes webcam to checking that the yacht had duly arrived there (it had) ...

... I didn't think about it again until Friday (3 May) when I got a tip that there was a blog by a solo yachtsman who'd fetched up in Flores in slightly fraught circumstances and did I know anything about this?

Turns out the yacht is called Wild Song and belongs to one Paul Heiney (British readers may recognise the name of the BBC radio presenter.) You can read the blog here - for the approach to Flores, scroll down to the entry titled "Low in every sense" on 24 April and read up.

The long and short is, after cruising in Patagonia for the winter (our winter - summer in the Southern Hemisphere of course), Wild Song left Uruguay on 25 February bound for her home port of Falmouth, UK via a planned stop at Horta on Faial in the Azores (a popular yachtsman's harbour). After nearly two months at sea, Wild Song was within 140 mile of Horta when contrary winds drove her west. Moreover, the yacht's engine wouldn't start due to dirt in the dregs of the fuel tank. The main problem that caused was no power for the water maker. Hence Paul decided to make for Flores instead.

In the unseasonably awful weather we've been having this spring, he described the 48 hours around his arrival at this island as the worst in his yachting experience.

To add to the lack of an engine, Wild Song's mainsail tore catastrophically during the approach to the dubious shelter of Fajã Grande. That explains the unusual set of sails I observed. In anything but the most benign of conditions, a yacht is very difficult to manouevre without a mainsail. And having lobbed out 60 metres of chain to anchor at FG, which would be almost impossible to get back up by hand without the engine to power an electric windlass (machine to pull chain up), all these factors combined to make Paul (reluctantly as a very last resort, I should imagine from my own experience) call for help. This was achieved by phoning the UK coastguard on his mobile who contacted their opposite numbers in Portugal and the net upshot was the pilot cutter (boat) came round the next morning to tow Wild Song to Lajes - a distance of about 12 miles (19km). Note also that the pilot cutter is kept out of the water and have had to be launched by crane to meet this exigency.

12 miles (19km) from FG to Lajes

Four members of the pilot cutter's crew boarded Wild Song to assist with pulling up the anchor, a process which took 45 minutes (for any non-nautical coves still reading, it normally takes about 5 minutes, max).

But the troubles were only just beginning. With the yacht now free of her anchor, the tow rope to the pilot cutter broke five times before they got under way. On one occasion, Paul describes this as happening so close to the rocks of the shore, he could barely look. That must have been the lowest point of the worst 48 hours.

I watched this entire performance through the binoculars from my kitchen window and feel rather guilty now I was rubber-necking an event which must have been traumatic in the extreme for the participants.

Library picture of Lajes das Flores marina earlier this year

Anyway, a happy ending. They duly arrived at Lajes. An engineer came and fixed the engine and attempted to only charge 6 Euros! The tow round from Faja Grande cost only 100 Euros which seems pretty blooming reasonable to me. All in all, I think Paul Heiney will have some good memories of my island despite his inauspicious arrival thereat.

As I type this, Wild Song is en route to Horta on Faial, 120 miles east, powered by a combination of light following winds and her engine as necessary. At Horta, she can get her main sail repaired (essential to face the long haul back to Britain).

I shall be following the blog with interest from hereon in. I was amused by the fact that, despite the trauma of his arrival in the Azores, Paul managed to pen the very shrewd observation that, in centuries gone by, sailors judged their proximity to land by smell, colour of the sea, seabirds, stuff floating in the water etc. etc. Nowadays, it's by a text message from Vodafone as your mobile phone acquires a signal saying "Welcome to Portugal! Calls to the UK cost ..."

How true!

And a post-script on reading the blog was Linda at the shop who said "A tomato sandwich? Where'd he get from the tomato from?" It's a not entirely tongue in cheek allusion to the scarcity of fresh veg on such a verdant island (and how the vast majority of such of it as we do get is imported from other Azores or even further afield).