Hilton Head Island: The Azores: immortality lost

 

We are home and, although I like the Azores, very glad to be.

Carol’s planning of the trip was perfect, the experience not quite.  Partly that was predictable; partially it wasn’t; and part is on me.

The predictable was that we were going to arrive in Ponta Delgada on the island of San Miguel, the capital of the Azores, which are part of Portugal, very tired.

A week ago Monday we had a morning flight from Hilton Head to Newark.  Hilton Head is a small market and that was the only flight to Newark that day.  Once there we had a ten hour layover before the five hour flight to Ponta Delgada which was due to take off at 11:10 PM.  Carol had passes to United’s lounge, so we had some comfort and free food and wine and a fine view of the lower Manhattan skyline,

but we were also exposed to one of the many banes of flying, screaming children.  They dominated three of our four flights and two of the four boarding lounges.  Noise cancelling headphones are essential, and we had them.  If an adult made that much disturbance he would be tossed off the plane if still on the ground or arrested upon landing if already in the air.  I expect that children reflect upon their parents as dogs do on their owners.  Some children are well behaved and courteous; some scream because they have learned from their parents that is the way to get what they want.  This will prepare them well for their adult careers in politics.

Our flight took off at 11:30 PM.  Five hours is not long and Carol had paid for superior seats, but we got little if any sleep and landed at what our bodies felt was 4:30 AM, but was 8:30 AM local time exceedingly tired.

We stayed our first three nights on a houseboat in the Ponta Delgado Marina, to which we had sailed in 2001.

It was one of eight docked side by side and more house than boat.  Really a 20’/6 meter mobile home on pontoons, complete with artificial grass on the roof.  It did have a 9.9 hp outboard on the back and a steering wheel in what I suppose was the bow and part of our contract stated that we were not permitted to take it out of the slip.  We were not tempted to do so.

It moved about slightly and was heeled as were all the houseboats a few degrees to starboard, presumably the side on which the water and holding tanks are.

We walked around the marina and the city of around 70,000 and rode a trolly out to a nearby village and back.

In Tim Robinson’s books I have read of the stone walls on the Aran Islands constructed without mortar.  While on the trolly we saw that the Azores islanders have the same skill.

                                            

On Friday we flew a hundred miles back west to Horta, on Faial Island, which was our first port after sailing from Boston in 2001 and whose marina is still the center for visiting yachts.

There has long been a tradition of visiting yachts painting their names on stone and concrete surfaces around the marina.  Carol did when we were there in 2001.  You may recall that a reader sent me a photo he had taken of her effort.

He sent me that photo last year, but I don’t know when he took it.  Studying the photo we found that there is only a small area where it could have been taken with the double step and black rocks.  Nothing painted in the photo remains.  Not the blue whale, not the black letters on a white background in the upper left corner, and not the least sign of HAWKE.  It seems that immortality does not last.

I have driven around the island twice, but this time we hired a guide who took us into the interior to places I had not been, including this calderia more than a mile wide and a quarter mile deep.

He also took us to the west end of the island where in 1957 a volcano erupted for more than a year and destroyed a lighthouse and nearby villages.

I took one of my favorite photos of Carol there in 2001 and so took another.

                                                

Returning to Ponta Delgada we stayed our last two nights at a hotel overlooking the harbor.  Sitting on our sixth floor balcony in the evening, sipping wine, we saw a dozen boats out for a twilight sail.

I think the Azores are a very good place to base a boat.  The nine islands are all volcanic rising abruptly from the ocean so there are few, if any, good natural all weather harbors, but there are harbors with breakwaters and fair weather anchorages.  One site claims 16 marinas and 38 anchorages, which I think is a bit exaggerated, but the climate is good and the islands are out of the hurricane zone.

https://www.navily.com/region/The%20Azores/19763

Our last day we took a tour of ‘hidden gems’ of the island.  There are infinite beautiful vistas and sights.

Our return should have been easier, with a day flight back to Newark, overnight there at the airport Marriott, and a short two hour daytime flight the next day to Hilton Head, and was except that a flight from Ponta Delgada the previous day was cancelled due to a broken water line in the plane and rescheduled to depart an hour before our flight.  That flight was delayed again and thus passengers for two flights were sardined for two hours into a boarding lounge that could barely hold passengers for one, including of course screaming children.  I rather wanted to scream myself.  I understand accepting suffering in order to achieve a goal, but to pay to suffer is perverse.

I have never liked crowds and noise and with diminished vision and hearing I like them even less.

Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed that Boston is the hub of the solar system.  Bostonians soon inflated that to Hub of the Universe and still refer to the city as The Hub.  With that in mind there is the anecdote of the wealthy Boston matron who in the early years of last century was asked if she had been to Europe.  Amazed at the question, she replied, “Why should I travel?  I’m already there.”

A thousand miles south of Boston, I am somewhat the same.  I have written that I live in proximity to beauty, but realize that is wrong.  I live in beauty and quiet.  The Live Oaks and Spanish Moss are little more than an arm’s length away and spartina and the changing light on Skull Creek not much more distant.  Almost three million people come each year to vacation where I live.  I am already there, and the only means of transportation I really like is sail.  I would be pleased never to make another long journey except in GANNET.