Thirty hours later we hit the Atlantic again, enjoying a series of high-pressures over most of south-west Europe, and a few days later we could finally anchor in Portugal having sailed most of the way. A relief after having had one (1) day without motoring for a month-and-a-half through the mediterranean.
Our mission in Cascais, Portugal was 1: Wait for Martin to come join our jolly cruise. 2: Nothing. Acomplishing objective 2 shortly after arriving we settled down to wait a day for Martin. However the waiting was interrupted by a visit by The Jolly Portuguese Fellas. The Jolly Portuguese Fellas had taken their sailboat a half-miles way out of the marina and where motoring up and down the beach enjoying beverages previously aquired by a volunteer Portuguese Fella swimming ashore to buy a sackful of said goods at the closest bar and swimming back. Jolly Portuguese fellas normally don't carry a dinghy since the boat spends its time tied up in a marina or motoring back and forth right outside the playa.Now The Jolly Portuguese Fellas were getting hungry and wanted to send for some marinated snails. Since the swimmability of marinated snails and other tapas are rather limited and the volunteer Fella no longer volunteered they wanted to borrow our dinghy. No worries. Thirty minutes later they returned with dinghy, beer, wine and snails, promptly tied up alongside us and commenced stuffing their shoppings down us. After running out of beer and wine we managed to cough up a bottle of our best vodka so the get-together could go on. The Pessblaut-boys sincerely enjoyed this little gathering with the Portuguese General Manager of one of the largest internet-poker companies worldwide, the unofficial "King" of the local marina, the most expensive one in Portugal, and some "special police"-guy with a look that would scare the Hulk green in broad daylight. Hold on; the Hulk IS green?! They've probably already met...
The party took a turn for mainland, and ended up with Yours Trulies being showered with drinks in the local bars (after having had the doorman clear away some people from our desired table), according to a somewhat patchy memory. Probably lots of fun. Somehow Øyvind must have felt the urge to refinance his funds towards the end of the night, since he asked some of the guys if they knew of a place a guy could "fight for cash". He was promptly directed to some obscure garage-building by the seedy part of the waterfront. Somehow either his bravery, bravado or breadwinning desires disappeared at some point and he woke up the next morning with an intact face, yet penniless.
Next evening we dodged the Fellas, hoping to be able to receive Martin and remember it. We managed, and were pleased to discover his lack of tan as we have previously been unpleasantly surprised by our guests being more tanned than us. Anyway, he'll probably rectify that in the couple of weeks he'll spend with us. Wellwell, next day, the 21.st of May we took off up the coast, and that's what we're doing as of now: taking off up the coast. We'll stop somewhere before the infamous Bay of Biscay to check the weather and post this rubbish. So, catch ya'll later!
We´ve spent the time doing intensive repairwork and have managed to get made and replace two new wires in the rig, make our lights in the mast work again (we were receiving complaints from the commercial traffic on our VHF that we cannot respond with when we were running around at night with no lights, wonder why...), changed oil, filled diesel and not succeded in repairing our VHFs. All in a two days and squeezed in between socializing with the other cruisers in the anchorage. 
And now, in a couple of hours we´ll be "home" in the Atlantic!!!!! Finally, it´s been almost two years since we saw it the last time!
Or beating up against the wind
Someone told us that Algeria was a sweet spot to hang out, the trick was apparantly to get yourself arrested in the right place. Sidi Ferruch was such a place, and since we were going close by anyhow, we decided to give it a go. Unfortunately they just gave us plenty of polite hassle, told us the harbour was to shallow to enter and sent us packing after 20 minutes. A brief, brief visit to Algeria....
I just checked my nag-list, and it appears I forgot to nag about currents. Appearantly the currents are all against us. We spent 60 hours covering 100 miles out from Sidi Ferruch. 100 miles is normally an ok 24 hrs run... 
Coming to Tunisia we had to - as usual - effect a number of urgent repairs. The most serious of which was re-replacing one of the wires of the rigging that we replaced in Malta.
The new one (which in reality was a pretty old one that had been kicking around in the bottom of the boat for a while.) Didn't even last the trip over from Malta and had split in two or three places. Egil was dispatched up the mast to put the old one back. Now we're hoping everything will hold up until we reach home. ...which is getting pretty near now. Unbelievable! We have been sailing for more than a year now. The stars look familiar, we're on the right hemisphere, our clocks are set to the right timezone, the weather is cold and we've stopped provisioning "as much as possible" whenever we find something cheap. In maybe as little as a month we can be in Norway, and by the beginning of August back home by the border to Russia.
In Carthage we checked out some really old bricks. Apparantly made by some rumanians, bad job it seems anyway, since it's all falling apart. After seeing all this and having mangled and abused the french language as much as our rusty high-school french allowed us, we returned to the boat.
Back in Bizerte, oh, yes, that's were we kept the boat, we had to wait a couple of more days for the weather to be tolerable. While we were gone a storm had passed and filled the boat with gravel, sand and dust that didn't go away until yesterday when a weatherfront passed us with crazy winds in the face and water all over the boat. Now it's back to no-wind again, and it seems like we'll stop over a day in Algeria. The Med sucks for sailing.
Tripping with Erlend, the Animal Friend.
The pictures from Malta to Tunisia by way of an unscheduled stopover in Italy.
