A week in Lagos!

November 3-9, 2020

After one night at anchor outside Lagos we entered the marina, with a quick stop at the fuel dock before (so we wouldn’t have to wait for that once we were ready to leave Lagos). The reception dock is right next to the fuel dock so we checked in at the same spot and after that they opened the bridge for us so we could enter the marina.

We have been used to quite empty marinas, but here in Lagos it was pretty full and a lot of activity on the docks, which was really fun.

It was sunny and nice weather when we arrived to Lagos so we enjoyed a beer in the sun.

One of the first things we did was to go to the boat shop in Lagos (incredible boat shop, they had so many things and what they didn’t have they ordered. Very service-minded) and order a new drive unit for the autopilot. The one we bought before our departure from Stockholm started sounding a bit weird some time before our arrival to Lagos and as time has gone by the worse it got. And on our night sail to Lagos it gave up completely. It was an electro-hydraulic linear actuator, which we bought second-hand. And if money were no problem we would have bought a similar, but new, drive unit. But buying a new electro-hydraulic linear actuator is very expensive so we settled with a wheel-mounted drive unit instead. Hopefully it will do the job. When the drive unit was ordered and we had bought some other stuff we needed we set out for a walk along the coast.

The pier along the marina entrance in Lagos.

The coast here is really stunning and it was an amazing walk. Will let the pictures below talk for themselves.

We stayed in Lagos for a week, we did some walks around town, met up with some acquaintances that lived in Lagos, hung out with sailboats Svala and Freyja and got a lot of work on the boat done. The main job was installing the new drive unit (which arrived to the store one day after we ordered it, amazingly fast!) and other minor jobs. There is always a lot of small jobs for us to do and it is very easy to forget about them once they are done. Other than boatwork we also started preparing for our sail to the Canary islands. We washed a lot of clothes, bought some food, prepped some meals for the sail, cleaned the boat and made sure everything was in order.