Horta is where yachts stop halfway across the Atlantic, and there is a superstition, or a tradition, or a law, that you paint your boat's name on the marina wall before you leave or you'll have bad luck. So the wall is a thousand paintings, some of them beautiful, most of them by people better at sailing.
We painted ours in 2011. A bad drawing of a boat, three names, a date. I wasn't sure it would still be there; the sea gets at the wall and the harbour authority paints over the oldest.
It's there. Faded to a suggestion, one name flaking, but there. I stood in front of it for a while with a coffee from Peter's Café Sport, which is the bar where every sailor in the world has been at least once, and felt approximately ninety years old and approximately twenty.
I touched up the date. That's allowed. Then I sat in Peter's and told a Swedish couple about the wind south of the Canaries, which they'll find out about themselves in a few weeks, and which nobody can really tell you.
