If you’re looking for a different kind of charter, take a look at the Douro River in Portugal. Ellen and John Goncalves, a cruising couple from Valparaiso, Florida (where they’re Harbor Hosts for the America’s Great Loop Cruisers’ Association), recently cruised the Douro on a Greenline 33 for 260 miles and loved it. They cruised the length of the river from Porto, on the Atlantic, to Spain and back, running ten days through ten locks (five each way), including the Carrapatelo Lock, one of the deepest in the world, with more than a 100-foot vertical drop (see the video below).
Home of some of the best port wine in the world, the Douro Valley is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with gorgeous hillsides and river valleys, friendly people and easy cruising. The Goncalves chartered from FeelDouro out of Porto for ten days, and said they had other cruisers from the same organization going with them on the river for the first few days, but after the town of Pinhao, about two-thirds of the way up river, “we were on our own. And this was also the beautiful and pristine part of the river.”
See the video of the lock, below:
For more: http://feeldouro.com
