Friday 11 December 2009

Cape Verde

After the incident with the spinnaker halyard and some exercise trying to pull the sail out of the water in a bobbly sea, here we are, in the city of Mindelo, in the Island of Sao Vicente, Cape Verde. (We now appreciate the ‘para’ bit of the parasail, pulling an upside down one out of the Atlantic gives us an appreciation of the volume or air it can hold.....)

The idea was to go straight from the Canaries to Brazil but we are actually very pleased we did stop here. Lovely place, great weather, friendly people, cold beer and live music bars! In many aspects it resembles the Marvellous City ( for those of you not familiar with the term, this is Rio de Janeiro’s nickname for obvious reasons...)! Not to mention they speak Portuguese in an accent very much like the Brazilian one! Tilson, the guy that fixed our spinnaker, actually told me they themselves like to call Cape Verde ‘’Brasilzinho’’, which means ‘’Little Brazil’’. Nice!

We were planning a very quick stop, enough to get the work done, but as we were marginal at best to make to Brazil by Christmas and this place is way too nice, we’re staying over the weekend and plan to slip off on Monday the 14th.
The marina is quite new and has a very different vibe to any of the marinas we stopped at previously. It’s not just the excellent facilities and very friendly and helpful staff, it’s also the fact that every boat here is, in effect, a transoceanic cruiser. Every boat that arrives here has already travelled hundreds of miles offshore. They all have stories to tell and are generally a quite friendly group. A for instance, whenever any of the yachts depart, they are seen off to a cacophony of fog horns and trumpets, not just from the yachts in the marina, but from the harbour master, commercial ships, fisherman, and even people on the beach as well.
This is the only marina in Cape Verde and the guys at BoatCV quickly replaced our Spinnaker halyard and all our other lines as well (it seemed the best form of insurance) and they finished in two hours a job that we’ve seen take a day and a half in the UK. Their motto seems to be if someone made it, we can fix it, and watching them work on the inevitable breakages that occur on ocean passages, we believe it.
Having visited here we wish we had a lot more time to spend around these islands. They will certainly be a stop in future trips.
I had seen reports that Cape Verde had some problems with security and that it was expensive. We have seen absolutely no evidence of either. Food and drink is the cheapest we have seen since the small island tavernas in Northern Greece, and the repairs we had done were better priced than either Cartagena or Santa Cruz. This is definitely the best stop we have made, and is even better for being an un-planned one.
Of an afternoon, local guys go from boat to boat offering their fresh catch of day and yesterday we got some lobster for a snack.
I must say I felt almost a second of compassion before throwing the poor thing alive in boiling water but what I kept telling myself is that it would do the same to us if it could!! ( Lame excuse, but there you have it, it helps me sleep at night! ) Well, it can’t! And humans don’t taste that nice anyway, so I heard...
We didn’t have a pot deep enough so we did a bit of a mess on the boiling process but it turned out perfect! We also didn’t have a lobster cracker to help and get those best bits out but a pair of pliers did the job.
There was a private party going on just across the marina, the inauguration of a new club, so we sat on our deck, cracking our lobster with our pliers, having a beer and watching the concert. Not bad, huh?


Before

After

It got a bit cold after a while though, around 25 C. Well, you can’t have everything I suppose...
All in all, with the new marina, safe anchorages ( you can park your tender at the secure marina dock for around £2 per day), the new clube next to the marina with a huge swimming pool and poolside bar, many restaurants, all who seem to try and outdo each other with live music, and the charming people, this place has got to take off.
On our way....


Friday 20 November 2009

Gibraltar to the Canaries

It’s time to discuss gremlins...Gibraltar to Tenerife was our first real long stretch without the ability to hit a friendly port within 48hrs or so, so naturally it was the stretch on which we had the most ‘incidents’.
The first was the Morrocan fisherman and their fishing nets....... These are nets that seem to run around 1500m floating on the surface, and are generally guarded by one small fishing boat. Some are lit with flashing lights, some have a light at one end, others in the middle. Add to this that they lay these nets across merchant shipping lanes and you start to get the picture. Using radar and guesses, we avoided ten or twelve of them, while listening to fishermen pleading with merchant ships to turn North or South of their individual nets, always without being able to identify either their location or the ship they were trying to plead with. In the end while dodging one net, a fishing boat approached us waving us off, guessing he was protecting his net, we turned away from him, right into an unlit net. Luckily, just as before our keel popped over the rope it was spotted so the props were stopped before they could become fouled, although in the next two hours that it took to get clear, many’s a time I wished we had done what the merchant ships seemed to do, and that is give up and assume that the line cutters work and stem full speed ahead.
All this was occurring in very calm conditions, the next day we had a bit of a blow which continued well into the early hours, at around 1am there was a loud crash which turned out to be the stay of the main sheet where it attached to the rear of the boom deciding that it was time to retire. After an hour or so of swinging around at the end of the boom in a brisk wind with a 3 or so metre swell, we were able to get another line through the stays and get the boom back under control.
Around the same time the following night, after doing a quick deck check and grabbing a coffee, I flicked on the deck light again for some reason, only to see our Parasailor streaming out of its deck bag and over the side of the boat. A very quick dash secured the end of the sail, and after we got the boat hove to, the workout commenced. Let it be said that a 15m x 7m sail that has had the chance to fill with water in its sock is not the simplest thing to haul back in. Luckily the sail itself didn’t catch on the keel, but some of the lines did, so they needed to be cut, and later repaired. Needless to say, the sail now lives in the forward compartment not the deck bag J After that, a cold wet crew was looking forward to a hot brew, whereupon Miss Bossy actual discovers halfway through boiling the kettle that the gas bottle while still very heavy is empty.... Luckily we have a generator and an electric oven and electric kettle, however that meant no steaks for the rest of the trip.....
Finally the sea state subsided and the winds shifted so we could deploy the Parasailor, that worked fine, but it seemed that the early morning gremlins were not to be outdone, as the topping lift decided that what if was good enough for the main sheet stay, was good enough for it as well and it snapped in two with barely a murmur, luckily the main was up on the second reef, so not a big drama, but it was something else to repair.....
So, we had a great start, calm condition through the Straits, after which the wind died, then two days of wind right on our nose with moderate to heavy swells, followed by another few days of very light winds, but downwind at least. And something to make every night watch memorable.
In all some nice lessons learned ( we now have two massive gas bottles), some practice in exigent repairs and a belated but safe landfall in Tenerife.
Getting there...

Thursday 5 November 2009

Gibraltar

In order to get to Gibraltar in the morning, we left the marina in Benalmadena around 20:00 last Saturday.
Thick fog appeared mid-morning, and local lore says it would clear by lunch-time, naturally it didn’t.
We thought about waiting for it to lift but we are already way behind schedule and apart from the fog, the forecast was alright. Being only 12 hours away from Gibraltar we made the call to leave.
Visibility was extremely poor, so extra care was needed when leaving the port and it would have been hard to enter Gibraltar under the heavy fog curtain considering the insane amount of shipping traffic. So it was a night where there was absolutely no wind, dead calm seas and 10m visibility. The radar and the AIS got a great work-out, as did our fog-horn. Fortunately, around 4 am, it did lift eventually and we were able to make our way into the marina without issues.
We’ve been in Gibraltar for 4 days now but coincidentally every stop we made so far has either been on a Sunday or a public holiday, so everything is shut (in Spain, everything is shut between 12:00 and 17:00 every day anyway!!!). Again, as seems our luck, not only did we arrive in Gibraltar on a Sunday, but the Monday was a public holiday in Spain, so we had a two-fer.
The parts we bought to be delivered here in Gibraltar  - Bimini top, cockpit cushions, Parasailor and Lazy Bags - all arrived in the region, but there was a day or two of phoning and running around before we could locate them all and get them cleared into Gibraltar. All worked out in the end, and the work started this morning. We’re also having adjustable legs installed on the salon table so it can be lowered into a double bed or lifted into a table. Nice!
When all the work is done we’ll start planning our passage through the strait , which due to its geographic characteristics needs a bit of calculation so as to match the time we leave with a suitable combination of tidal stream, currents flow, wind direction and strength.  With all that , we don’t believe we’ll be able to leave Gibraltar this coming weekend as previously planned which could delay our arrival to Brazil a bit more. Probably Monday or Tuesday, better safe than sorry though...
The city is quite nice with lots of live music bars, good restaurants and is itself a big duty free shop too and for that reason, you just feel like you HAVE to buy something! We got a waterproof (for obvious reasons) video camera to document our journey.
An interesting thing: hitchhikers. Some people go from boat to boat offering themselves as crew asking for a ride to the other side of the Atlantic! One of their marketing techniques seems to be trying to advertise the fact that they won’t waste any water by washing either their clothes or themselves (!!!!!!!!!!!!), Alas, Miss Bossy's team is complete...sorry...
We still haven’t had the chance to go up The Rock, check the Siege tunnels, feed the apes and all the basic tour, probably tomorrow if the weather is good.
See you when I see you,

Sunday 11 October 2009

Malta to Cartagena

After 7 days at sea, we’ve finally arrived in Cartagena this morning. So far this has been our longest ride and I’m pleased to say that 4 days ago we crossed our 1000 miles mark!!! We should have arrived yesterday late afternoon but the wind died on us - the last 24 hours we’ve been averaging on 4kt only.
So a fun filled trip, we left with Force 5 winds, a 1.5m sea and a weather report that said the wind and seas would drop to Force 3-4. Within an hour we had Force 3 winds and 3m seas, that were building when we decided to pop into Mgarr Marina on the northern Maltese island of Gozo. On leaving (take 2), we had a forecast again of slight seas and moderate winds, within two hours we had 20-24kts of wind, and late that day were in 4m seas, you have to love weather forecasts.
We’re very happy to be here and the plan is to stay for a week. We’ve got some things to do apart from having fun though.
First job will be to clean the outside of the boat. It’s FILTHY!!!!!! Salt stuck all around since we’ve been washed by some big waves, bird shit everywhere and God knows what they have been eating to shit like this; and let me just say that apart from some big tankers and cargo ships we saw when crossing the shipping lane, we’ve been pretty much alone in the middle of the Med, so there’s loads of room for the birds to perform their business, but NO, they do it right on top of our boat! And what an aim!! Could have been worse, I’m glad we weren’t on deck at the time...
Cleaning the outside of the boat, apart from the cockpit, is a bit tricky with the motion. We can always give it a rinse but a real good decent scrub has to wait until we’re in port since none of us is willing to go overboard in the name of tidiness.
There’s also the rib. It was punctured by one of the solar panel brackets that broke as a result of the rough seas we’ve got on our second day. Not a biggie but I wish it hadn’t happened.
On the bright side, we are definitely glad that Miss Bossy saw us through the sun and rain, the calm and storm and here we are, safe and sound, the three of us:-)
Off to get breakfast now on terra firma. We would have a beer to celebrate our successful passage but it’s just 9 in the morning. Ah well, it’s past 12 somewhere in the world...
See you,

Saturday 19 September 2009

Meeting Miss Bossy

Today is the 19th of September, we’re anchored in Vlikho and we should stay here until tomorrow while Scott does what he does best: make things work. So I decided to take the time to write a summary of what has been happening since we arrived in Greece to get Miss Bossy.


Well, we flew on the 29th of August and we met Miss Bossy on the day after. At the time she was called Catzmaiborne and we had the pleasure to meet Phil and Suzzy, the owners. They bought her new from Ancasta on the Southampton Boat Show in 2003.

Phil and Suzzy took the time to show us the boat on which they have been living their lives for the last 6 years, tell us some of the adventures, funny stories, interesting people and wonderful places that they had the chance to see throughout their journey.

We fell in love with the boat at first sight. The love and care that Phil and Suzzy have given her was clear from the most pristine engine bay we have ever come across to the affection that they talked about her.

The survey and sea trial were scheduled to the 3rd of September but by then, something extremely bad would have to come up to put us off. Well, it didn’t. She passed both the survey and trial with honours.

It was Friday the 4th when we took possession of the boat and baptized her as Miss Bossy. It was also when our belongings arrived from London. Well, half of it. So we had to stay and wait for the other half that came on Saturday morning. I confess that looking at those 20 big boxes averaging 30 kg each I thought we would slow down the boat with so much weight and also, where on earth were we going to fit all of that??? Well, it was a lot of work but somehow everything fitted nicely and we still got loads of room to spare. Nice:-)

Since then, we’ve been wandering around the Greek waters of the Ionian Sea, sharpening our sailing skills, meeting great people and having a wonderful time. Meanwhile, Scott has been installing new bits and pieces of equipment that he swears every single one of them is a must have. As soon as they are all in place, we’re setting the course to our first great journey all the way across to Brazil.

Catch you later,