Blog
We are in Mindelo in São Vicente, Cabo Verde at the moment, getting ready for the crossing. Zissi had come to join me in Sal almost two weeks ago and we have been cruising around some of the islands. We have met new people and old acquaintances from the Canary Islands in the “Floating Bar” and sometimes it is hard for me to believe that I am here … in Cape Verde …. 4000 nautical miles from where I started and my starting point for crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
I have found a way of sending short texts directly to the blog from my satellite device. Since I will be making longer passages from here on I will probably make a few log entries once in a while if you are interested. Of course you can also always just follow the dot with Amy’s position.
The satellite texts can for some reason only be viewed here in the English version of the blog.
Last Friday I was finally notified that my battery is beyond repair. I won’t go into the “why” and “what went wrong” etc. I did that for myself long enough and apart from destroying my mood it also didn’t help at all. I then tried ordering a new one (the ones they were selling in Tenerife were to large for my battery case and very expensive). I tried ordering and every time it would take one or two days until I got a message that told me the seller wasn’t delivering to the Canary Islands. This went on with different Sellers for days. I had postponed my reservation in La Gomera to next Tuesday. So I cast off Monday evening to sail the 70 miles overnight and not arrive in the dark. I still had my starter battery. That would have to suffice.
Porto Santo was probably the hardest place to which to say goodbye so far. After I had got everything pretty much ready the evening before I paddled to the harbour café one last time, sat in the evening sun and had a few beers. Besides being a little sad to go, I was also eager to get to the Canary Islands. This should be a fairly easy passage with perfect winds from the port quarter all the way.
If my journey were to end here for some unforeseen reason, which of course I hope it will not, I think I would be able to accept it and be happy that I have at least made it this far to this very beautiful place. I have done a bit of hiking, some repairs on the boat of course and met new people. I think it would be great to stay here longer but I want to go on and will probably try to go to Tenerife on Wednesday. Here is a collection of pictures that I took during the last few days.
This post now has a little film of my 8 day passage from Vigo to Madeira. I will write a bit about the Island of Porto Santo in my next post.
As is often the case with plans, it all went down the drain caused by a small detail. In this case the small detail was a small tin of sardines which I had the night before departure and I will spare you the details of my sickness all through the night. It wasn’t pleasant and I was totally exhausted the next morning lying in my bunk, feeling sorry for myself and not in the least bit ready for a three day offshore passage. (I know Webb Chiles doesn’t consider anything under a thousand miles a passage but for my own frail self I thought of this as one).
The forecast called for almost no wind and there was just a very little bit of a breeze when I weighed anchor. I had decided to sail off and we were ghosting through the anchorage with only a half knot of speed but still able to steer and I got a bit of satisfaction out of this so we kept sailing out of the Ría. After two hours we had covered two miles and I decided to motor.
I had hoped to be able to sail but there was absolutely no wind. So we motored and even when the wind picked up about one hour before arrival (against us) I didn’t set sail. The waves were very confused and and I just wanted to arrive and not tack into very uncomfortable wind and wave (it was now blowing F6). With this wind the last hour turned into two because our engine wasn’t strong enough but we finally made it into the Ría de Cedeira and all of a sudden all was calm.
It rained a lot in Ribadeo and the harbour turned out to be not as protected as I would have thought. Amy was constantly rolling and banging against the fenders and sleeping was getting harder and harder. I decided to repair my anemometer. After two days of climbing the mast and getting my bunk wet because I had left the hatch open when it started to rain (I was up on the mast and couldn’t get down fast enough), I became very frustrated and gave up.
