It’s official, after an amazing 2 years and 3 months (to the day) exploring the Med, we have officially left the shores of Europe for the last time.
Gran Canaria was amazing, the people we’re incredibly friendly, and so helpful, even taking the time to help me improve my pronunciation and increasing my Spanish vocabulary. We had lots of laughs and exploring time with Jade & Terry who flew out for our first few days and Lindy who joined us a few day after them. We had planned to leave earlier this week, but Caspar managed to pull his back which meant he was man down for a few day. It did mean that we both got a massage and we joined the pool club in the marina for some recovery swimming and daily saunas. The delay meant that our buddy boat was able to catch us up after that got waylaid in Gibraltar due to a few technical issues.
So much shopping has been done, if you thought that bracing yourself for the shops being closed on Christmas day was a bad, try getting your head around not having any shops for 2 and a half weeks. Not only will the shops been in short supply, land will be very much out of sight. Christmas and New Years will be spent at sea, which put extra pressure on, we have a tradition of having beef wellington, roast spuds, red cabbage and brussel sprouts on Christmas day and dam if I’m going to let a little thing like being 800 nm (nautical miles) off shore ruin my traditions! I’ve managed to get everything except the sprouts, I might need to ask Bruce to pick some up in the UK before he flies out to join us in Cabo Verde.
This first leg will see us doing our longest single crossing yet, 867 nm (1606km) which should should take us around 6 1/2 – 7 days, getting us to the island of Sol in Cabo Verde buy Saturday afternoon, just in time to welcome Bruce aboard. Bruce will be joining us for the Main Event, the crossing from Mindelo the port city on São Vicente in Cabo Verde to our first Caribbean Island, Barbados!
We left Puerto Las Palmas at 17:00. I a bit of last minute panic grocery shopping ( we’re definitely not going to starve. Casp did his final trip to the chandeliers & we went for a stroll around town. Nautilus got a final wash down and we topped up the water (400 L) and fuel (400 L + 100 L in Jerry cans) and cast off the lines. Things were a little rough for the first few hours as we beat into a head-sea & I ended up needing to take a seasick tablet & gaze lovingly at the horizon. After all the shopping I did, for all the delicious food, we up having cheese & chorizo sandwiches for dinner. We made the most of the last of our unlimited internet, we’re now on priority data which at €2.39 a giggly byte, means our internet usage will be rationed. Caspar took the first watch, letting me sleep until 02:00am, it’s currently 05:19, I might see the sun rise before we swap over.
Not only did I get to see the sunrise, we were treated to a 25 minute dolphin show! They swam around the boat doing barrel rolls and a few of the young ones did full on out the water show jumps with some epic splashes. They are loving us today, I woke up to a second pod swimming with us, it really never gets old. For those of you interested in what you eat on a boat in the middle of the ocean.
Boat jobs are never ending (even if you sometimes have to go hunting for them), Caspar is currently re-tieing the edges of the trampoline to make it a bit stiffer.
After yesterday’s double dolphin encounter, I was hoping it would be a daily occurrence, but alas no dolphins today.
We did however land a fair sized mahi mahi, it’s the third one we have caught in our 2 year sailing adventure but the first one we’ve actually managed to get aboard. No prizes for guessing what we had for dinner.
The rest of our day was pretty uneventful, we had the gennaker up for most of it as the wind is blowing up our chuff. Changed over to the white sails (the main sail & the gib) for the night shift as they are more forgiving of fluky winds & gusts. We try to avoid having to change sails or reef at night especially as it is dark, dark in the middle of the ocean when the moon is not about.
We had some tasty winds during the night, with the apparent wind getting up to 20knts & Nautilus cruising along nicely at 11knts at one point. Luckily things calmed down before our reefing point of 25knts.
I woke up to a very hazy horizon, it’s impossible to tell if there are any clouds in the sky as we are surrounded by a Saharan dust cloud. Nautilus is covered in a fine coating of red sand. It’s also stating to get much warmer.
The wind dies out for a few hours, which wasn’t all bad as we needed to run the engines to charge up the batteries (the hazy skies & mainsail casting shade on the solar panels are doing nothing for our energy production today) Running the engines also gave us the opportunity to make some water, the things that excite you when you’re 120 miles off shore. Caspar baked a bread & I’ve made a stock from the roast chicken carcass (waste not want not and all that)
The genniker is back up and we’re pottering along nicely at 6knts, only 417 miles to go.
There’s something thing rather surreal & humbling about being pulled across the ocean powered by nothing more than Poseidon’s breath, a bit of fabric & a few ropes. After 5 days of endless ocean views and the odd dolphin for company you really do realise how small you are as bobbing along in our 6m x 12m world of 2.
We had a rather uneventful hazy day as we’re still sailing through the dust cloud, no dolphins and no fishing as we still need to work our way through the Mahi mahi in the freezer.
After saying that we usually take the spinnaker or gennaker down at night and opt for the easy life of the white sails. Todays wind was just to good and consistent so we decided to leave the spinnaker (the true down wind sail, this one only really works when the wind is right behind us) up for the night
We’re still in the dust cloud and Nautilus is covered in so much red sand that after washing the windows it looked like a mini massacre had occurred. She’ll be needing a thorough washing down when we get to Cabo Verde.
The decision to keep the spinnaker up last night paid off, the wind stayed true to the predicted models and we covered a good amount of water. Looks like we might even arrive in Sal a day early.
The wind shifted and with it came a sail change, swapping the spinnaker for the gennaker gave us a few degrees to play with meaning we could point Nautilus at Sal rather than Mindelo. We’re back to full whites for the night passage.
The lingering dust has reduced visibility to about 3 miles which gave our day an eerie feel as we chased down the ghost ship that we could see on the computer but through the haze. Eventually the faint out line of ‘Loving it’ appeared out of the gloom, but even as we neared and eventually overtook the Fountaine Pajot, the poor visibility meant it held onto its bad 90 film ghost ship vibes.
With our now familiar dust cloud still very much in place and the computer assuring us that land was less than 5 miles ahead, we put our faith in technology and pushed on. Eventually the out line of something very large and solid broke through the haze and we caught our first glimpse of Sal, Cabo Verde. With the anchorage just round the first headland we didn’t have long to go. At 13:37 after a couple of failed attempts due to the anchor dragging, we managed to nestel our way into the very crowded bay, 24 hours earlier than we’d originally planned.
We’d been invited for drinks ashore at Rotterdam by a couple in one of our Atlantic crossing groups who had arrived the the day before. After a few local beer and a lovely chat it was time to embark on the checkin process. Surprisingly for a tiny island off the coast of Africa it was all very efficient and we were done with in 10 mins, we did however have to leave our boat documents with them, which is right up there with handling over your passport.
We headed back to Rotterdam, the biggest of the restaurants that we’d seen, a shipping container that housed the well stocked bar and the only bit of the ‘building’ that could be secured was surrounded but what could loosely be referred to as a room, theres a back wall made off corrugated metal and bit of wood that hold up the corrugated roof. The beach side if the building has a wall of plastic framed glass doors that are too short to reach the roof and look like they washed up after someone in Cornwall fly tipped their conservatory. The front of the restaurant is an open to the elements series of dark wooden telephone pole columns , the piece de resistance however is the kitchen, a row on open burners encircled by a giant heavy duty fly screen. At least the chef get a reprieve for the flies, and oh dear god are there flies. It’s all quintessentially small village Africa, and very much reminds me of all the great places I visited as a child. The restaurant was buzzing with locals and a sprinkle of sailors, food was delicious, the prawns were the best I’ve had since our trip to Mozambique and I’ll definitely be trying to recreate the dressing they used for the Dorado, though I’m not sure that I’ll be able to nail the smokey open flame taste on Nautilus.
With the local ‘liquor’ (a sweet syrupy alcohol that tastes of passion fruit) and Grog (although it’s made from sugar cane, it has non of the similarities of rum, it’s clear and is more akin to grappa) running through our veins and very full bellies we made our way back to Nautilus and Caspar promptly fell asleep at 20:30, leaving me to catch up on some work before I joined him in lala land.
