All in all it was a really good trip (apart from the very rolly sea) and for us, pretty uneventful.
Anyway Sunday was lovely so off we went. We motored to our first two waypoints as there was not much wind but all the wind we had been having meant the sea was really rolly – AGAIN. Shortly before dusk we let out the headsail and shut down the engine – we can’t motor 800 odd miles!
It was going quite slowly which meant the wind vane steering was having difficulty keeping us on course but over night we tacked and with wind over our port side we began to make some good progress, although still not nearly as fast as Chris had done it before
I had the very early watch on Christmas Day (about 01.30) – it was a lovely moonlit night and I was listening to a recording of Amahl and the Night Visitors (a Christmas mini-opera a story of the first miracle) – quite magical.
During the watch, the wind came up and Chris had to come up and reef the headsail but by mid-day we had done nearly 300 miles. When we changed watches around 2.00pm and we had a glass of wine and some nibbles to celebrate Christmas Day. A very very different type of day to usual!!!
On the 27th we changed the clocks as the Cape Verde Islands are an hour behind GMT and its quite useful to get into the correct time frame while at sea.
We were going to the island Sao Vicente and a bay with the harbour Porto Grande, known as Mindelo. The bay is almost guarded by a large rock and I got pretty scared as the waves kept turning us towards it but we could not go too far in the opposite direction as we needed to turn into the bay AND there was a dirty great mining rig in our way if we did! {We heard later that it had been towed out there that day.} |
We had thought we would go into the marina but as we got close the wind was still blowing quite hard and it again looked like a mediterranean moor (which we don’t really like and at the prices they were charging we thought was not good enough!) so we decide to anchor and at 5.30pm we got the hook down and sat in the cockpit and relaxed while checking the anchor was well dug in. |