Visit to Santo Antao

The island on which Mindelo is on is called Sao Vincente and is nearly the northwesternmost of the islands but there is a much bigger one which as been lurking to the west of our harbour which is called Sao Antao. It is over twice the size of Sao Vincente and much higher. Well, we decided to take the ferry across and explore it. Sadly, there are no suitable harbours where you can take a boat so it is best to visit by ferry. It proved to be one of the highlights of the whole cruise so far.

Just at the entrance to the bay at Mindelo is this remarkable rock called Ilha de Dos Passaros and this was the first chance I had to get a decent (hah!) photo of it.

The ferry takes about an hour to make the six mile crossing and this was quite rough though not too rolly. It would however have been quite a lively sail in Sarah G! Once you arrive, the approved thing is to allow yourself to be commandeered by one of the mini bus dirvers to be shown over the island. We resisted for nearly half an hour as we wanted to walk around the main town of Porto Novo. Eventually, we did succumb and were transferred to a rather battered four wheel drive. The real thing on Santo Antao is an old road that crosses over the island to another town called Ribeira Grande. This road is cobbled and takes in some incredible scenery. The two biggest “sights” are a huge volcanic crater. The road passes round the rim and you can look down nearly 400 meters to see crops being cultivated in the bottom. The vulcanicity has long ceased on this island of course. A few kilometers on from the crater and you start descending to the west coast of the island. Here the rock is mainly sedimentary but with huge volcanic dykes intruding into the rock which makes for very steep sided ridges with almost dry rivers at the bottom. The road. The road follows one these ridges. The photos completely fail to do it justice as you cannot portray the vertical drop on each side of the low wall at each side. According to our guide, it was built over 20 years during the sixties and seventies. They have now built a new road that goes twice the distance round the coast but takes half the time.

Approaching Porto Novo

Once ashore, we found this incomparable sign on a beach bar.

Our guide proved to be quite a character and took us to his village where we met a lot of relatives as well as being treated to a really good lunch provided by another relative. We also got to sample lots of the local rum which is called grogue. I can't say that I was overwhelmed with it. Good spirits really need to be matured in casks for a while so as to soften them out and impart some distinctive flavours. Still, grogue was produced locally and was sold to us in used mineral water bottles. Matthew took some back to the UK with him.

Here are a selection of some of the 88 photos I took.

A typical view at the top of the mountains.

Audrey, Matthew and our guide Kykie

An artful tree just as we began our descent to the western side of the island.

Where I am stood here there is a drop of several thousand feet either side of the road. It is almost impossible to do justice to the scenery with my lack of skills behind the camera unfortunately.

The wifi here at the marina is a bit slow and also charges on a per MB basis so I will wait till I can get somewhere else to upload more photos.
All in all the day was one of the best ones of the cruise and I would thoroughly recommend a visit to these islands either by boat or by plane.

Finally: Happy New Year to all readers.

Some Photos

We have been here nearly a week now. We enjoyed Christmas day and took a taxi tour of the island on Boxing day. Here are a few photos. I'll put more up later on.

The view from where we are anchored.

The weather has been very hazy (and windy being in an acceleration zone) so pictures of the neighbouring island and generally in town have been a bit sketchy. However, this is one I am quite proud of showing one of the derelicts moored in the bay.

More Christmas stuff first though.

Audrey's knitted Christmas tree.

The island we are on is called Sao Vincente and is one of the smaller. Also, because it is not very high, it is very dry. It is very nice though and the taxi ride around it was a lot of fun.

There is a village on the east end of the island called Calhau. It has some seriously upmarket holiday homes but also a small set of fishing boats. There is also a very closed looking holiday development. We are not sure if it is just the close season or whether the developer ran out of money/tourists. It is quite picturesque though.

On the north side of the island is a huge beach and a nice village at the western end of it where we had a huge lunch.

Mindelo itself is a great town. It is the second city of the Cabo Verde but as the entire population of the country is only around 500000 it is not really more than a medium sized town. It had a heyday as a coal bunkering port in the days of steam ships and so has lots of distinctive architecture from that era along with a fantastic produce market. The fish market is also fascinating and it provided us with some delicious fish of some type for Christmas dinner. They looked like small tuna.

This lady sold us our fish!

Typical Mindelo architecture

Tazacorte to Mindelo

This turned out to be quite an exciting trip though not the nicest one we have had. As followers will know, we had a frustrating time with light and contrary winds south of the Canaries for a good couple of weeks. Finally though the normal situation with a low over the Sahara and a high out in the Atlantic funnelling the winds from the north east. A lot of us looked at all the sources and eventually we all pushed off at nearly the same time.

Well, the winds did blow but with a vengeance and we got four days of actual gale strength wind and only about 24 hours with the wind less than the Beaufort force 7. We covered the 800 miles in seven days which is very quick for us though it might have been quicker had the wind been a bit less. The first night out was very much what we were used to with around 28 to 33 knots of wind which is a good strong force 7 but not too bad. Then in the following day things dropped away much as we had experienced in the past. It was that night that we really got a blow and from then on we had a minimum of 30 knots and usually more than 35 which is the official point at which force 8 starts.

We think that the trade winds, which are “supposed” to blow at between 15 and 25 knots, were being augmented by a Calima wind off the Sahara. On our third day the air turned very yellow and the sunset was this strange bleary thing while visibility was reduced to less than two miles. That was when we had the longest sustained period of gale force winds. The boat is also covered in yellow dust which will have to be cleaned off at some point.

All in all, the sailing was quite wearing and we were extremely relieved to get in on the afternoon of 21 December. On the Friday while still 130 miles away we did some calculations about whether we could make it in on Saturday before the sun went down as night entrances are not advisable in these islands. Navigational aids are generally poorly maintained and there are apparently numerous unmarked wrecks in the bay. As it turned out, the entrance was really quite easy though it took a long time to actually get in from our first sighting of land.

We did see a bit of wildlife while on passage with several pods of dolphins playing with us both in the day and at night. There were a different sort of dolphin from what we usually see though being much smaller at only around 2 to 3 meters long and in different sized pods of between twenty and five or so. Still, they were still great to see. In particular on one of my night watches, one of them did a huge jump right across our path just in front of the bow. Of course, getting pictures of fast moving animals from the unstable platform of the boat meant we didn't get any pictures worth looking at, particularly in the dull weather we were experiencing.

Arrived Cabo Verde OK

We had quite a rough trip in the end but arrived safely in Mindelo yesterday afternoon and are enjoying the sensation of not being in the Canary Islands any more. I'll do a full posting and such like soon as the wifi is a bit flaky out here in the anchorage.

Last Days in the Canaries

The time for our departure is coming very close at last. The weather has been frustrating our plans for leaving but the north east trades have finally re-established themselves and Saturday 14 December is looking like the day! We have had some extraordinary weather recently though.

First, there has been a long period of light southerly winds which are the worst possible as there would have been insufficient wind to move us very fast and there would still have been an ocean swell to contend with and no wind to steady the boat. Then it blew a southerly gale for three days which made the harbour here in Tazacorte a bit exciting though the breakwater is very good and we didn't surge around too much. We were also treated to a spectacular thunder storm with lightning bolts cracking and rumbling all over the place. There has also been a huge ground swell from the west for a couple of days which must have been generated by a storm off in the north Atlantic. Anyway, all this looks to be settling down at last and we, along with others, are now looking to get south as quick as possible.

Not many photos I am afraid but here are a couple of the waves on the beach and the swathe the flood waters cut over the beach.

Our other energies have been devoted to provisioning. This has to be done quite carefully as obtaining good cheap food will be more difficult in the places where we are heading. There are two elements to provisioning. Firstly, there are the non perishables, mostly tins. Then there are the perishables for the passage to come. The local supermarket chain has the fantastic name of Hiper Dino and we have become regular visitors to them. The boat feels like it must be another inch down on her marks with all the tins of tomato we have got. We effectively have enough to get us across to the Caribbean now. The next stage is to get the perishables for the passage to come. This takes planning of a different kind as we need to ensure that they will keep without a fridge. Fresh unrefrigerated stuff stored carefully is the trick here.

As ever, there are always loads of last minute things that you feel have to be done before you can even think of casting off. The truth however is that there comes a point when you just tidy up what is not stowed properly and go. Once at sea it all ceases to matter and you can relax a bit. In between though you can build up a good state of nerves about it all.

The passage to Mindelo is a bit over 800 miles so we should take eight days to complete it. We always budget on doing one hundred miles a day when on passage but if we are lucky we will go a bit faster than that and we may be lucky and get a favourable current as well.

Technical issues

In the process of trying to organise all the pictures I have in Google, I succeeded in deleting a whole swath of pictures on the blog. It appears that when you delete photos from one "album" it actually goes and deletes them from the whole of your Google area!! I will work to get them back but this will take a little time.

Please bear with us - all you myriad readers.

A Different View Of Sarah Giddings

As Matthew, my Brother, is an avowed mast monkey we lost no time in sending him up the mast to fit our shiny new LED tricolour navigation light. After having done that successfully, he took this picture of us.

La Palma, Tazacorte and Getting Ready

We have been in Santa Cruz for quite a while and look like being stuck in La Palma for a bit longer till the weather sorts itself out for passages south. Still, this is at least giving us chances to sort stuff out and do some more sight seeing.

Amongst stuff that has been sorted out, we have fitted a new starter motor to the engine as it appears that the old one is not working. Matthew has also brought his carpentry skills to bear on the cockpit grating. As the photos shows, we had started a garden growing in the bits that had broken up. Well, we now have cut away all the broken bits and substituted two lengths of pine. This is not ideal of course, but is much better than having it disintegrate under our feet and start to rot.

We even had a bit of something sprouting in it!!

We were also getting very fed up with the surge in the marina though. This surge was not a thing we could understand as the outer break water is very long, the marina is up the top of the harbour with another inner break water separating it from the main harbour. However, somehow the north westerly swell was curving round the south facing entrance of the harbour and then working into the totally enclosed inner harbour. It makes you wonder what it would be like in a heavy blow from the south which does happen sometimes in these islands.

Still, on Thursday, we took off for Tazacorte on the other side of the island. The wind, as well as being in the south was very light and we only managed a brief bit of sailing round the southern tip of the island but we are very pleased to be here. It is an excellent marina and also very social with lots of other transatlantic types waiting for the same weather change we are waiting for.

Highlight of the trip was being passed, very close, by a couple of what we think were Bottlenosed Whales. The were too big to be dolphins.

So far, we have only explored a bit round here and done a walk from Fuencaliente down past the two most recent volcanoes to the lighthouse of Fuencaliente (El Faro de Fuencaliente). The southern end is the newest part of the island and was subject to a volcanic eruption as recently as 1971. They have built a visitor centre outside El Volcan de San Antonio where you can walk round the rim of the crater. Audrey and I had visited it before by car but everything was fog enshrouded then. This time, we had clear skies and great views. The walk through the lava and ash fields of the Tenequise volcano was also fascinating though we didn't get time to explore the lighthouse at the bottom much as buses were waiting to be caught.

Being on the exposed west side of the island, the harbour has a massive breakwater and I am slightly proud of this picture of the northern end of it.

Although sunny yesterday - 06 December or St. Nicholas' day a dramatic rain shower pushed through leaving this dramatic view to the south.

Here are the long awaited views of the marks of the vulcanism to the south of the islands.

If the weather continues to hold we may try a more ambitious walk to El Pico de los Muchachos. There is a long ridge walk up round the rim of the Caldera de Taburiente and if it is not cloudy, we would get great views compared with the cloud and rain we met when driving up there the other day.

Looking ahead, the run of southerly wind looks like it might be ending by the end of next week which would allow us to take our departure for the Cabo Verde islands at last! Watch this space!

Brothers Arriving and Fair Transport

We welcomed Matthew, my Brother, on Sunday and are now just waiting for good winds to take us away from the Canary Islands to the Cabo Verde archipelago. More on the weather shortly.

There are also a couple of tall ships tied up here in Santa Cruz which are very interesting. The first is an old Swedish Baltic trading vessel now converted to a floating school. They take a range of children who spend a few months sailing round on this 250 ton schooner.

The other smaller brigantine is part of the fair transport. They are not linked to the fair trade movement but are seeking to reduce the amount of fossil fuels used in transporting goods around the world by reverting to sail. Of course, it is a tiny movement but one that is intriguing to say the least. As well as traditional vessels they are also looking to promote development of sail assisted cargo ships using modern technology. It would, I believe fit very well into the philosophy of fair trade as well.

The website for the brigantine Tres Hombres is here
The Fair Transport site is here

Meanwhile, we are getting very frustrated with the weather. The normal pattern has a high pressure out in the middle of the Atlantic and a low pressure over the Sahara which generates the so called north east trade winds. The problem is that the Azores high, as it is called, has been replaced with a depression. We are therefore getting light westerlies or southerlies. The depression is giving gale force winds to the north of here though. We have also experienced very heavy rains for a couple of days. The runoff made the marina look like a vast cauldron of tea!

We are hopeful that the wind will change in time but we look to be stuck here for a few days more.

The Green (and wet) Island

Well, this island is known as the greenest of the Canary islands and this is of course for a reason. We have had more rain in the last few days than since we left the UK in April. For our last day with the hire car we drove up to the top of the island - El Alto de Muchachos which is over 2400 meters high. You also get to drive past the observatories which was a bit exciting. The trouble was that everything was in thick cloud and when we got to the top (you can drive all the way) the rain had started. Jen Butter had come along and she, Pico and myself walked along a bit to try and look down in the Caldera de Taburiente but all we say were a few rock outcrops and fog. Still, it was dramatic and we all enjoyed ourselves except for poor Pico the dog who got carsick on the way up.