Out of the Atlantic!

We are at last out of the Atlantic! The last couple of days have been so uncomfortable it is hard to think why any one is ever tempted to do this slow way west. We are all bumped and bruised. But at last there is a little relief. 

Midnight saw us passing between Guadeloupe and Antigua and into the Caribbean. A couple of hours later the wind did not lessen but the waves are not so vicious and we can move a little bit better. Down side is more shipping - three spotted overnight, which is going to spoil our sleep a little. Sun shining, coffee on, about to get the weather.

Gibraltar to Cape Verde 1691 miles, 15 days
Cape Verde to here 2182 miles, 16 1/2 days

Hot news.

Last night Dave dropped a winch handle in the cockpit. He bent down to pick it up and gave himself a fright when he picked up a fish instead!!!

By last night we were so crotchety with fed-up-ness over the state of the sea we were ready to get off, except there were no buses! Much better this morning!

Missing you all and the internet contact, we will be at least another week - then onto skype!!

Christmas Spirit

Despite breaking all known food safety rules we had an excellent Christmas. Roast chicken, roast potatoes of the super crispy kind, carrots and peas courtesy of Morrison's supermarket and a lovely gravy. All served in our best china dog bowls.

A sail change later saw the next course arrive - peaches and evaporated milk. A little siesta and as few jobs as possible saw the day rounded off with butterscotch dumplings. 

Not THE butterscotch dumplings, but close enough.

 

 

Mind you these treats nearly did not arrive as the flour bag exploded and took a bit of sorting out, followed by the lid flying off the skimmed milk container for a second round of dustpan and vacuum cleaner. Dave was not amused as the weighing station is his work bench and it all went over the boxes strapped underneath - nuts and bolts flour and milk, very tasty! But we had very full tummies for bed time!

We are going slow as there is not a lot of wind, still 250 miles to reach Antigua! And the bumpies have returned!

Loads of love to you all,

Jenny and Dave. 

Happy Christmas!

http://www.caddylakgraffix.com/

Happy Christmas greetings from the deep, deep ocean. And very deep it is too!! And warm - sea temperature is now 31°c, Air temp gets over 30°during the day, 27° overnight.

No Tree - we did not find one floating by, alas, but we have a nativity scene embroidered on a little cushion, a gift from a dear friend, as decorations. The other ones like the angels and the crib have had to stay put as the lumpy-bumpy-throw-you-all-about stuff is back with a vengeance. I think Santa took us for a sleigh ride last night, we just wish he had not made the effort.

Still, we are in good spirits, and we are looking forward to roasting the potato we have nurtured, to go with the chicken we have managed to keep edible and butterscotch dumplings for dessert!! Yum yum. Or then of course it could be biscuits and cheese if the lumpiness gets too much for the chef!

Anyway, we wish you every blessing. We hope the four legged members of the family liked their prezzies. Big hugs to the furkids from us.

Jenny and Dave.

PPS Now 450 miles to go to reach Antigua:

http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/namerica/caribb/ag.htm

Bounce and Roll

Well, here we are at sea again, and a rude reminder it has been that we are basically living in a highly unstable environment! Bounce and roll, lurch and fall, loads of colourful bruises, and lots of sitting around hanging on. The Wind is not the problem, but the confused lumpy sea is. However, today things are a bit quieter and I am falling off the chart table seat a lot less and able to type a bit more.

We set off from Mindelo with a lovely send-off from the friends we had made there throwing our lines off and blowing whistles and trumpets as seems to be the custom here. Dave reckons it is a sign they want rid of us!! He can be such a tease at times!! So out into the bay and set up the boat to go off downwind and out into the strait between the islands. Dave assures me that the waves will settle down as we get past the islands, and gullible me believes him! That was Wednesday 5 days ago! So lots of sitting and watching the sea and reading. Too lumpy to sew,  but will try knitting.

We had a visitor, a white sea bird, not a typical sea gull, but definitely supposed to be on the sea. He stayed with us for 24 hours and then flew away when some of his mates came by. He turned up his beak at the offer of tinned corned beef - maybe he was telling us something! We were a bit worried when he first arrived as he sat up at the back not far from the wind generator and I had visions of him ending up in little pieces. Dave found where he had slept - cockpit cushion - as he left his calling card. Then he settled on the loo hatch till his mates came. I have the feeling he was a frigate bird, but we have no way of looking for it on the internet at present.

Other visitors are the flying fish, about 2 a night so far but that will increase as we are going ever towards the greatest concentration of flying fish in the area. In the day time they avoid us, but at night it's a different scenario and a few land on the boat. They certainly can travel a distance out of the water and they travel in schools so the water froths and bubbles as they all take off in formation flying. The other night we had the deck lights on and when we looked out over the sides we could see the fish flying with phosphorescence dripping off them and making the scene look like some huge fountain.
No dolphins on this leg yet.

………………………………….
'Hey, Dave'
'Yes, Jen'
'Dave, this autopilot is lovely but he uses a lot of power. Should we try Harriet again, now we had the rudder fixed?'
'I guess so, but she wasn't very good before. But something has to happen or we will have to run the engine too much.'
So, out comes Harriet's hat. For those who have forgotten, Harriet is the Monitor wind vane self-steering gear which hangs on the back of the boat. She operates by means of a servo-pendulum and uses no power whatsoever. Her hat is the vane that sticks up on top of her to be tilted by the wind. So with all the strings attached we give her a go - nothing but a big fall off course. Another go. Same thing. Then:
'Jen, OHHHH NOOOOOOOOO'
'What Dave?'
'I have put the strings on back to front, that is why she is not working.'
'You sure?'
'Fraid so. Been a dill brain again. I will go and check the book.' 
Then:
'Jen, says here if she won't stay on track the strings are crossed. So all this time Harriet and Terry haven't worked it is because the strings are back to front! All that time going up and down the harbor at Siracusa trying to get Terry to work! If only we had put on Harriet we may have sorted it! AAAAArrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhhhh'
So cut, stitch, sew and attach again, and wow!!! Harriet works and has been working now non-stop for days! Which means Terry the tiller pilot that works on Harriet will work too (he uses very little power) and that leaves the big guy for those stormy seas and difficult places.
Which goes to show there is something to learn every day, which means there will probably be another mini disaster tomorrow!

OFF AGAIN

December 11th 2012

CAPE VERDE

OFF AGAIN        

We have now made a very important decision – we are going to prise ourselves off this jetty an make our way over to the Caribbean. The books we were waiting for never did arrive so we have now had our refund from Amazon and will just have to do without them. However, by waiting so long for these pilot books for the Lesser Antilles (7 weeks no less) we now will have no time to visit them anyway, so it will be a straight trip to Panama. We are not too disappointed as we were feeling less inclined to stay in the Caribbean and more inclined to spend as much time as possible in the Pacific. So Dave has just gone on a march to the docks to try and retrieve our boat papers from the Maritime Police and get our passports stamped ready for tomorrow. This is definitely not a nice place in town to go to as there are dozens of men just hanging about the port entrance which is quite intimidating. But there are quite a number of police wandering about and the main police building is just across the road. Then it is the last food shop, pay the last of the marina bill, retrieve the last wash from the laundry and a thousand other things and then off in the morning. No matter how many lists I write and work out a timetable, there is always a last minute rush of “why did we not do that sooner!”

Help!!!!

It is tomorrow  and we are in imminent danger of being ready. The last glitch is that the cash machines are not working and we can’t go till we pay our bills! But most of the stuff is stowed, just have to put the air conditioner to bed for the journey, turn on the engine and we should be on our way.

The editor is standing by to do the blogs from the journey, so if it is not too bumpy bumpy there should be updates.

Now it is leaving first thing tomorrow morning just after the sun is up!

Surprise!

December 5th 2012

The David and jenny saga is continuing after a lengthy break in transmission. I apologise to all those who have been waiting,  and say thank you to all those who have been prodding me to get going again. I can not believe that there could be so few hours in a day – even fewer when there is a man around the place! We have been really enjoying ourselves despite a couple of hospital adventures in Gozo and trips to the Gibraltar hospital, and, having fixed ourselves up and the boat up, we have duly set off on the next phase of the Great Adventure.

You will all have to wait for the newsy bits of what we have been up to in the Mediterranean. You will be given flashbacks for entertainment value when I feel you might be tiring of endless tropical sunrise and sunset descriptions. We are now in the Cape Verde Islands, on the island of S.Vicente, at a place called Mindelo. There are some good websites about the islands and also Google earth to look at. We have made a change of plan decision and instead of continuing down to Cape Town and then across the southern Indian Ocean to Hobart, we will be leaving here for the Caribbean and the Pacific to arrive in Brisbane around September next year. That is the plan as of today!

Before we continue I have to introduce you to the editorial panel. Once we are at sea I cannot post onto the blog, so I have a team who will take the text I send over the radio and craft it into the right format and post it.

Interruption.

“What you doing Jen?”

“Writing the blog at long last”

“Why the picture of the Brisbane crowd?”

“They are the editorial team. Dexter is the Senior Editor, Our Kate is technical adviser and King Fred is quality control.”

“Jen, Dexter is a dog”

“Not just any dog. He is an Assistance Dog, and I hear he has been called Assistance Dog Extraordinaire for all the things he can do to help Our Kate. And he goes to University for post graduate studies and spends hours in the library. He used to write poetry but I haven’t seen anything for a while, probably too busy, but he has beaten Kate and me at Scrabble a number of times. He has his own Face Book page too.”

“He is still a dog”

“Well, I have been assured he will be an excellent editor, as long as people understand the occasional references to chicken wings (food) and bush turkeys (torment).”

“And King Fred is a cat”

“His Face Book page has him listed as Monarch. He is a bit more limited in his vocabulary but I hear he is very discerning and will be an excellent quality controller if the editor gets carried away.”

“He is still a cat”

“Time will tell. Just wait and see”.

                                         ................................................................

So. 

Where are we now?

We are at a marina at Mindelo on S. Vicente, one of the Cape Verde islands. We have been here some few weeks now, trying to sort our life out (a never-ending occupation) and waiting for mail and the weather. The weather has arrived in that the trade winds have started, but the mail has disappeared somewhere deep and mysterious. We have made unproductive attempts to trace it, visiting all agencies we can find, getting the girls in the office to ring around for us as there is a big language problem and trying to contact the senders as well. The charts turned up at last, and took a whole day to be extracted from customs. This included Dave and one of the marina staff tramping around a couple of offices in the town to collect paperwork, then out to the airport by taxi. Then back again to pick up me and more documentation, and another taxi to the seaport to pick up a policeman (no kidding) who was to come to the airport with us. Evidently only he can get the charts out of the store. Then it was taxi back after more delays and more paperwork, with the policeman coming back to the boat with us so I could stamp his piece of paper with the boat stamp. Thankfully, I had made one up before we left out of a WH Smith do-it-yourself kit. First time it had been used. So much paperwork, a whole day taken up and a small fortune on taxis and money to pay for the policeman. But at least we have the charts.

It is a very different world here to where we have been up until now. We have left the affluent West and have now arrived in the not so affluent, indeed very poor, part of the world. There is so little here, the supermarkets are really what we would call large corner shops  - there is most of the real necessities of life but not a range of choice, and there are some days when the re-supply has been delayed and there are big gaps on the shelves. There are no High Street stores, there is really no High Street, and the clothing shops are mainly full of T-shirts and flip flops. The poor are everywhere, from the women trying to sell  bananas on the street corners to the men begging as you pass. The contrast with Gibraltar and its huge perfume and jewellery shops is overwhelming – there is no perfume and there are no jewelers. One thing that has struck us also is that there are no push chairs or prams anywhere. In all our weeks here we have only seen 1 push chair and that was off one of the boats. There are no Mothercare type stores, a few shops sell terribly cheap toys. The supermarkets do not sell much baby food at all – there are a few jars on the shelves, but not enough to feed a child regularly. There seem to be very few packets of disposable nappies either. Yet the children are clean and appear well cared for – but there are no overweight youngsters here as there were in Gibraltar and the Mediterranean countries we visited, as well as back in the UK. There are no sweet shops either. The supermarket has a shelf with a couple of bars of chocolate, some Mars bars and a few chocolate biscuits. The biscuit section has 2 varieties of sweet and a couple of savoury. The cheese counter has 3 types of cheese. Vegetables are so very hard to source and the quality is awful on the whole. Green vegetables are virtually non-existent, carrots are very poor indeed, and the potatoes can be great or hopeless. There are yams and sweet potato available, and loads of millet and grain, and lots of tinned vegetables. Meat comes frozen and has been surprisingly good – there is little choice but for our basic cooking it has been fine. There is no butter anywhere, it is all margarine of a parentage unknown to us which is out on ordinary shelves and not refrigerated. Refrigeration space is at a premium and is nearly all freezer space.

The infrastructure of the place seems to be depressed with the water and electricity supply being frequently interrupted. We run the computer on the boat’s 12 V system as the shore power is too erratic and we risk damaging the hardware. The marina runs its own generator at times, but now the number of boats has increased this is struggling. Our clothes were held up for 5 days in the laundry as first off there was no water and then there was no power.

But the people we have met are very kind to us, and the girls in the marina office have helped us enormously to find what we need. I managed to find the last black printer cartridge on the island but no colour one could be found. The church we go to has been jam packed and so vibrant and welcoming. I have managed to run off a side-by-side translation of the Mass and we have our English version of the readings, so the only bit we miss is the sermon. We have had a couple of Sundays when there was a big celebration and the inside of the church was moved out into the street, pews and all, to accommodate the crowds.