Brazil - Uruguay.

Dandelion
Rick, Helen, Sue, John
Thu 2 Feb 2017 14:02
Now in Montevideo 34.54S 056.07W
Sorry about the silence. Real life seems to have been moving along faster than I can record it.
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>> 9th January
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>> When, on these sort of voyages, one receives an email fromfriends enquiring if we are ‘still dawdling south’, one’s initialreaction might be, ‘now hold on a damn minute! We’re already 5,500 miles into this thing, this is our seventh country, we’ve only been away for six months……’.
>> But of course they’re right. And the truth is that Brazil has grabbed at us. Enticing, beguiling, hot, sexy. Like a sort of benign sea-creature, her arms have brushed against the hull and our momentum has been lost in a lovely, gentle crawl…. Let’s and explore this river, dive for turtles here, anchor off these islands, anchor here for a few days, get into the scuba gear and scrub the bottom in this gin-clear anchorage…... And, like a warm, benign hand, the more-or-less reliable SE Trades pushing us along….
>> And so, by any measurement, we are LATE. Late anyway, for the Big South this season and so at some stage, without any undue haste or angst, we’ll need to hoik out The Plan and make some revisions….
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>> The late Clube de Santa Catarina is the fairly posh YC of Florianopolis. The layout here isn’t entirely straight forward. They put most of the city of Florianopolis on the 20-mile-long island of Santa Catarina, spanned the channel with a dignified iron bridge and called it a day. Handily, the bridge offer what we mariners call, an air-draft of 25 metres. Air-draft, of course, referring to the gap between the water and,‘Whew’! or ‘oh, Christ!’.)
>> Years went by and, as is so often the way of things, one day it was decided that an exciting New Bridge would be required. The planners drew it, the City found the cash, and it was built. Demonstrably neither the planners nor the City had in mind that at some point, way off in the indefinable future, S/V Dandelion would navigate these parts and her air-draft requirements would not be served by a New Bridge possessed of only 17. Therefore, to transit from north Florianopolis to south Florianopolis we are obliged to head north, back out into the channel, enter the open sea, sail south down the ‘rough side’ round the bottom and head north again back to the town.
>> We arrived here a few days ago and, gratifyingly, our arrival wasn’t entirely incident-free.
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>> To gain access to the Yacht Club marina one must first navigate over an extensive patch of shallows – slightly nervyas one is manoeuvring with less than 10cm under the keel. The marina RIB then escorts us in, and then, once we’re nicely buried deep inside the marina, there breaks out a discussion between the marinhos and the office. Something has been decided and, it seems, not to our advantage. The marinhos come alongside. ‘Buoy!’, they shout and point to a group of mooring buoys behind us outside in the channel.
>> Wonderful! So now, in an F4 crosswind, and with a 2-knotcurrent sweeping through, we’re asking DDL to do a nifty little U-turn. She, of course, does not take to the idea well and requires a mix of urgent bursts of forwards and astern, swearing and prayer to kick her round. We motor out to pick up one of their blasted moorings. The fetch here is about 15 miles so we’re not looking at ‘…a placid, mirrored lake, reflecting in dappled, upside-down splendour, the mountains a’ Mourne….’. No, we’re looking at a good two-foot chop with pretty little white horses. It’s a bit like being shown ahotel bedroom only to be find that when you get down toreception the only available bed is the bunkhouse.
>> We take the Beagle (the RIB is so-named) over to marina HQ to re-negotiate the deal.
>> In the office: -
>> Me. ‘May we berth in the Yacht Club marina?’
>> Nice young fella. ‘Si, Senor’.
>> Me (thinking). ‘Then why the hell, Jimmy, did you have your men make us go to the trouble of picking up a mooring (sans pick-up line by the way) halfway across the damn channel, hmm?’
>> Me (saying) ‘Gracias Senor’.
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>> (As it turns out the marina itself isn’t a complete haven of tranquillity and calm. The protecting wall is merely a lattice-work affair so the swells came marching through more-or-less untrammelled and DDL ends up see-sawing to the extent that it’s impractical/unsafe to carry out a timed leap from bowsprit to jetty. Shore-side excursions, therefore, begin with a ride in the Beagle.)
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>> So today (back to 9th January) with a full complement on board (R and H having re-joined) we’ve peeled ourselves away from what turned out to be a most welcoming and agreeable Club in order to take a further bite out of our voyage southwards,. A fairly delicate bite in this case as we end up in the anchorage at our tried and tested Ensenda da Pinheira. But 10 miles south of Florianopolis.
>> This is a half-moon-shaped bay, about two miles across. Abeach of hard sand runs around almost the whole length of itand clinging to that is the sprawl of a holiday village. In the early morning (early being defined as the time before you can legally purchase intoxicating refreshments from the various beach bars) you can have your run along this beach, encountering as you go folk, who clearly have just arisen from their beds and are now also slumbering away their remaining daylight hours on a recliner.
>> Oh. And there are Jet skis here. Blast them.
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>> Friday 13th January.
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>> Yep, Friday 13th. Setting aside the Friday Rule (never begin a passage on a Friday) and all the history (Apollo 13 and all that) we’re pushing off to Rio Grande – 320 miles without a single port of refuge along what is essentially a 300-odd mile-long beach.
>> And, if that wasn’t enough, we’re discounting a less-than-certain forecast. What can possibly go wrong?
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>> We clear the south end of the channel and as we gain the ocean proper we find a F4/5 NE’ly in force. This suits us to a ‘T’ (whatever that is) and we roll down our rhumb line in the 6 – 8 knot territory with the spectacular coastline unwinding down our starboard side.
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>> From Cabo de Santa Marta Grande, the last prominence of any kind on this passage, there’s a 240 mile grind down to Rio Grande. And this section of coastline is something of a feature. The feature being, of course, that it has no features. Its low lying. Its shallow. And nary a river mouth, bay, island, headland nor cape, interrupts this smooth, infinitesimally curving stretch of coast . And, maintaining thetheme, once one finally locates the mouth of Rio Grande (or ‘ero gron-jay’ as they say down here) one finds that it’s is not going to be entered into the World’s Top Hundred Most Awe Inspiring River entrances. Essentially one is met by twin,parallel walls of ‘rip-rap’ (concrete boulders) terminatingabout two miles out into the South Atlantic. Gone is our steep, jungle-covered, mountainous coast. We are now in the land of shallow looping rivers, county-sized lagoons, mangroves and flat, very, very flat.
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>> Rio Grande do Sol.
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>> To reach the Yacht Club of Rio Grande one must first punch 14 miles up-river, initially through a world of tankers, container ships, massive cranes, warehouses, giant oil tanksand all the gubbins of a huge commercial port. Once through this lot you gain the lagoon and the commercial stuff gives way to the fishing harbour and their own specific needs. One of these being provided perhaps by ‘Sauna 29’. A business contained within a gaily-painted building right on the harbour side, its logo nicely picked out in pink and red.
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>> The Yacht Club of Rio Grande is a truly a grand affair. It’s possessed of a marina, a two-story club house, a football pitch, a swimming pool, boatyard, two tennis courts and a lawned area with little buildings, each with a barbeque and picnic table.
>> There are parakeets in the trees. There are humming birds, jacamars, thrushes, kingfishers and Gawd knows what other species of brightly coloured, tropical birds hopping about hither and yon. Out on the water are huge storks and herons and egrets. There’s an island opposite with a jetty made up of roughly 400 closely-placed piles. On each perches a cormorant, nattering away to its neighbour (I would imagineabout fishing).
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>> Outside the marina, in the main lagoon, the club also owns a decent timber-built hammerhead jetty and to this we gratefully attach ourselves for the duration.
>> Of course, being Brazil, one’s first task is to ‘clear in’.
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>> The Port Captain’s gaff– a smart, modern, two-story with lawn and flag pole – is situated about as far away from the Yacht Club as it’s possible to get and still be technically within the precinct of the port. A longish walk in this still-tropical heat.
>> WALK! Hell No! Within our Essential Items is a folding bike:-
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>> If you took a wire coat hanger, reformed it into an A-frameshape, stuck teeny-tiny wheels at two of the corners, placed handle bars on the apex and fixed an uncomfortable saddle about two-thirds up one of the uprights, you’d have something which, in itself, of course, would be utterly useless, but would achieve an at least passing resemblance to our folding bike.
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>> The streets of Rio Grande are, for the most part, laid to rough cobbles. For a folding bike with little wheels, this surfaceoffers a sort of horrible violent, jarring vibro-massage for the groin and associated areas. I bounced and groaned across to the far side of town.
>> Once inside the air-conditioned offices of the Port Captain – and having managed to utter ‘mucho disculpe’ to the offended, flap-of-holster-fumbling, guardian-of-the-front-door, armed-midshipman- I’d unwittingly marched past– allwas quiet, cool efficiency. Papers checked, shuffled, copied, stamped. And I was shot out into the heat and light and jolting along back to the YC.
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>> Near the old market I came level with a man of similar age also juddering along on a push-bike and elbow-to-elbow wejerked and bounced along – a companionable twosome unitedby common suffering. After a bit, a sort of conversation broke out. Him in Portuguese (I think). Me in apologetic English. For all I know it might have gone something like this: -
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>> Him: ‘What the hell’s that you’ve got there?’
>> Me: ‘These cobbles are bloody hard-going, aren’t they?’
>> Him: ‘It looks like a fucking coat hanger.’
>> Me: ‘Why don’t the council tarmac this road?’
>> Him: ‘Those little wheels must be crap on these cobbles’.
>> Me: ‘You going far – we just came by sea from England’.
>> Him: ‘If your crotch gets sore you want to try Sauna 29’.
>> And thus we parted with expressions of mutual esteem.
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>> The town itself is a pretty scruffy ex-colonial, jumble of old-and-decrepit and old-and-falling-down. The one or two new buildings (mostly government departments) stand out like, well, like new buildings rising out of a bit of a bomb-site. And yet, you know, I liked the place. Stupidly maybe, I felt relaxed here. Not looking around to spot the nearest mugger.Not worried about which pocket my wallet was in.
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>> 19th January
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>> Once again, this gypsy life has caught up with us and with one or two deadlines approaching we need to push off south.
>> 1600. We slip our lines and with a decent NE 4 on the go we hoof it off down the channel and out into the oggin. This is to be a two-night passage (in that, if our sums are right, we’ll arrive sometime during the second night) to La Paloma in The Oriental Republic of Uruguay. The Logbook, noting, ‘Motorsailing’, ‘wing & wing’, ‘motor-sailing’, ‘back to wing and wing’ reveals the playful nature of the breeze on this passage. No drama, you might think, but each evolution involvessetting up, or taking down, a 20’ pole, with its associated bits of string, on a boat that rolling along in the S Atlantic swell.Night and day.
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>> 21st January.
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>> La Paloma is a fishing port, basic marina and a busy, heaving holiday town. Having managed, in the pitch black, to negotiate the dogleg turn at the entrance, we entered the harbour at 0130 and, despite the hour, there were harbour officials ready to take our lines and indicate with a nice shrug that as far as the paperwork was concerned, manana would dovery well.
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>> Morning.
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>> Ashore to ‘clear-in’ to Uruguay. La Paloma, as it turns out, is indeed La Paloma the fishing port, La Paloma the marina and La Paloma the holiday town. It is NOT, we find, La Paloma the Port of Entry. In practice this means that whilst the boat has been ‘cleared in’ her crew has not. The authorities suggest that all is well but, for the duration of our visit, we should perhaps confine ourselves to the boundaries of the port.
>> Hmm. Well, what would Drake have done? Or Nelson? On Cavendish? The hell with it, we march into the town (not march ON the town like these other fellas) and wonder through the holiday throng in search of drinks and supper.
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>> From La Paloma to Punta del Este is a passage of a mere 40-odd miles but it’s also a voyage from Grimsby to Cannes. Punta del Este is the Uruguay’s answer to Cannes, Cowes and the Costa smeralda combined. It’s a holiday town for the smart set from Argentina and Uruguay. And a cruise ship destination. And thus it’s not cheap. One night out on a mooring and one in the marina chewed a big hole out of two-hundred sovs and, looking back, the marina wasn’t much. You’re allocated a berth – in our case one where the gap between the neighbours was roughly five thou wider than DDL’s, four-metre beam – and as you nudge in you must hook up a stern buoy (which has no pick-up line).
>> Once secured you might go ashore to use the toilet. Now I can live happily with the principal of ‘taking your own soap’. I’m even entirely unrattled with ‘taking your own paper’, but, bloody hell, ‘take your own seat’? In this pretentious, expensive, posh place that seems a little crap.
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>> Fish Market. One rather nice feature is that within the marina here there’s a fish market and four or five resident, and sleekly well-fed, sealions fight over the scraps that the fish mongers fling into the water.
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>> Tuesday 24th January
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>> One thing has become increasingly apparent as we transit this coast: the Uruguayan authorities are more than keen to keep an eye on our progress. Whether this is because we’re ‘foreign flagged’ or that they’re disposed to be generally either noseyor watchful, I know not, but for the short, afternoon passage to Piriapolis the radio traffic would do justice to the movement of a decent-sized battle squadron: -
>> 1. Call Prefecturer (Navy) to announce departure from berth. Get approval.
>> 2. 25 minutes later. Call to advise that we’re anchoringoff Punta del Este for lunch and give lat and long co-ordinates. Get acknowledgment.
>> 3. Call to announce departure from anchorage, again quoting lat and long and ETA in Piriapolis (next port). We agree to call them on passage as we cross a given line of longitude.
>> 4. Duly call Punta del Este from specified longitude (no response).
>> 5. Respond to call from Piriapolis requesting an update.
>> 6. Call Piriapolis to announce 30 mins from arrival.
>> 7. Call Piriapolis to announce arrival.
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>> One could be forgiven for assuming that none of this is really ‘joined up’ and at the end of the day any paperwork generated would be consigned to the big round file. But that would be doing the Uruguayans an injustice. Piriapolis had been notified of our arrival by Punta del Este and called Punta del Este to confirm our safe arrival. Our details – boat dimensions etc – had also been forwarded by email so the entry form had been largely completed. For one who sails around Europe and the N. Atlantic with absolutely no thought to calling in, it’s a bit of a culture change. That’s all though, just a culture change. It’s their country, after all.
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>> Looking down from space one might judge that we are now navigating, if not the river itself, the estuary of the Rio de la Plata. At this point it’s a 120 miles across, brown, shallow, prone-to-violence stretch of water and has a bit of a name for sudden turns in the weather. Some of these turns are called Pamperos. (Essentially an active cold front gets all hot andbothered as it troops across the Pampas and comes hammering down at you like the Cornish Express.)
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>> Our baptism of fire occurs almost straight away. We securedwith the now ubiquitous ‘bows to’ arrangement, and are just sitting down round the cockpit table to a nice fish supperwhen WHAM! No warning, not even a drop in pressure. Yes, a bit of lightning to the north and to the south but Gordon Bennet, this thing really does come in like a train. In an instant, there’s 40 knots of wind across the boat. This has a number of immediate consequences: -
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>> 1. Our dinners are jet blasted from the plates and the neighbouring, downwind, vessel receives a fullbroadside of fish and veg.
>> 2. We are driven hard forwards on to the jetty (the stern lines stretching out like guitar strings – and immovable). The only way out of this is to fire up the donk and engage reverse which relieves the pressure until it all moderates a bit. The doingsrecords the thing peaking at 53 knots.
>> 3. For about an hour and a half, we’re faffing about in the wind and rain, tending the lines. By bedtime it’sdown to 10 knots and all is quiet and calm.
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>> Piriapolis is a holiday town, and not, on the face of it, on a different street to Torquay. There’s the beach with laid-out deckchairs. There’s the promenade, palm trees and a large 1920s hotel (slightly crumbling). There’s the souvenir shops, fast food joints, cheap clothes shops, restaurants and bars. And a couple of blocks back from the beach, there begins a matrix of small, well-set-back bungalows spreading up and out into the countryside beyond.
>> We discovered much of this hinterland on one of our recurrent ‘Gas walks’. ‘Shall I get the wheels?’ I ask the crew. ‘Nah, it’s just round the corner’. Of course it wasn’t ‘just round the corner’. It was five blocks across and seven blocks back. You soon get to know how a milk maid would have felt carrying just one churn. No yoke!
>> Where we might differ from Torquay is that onto a timber ledge (part of the jetty we’re moored off) a whacking great sealion has managed to heave itself for a spot of sunbathing. You can hear its snores from inside the boat.
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>> As one cruises westwards along the Uruguayan coast one is increasingly sailing through the tea-with-milk-coloured waters of the Rio del Plata. It must have broken old what’s-his-name’s heart to watch his beautiful Graff Spey slide under into this turbid water. Gone, like a memory, are the gorgeously clear waters of the Baia da Ilha Grande. And gone, too are the tucked-away little tropical anchorages. Here, any refuge is man-made and signposted by thesprouting of high rise apartment and office blocks.
>> Bucao (Montevideo) was pretty typical and once you thread your way into the Yacht Club marina you find yourself in a city, with all the city noises and smells just a coiled rope throw away.
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>> Kate left us at Buceo. She had been such a stalwart, we’ll miss her very much. A very good crew and good egg. We wish her well.
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>> Just a word on the marina here. A marinho will come out in his boat to greet and natter about depth and so on. The depth is a real concern and its worth ensuring that your draft is understood. We entered at high water and as we headed through the area of laid moorings we had less that a metre below the keel. By the time we’d tied up – the ubiquitous‘bows-to’ arrangement – we were showing zero. I checked again at LW. ‘ -0.6 metres’. Either there’s soft mud hereabouts or a bloody great hole where the keel goes.
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>> The tides and currents down here take a bit of understanding and I, for one, will not pretend to comprehend them. On the one hand you have one of the world’s largest rivers pouring out into the south Atlantic. On the other you might have rains far inland, winds blowing the water around, low or high pressure and the normal interplay with the moon’s gravity, hauling the seas up and then, like a breath, letting them go. To add further angst, depths outside the dredged channels are on the marginal side of not-very-much, and as there was a certain amount of nastiness here between the Spanish (who had the gold) and the English (who wanted it), the whole place is littered with ancient wrecks. With your starting point in the less than 5 metre range, an odd bit of galleon sticking up from the fundus might be a cause of concern.
>> (Date)
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>> Our departure from Bucao (Montevideo) highlighted the odd-to-us local conditions. We’d cleared the marina and made sail. The boat was pointing pretty much west. The little boat on the plotter-gizmo thingy was irresolutely pointing due east. I’m ashamed to admit that it took me some time to infer from this that the indicated 2.5 knots over the ground was not Velocity-Made-Good (i.e. towards whence we would go) but, the truth was, we were being swept backwards out into the S. Atlantic, next stop Africa. An hour or so later and all was well, the current has released us and, reassuringly, the plotter confirmed that our progress was actually in the direction we were pointing.
>> Anyway, we’re heading for what, we’re promised, is a little gem – the grandly named Colonia del Sacramento – apparently where Argentinians go for their holidays and if its right for 100-odd million Argentinians it’s probably OK for the four of us.
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>> More very soon, I'm afraid.
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>> Love,
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>> The Skipper
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>> Sent from my iPad
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