Start of Leg 2 - Cape Verde to St Lucia (15th Nov)
Surfinncrew
Wed 15 Nov 2017 19:49
16.55.790N 25.41.935W Here we go!  Our time in Mindelo has come to an end. We have all enjoyed our time here exploring the bars and the streets. We did a tour of the island on Monday, there wasn’t a lot to see. The entire island is made of rock, with no natural water supply. Most of the roads are made of cobblestones and the buses do not have the best suspension, so it was a very bumpy ride! We could tell the island had limited sights to see when the tour bus stopped at a lettuce patch for 20 mins as a photo opportunity! The locals have been incredibly kind and introduced us to their local rum, it is pretty lethal, 50% alcohol (and thats just what the label said). It smelt and tasted like rocket fuel.. naturally we have loaded a few bottles of this onto the boat for our halfway party! The ARC threw a party to announce the results of leg 1, unfortunately we did not win any awards! . Not surprising given we motored for a couple of days. Quite a few boats continued trying to sail in the low winds and arrived a few days after us in Mindelo. One boat only used their motors for 4 minutes! There was a bit of controversy surrounding the results for the multihull division. We missed witnessing the argument at the party as we all left early to go get some pizza. The results have been postponed until the ARC can recalculate the winners… we aren’t holding our breaths.  We have been very busy in Mindelo restocking the boat with fruit and veggies. Scott, Stevie, Chad and Martika spent the morning on Tuesday visiting the fruit markets. The markets are completely packed with veggies, finding fruit is a little bit harder. Most of the fruit only grows on the neighbouring islands so it is harder for the locals to source. In the end we found a fruit store in a different part of the island to restock our apples and oranges. John and Russell remained on the boat preparing for the sail.  Wednesday morning started out in a blur, with Russell and Martika going to the bakery while John, Chad, Stevie and Scotty prepared the code zero sail. Then Chad, Stevie and Martika did a final shop for some basics and some fruit. Scotty went and collected pizza from our favourite little restaurant so we have a prepared dinner for our first night at sea. We will be heating these up - we all can’t wait. They are some of the best pizza’s we have ever had! Leg 2 started at 12:45 today, we were more prepared this time around. We left the dock with 1 hour to spare and as soon as we got out into the bay we put our main sail up. We crossed the start line with the other catamarans. It was a slow start with minimal winds due to the other islands blocking the wind. As soon as we were out of the islands shadow the wind speed jumped back up. We are now kicking ass down wind with our code zero and main sail up. Beautiful! We are now doing 9 - 10 Knots under full sail. We had some Dolphins come to visit our boat this afternoon, amazing watching them jump out of the water at full speed to reach out boat. We have a fantastic video! I doubt we will get sick of seeing dolphins.    As night falls we can still see a few boats around us, most of them are heading further south than we are. Hopefully we will be able to keep track of a few of them for the next few days. Its quite fun (and comforting) to see another boat doing a similar route to you. Makes us all a little bit more competitive in the non race! |