Dat 20 - Salvadour - Bahia

Jacana
David Munro
Sat 31 Jan 2009 01:39
I have little to report with regard to Jacana &
sailing as she was tied to the dock ("Mediteranean style") from 1.30am this
morning, we arrived middle of the remaining fleet and the remainder of the IRS
& cruising boats have been drifting in during the afternoon. The
results havn't been published yet, there is a prize giving on sunday evening
when no doubt they will be announced. Off the record we think we finished 5th in
the fleet and 6th on corrected from 11 starters.
The day started earlier than expected as we
miscalculated the times in Brazil, they are actually 5 hours ahead of Cape Town
time, not 4 as previously advertised! We were therefore up at 7am and not 8am as
we thought, we didn't realise our mistake until late in the afternoon when we
were racing around in a taxi trying to get somewhere before six, for
reasons I'll explain later. We spent the morning sorting the boat out, taking
the boom off and making drawings for the locals to manufacture a new pin to hold
it on the mast. The sails were folded and bagged and the decks scrubbed of two
weeks worth of spilt coffee & tea and dinner.
Our next job was to forage in the town for an ATM
machine , find a travel agent and to get our bearings. Salvadour is not like
Lymington, it is probably as large as Cape Town and consists of tall concrete
buildings of various ages. The dominating influence is Portugese, there is no
English spoken anywhere so we have been speaking to everyone very loudly and
very slowly in English so that they could understand us. The over riding initial
impression of the place is that it could do with a lick of paint and some
attention is required to the drainage system, there is a constant smell of
sewerage that lingers in the air in the morning and evening before the sea and
land breezes kick in respectively. The marina bar/restaurant has been taken over
and become the un-official club house, plenty of cold drinks and good food after
the passage.
After 24 hours, as suspected Chris has not yet
ventured off the boat - we are trying to slowly rehabilitate him to the real
world but it may take a few days, meanwhile the delivery skipper for the boat
back to Cape Town has arrived and seems a very pleasant guy, David and he have
already started the process of going through everything on board. The fact that
Rob the delivery guy has turned up early meant that we could leave Salvadour a
little earlier than anticipated allowing us to spend an extra 24 hours
in Rio - god knows what we will be able to do with the time at this time of
year? As a result in the change of our plans, we had to alter flights and
decided to find a travel agent who could organise this for us.
After a walk through the local area, an agency was
found - David went inside to do the busines whilst Paul & John took up
position outside, arms crossed, sunglasses on - people watching. They were
mistaken as David's minders, as a result everyone were very helpful in the
agency and fell over backward to help David. The result was that they couldn't
alter the flights but they knew a man who could down town - we jumped in a taxi
and sped off having thrust the address under the taxi driver's nose. Needless to
say after cruising up and down a particular part of town, the address didn't
exist so the driver took us to another travel agent 10 minutes away. They too
couldn't help us but knew a man who could some 30 minutes away - once again we
leapt back into heavy traffic and were rewarded with an impromtu tour of the
suburbs of Salvadour. We arrived at another agency and everything seemed to be
going well until it was decided after much deliberation that they too could not
alter the flights but if we went to the airport, the flights could be altered
there - we gave up!! We had been in the taxi an hour and a half and had lost
faith in the Brazilian positive attitude towards everything. We asked the driver
to take us back to the marina, after 30 minutes more he pulled up outside "The
Marina Hotel" which was nowhere near the marina and on it went. We eventually
made our way back to the marina, handed over a month's salary to the taxi driver
and went back to the boat. David decided to call the number on the "E-ticket"
and 5 minutes later the flights had been altered, I am sure there is a lesson to
be learnt in all of this.
No pictures today, the cameras were left on the
boat for security reasons - more on this tomorrow.
Crew of Jacana.
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