Mindelo, Cape Verde Islands
Sweet Dreams
Roz Preston /Ed Phillips
Mon 14 Nov 2022 22:33
This is the scene on the pontoon this afternoon, 2 days after our arrival in the Cape Verde Islands on Saturday. We crossed the finish line at 1346, a full 24 hours ahead of our passage plan time, so despite light winds on Saturday morning forcing us to switch on the engine for an hour, we made great time for the boat rated third from the bottom of the fleet!
The atmosphere is great, a much enhanced sense of camaraderie as we all share our stories of the crossing. Ours was actually quite uneventful, we set the headsails on Sunday, gybed on Tuesday and managed a couple of hours flying the asymetric on Saturday, so we just set a course and stuck with it, while other nippier boats tried out different courses and sail configurations to optimise their time. It will be interesting to see the actual results with time adjusted.
There is a floating bar at the inside end of the marina. We went for a celebratory drink at about 1600 hours on Saturday and what with one thing and another, didn’t leave until midnight. So much for my alcohol free week. I was just saving up for a Saturday night binge! Sunday I felt slightly delicate to say the least. However I still very much enjoyed the Arc+ ladies group meet up on board Earandel, which was rather more sedate and wine rather than beer fuelled. There was singing and dancing and lots of lovely female support for those of us who are the only women on board boats with otherwise all male crews. Good to remember how to be a girl sometimes!
Mindelo is a fascinating mix of Africa and the remnants of Portuguese colonisation. It’s a busy town, but poverty is very obviously a fact of life here. Tomorrow we are hiring a couple of quad bikes to explore the island, maybe we will see the turtles in a bay to the south and hopefully find out why an archipelago of bare rocks sticking up in the Eastern Atlantic were ever described as green. They look pretty brownish grey to me.
Just waiting for the laundry to come back now. A lovely person took it away this morning to be returned washed, dried and folded for a princely 2 euros a kilo! It saves us the embarrassment of hanging our smalls in the rigging.
That’s all for the next couple of days.
Sweet Dreams out.
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