Porto da Palmeria, Sal Cape Verde

After nearly a week at sea, a full night's sleep without the boat doing the shake rattle and roll was a luxury but it was interrupted in the early hours by the most incredible din coming from what sounded like 30 locals jammed into our cockpit holding very lively conversations. I was too lazy to investigate but now wished that I had.

After a leisurely cooked breakfast by yours truly...

and general slobbing around and catching up on our comms via Starlink, we finally got the dinghy inflated and went ashore.

A "boat boy" minded our dinghy and deposited our rubbish for the princely sum of 1€. I thought the place was OK even if "charming" might be a slight exaggeration.

The Mate however continued to be unimpressed, although he did have the good grace to row back on his previous description of "shit hole". His negative outlook was partly informed by the fact that we had arrived in the Cape Verde with no valid currency (actually Mick had 10 € and I had 2€) and it appeared that we had arrived in a cash only economy. Also bothering him was the fact the wound to his foot first sustained in Las Palmas, had, after a long period of dormancy, reared its ugly head (or should that be foot) again. He was as a consequence rather preoccupied by the potential consequences of this development and was clearly in no mood to appreciate the unique charms of Porto Palmeira.

Our first job on landing was to check in with the immigration authorities. Following the guidelines provided in our 10 year old pilot and by Noonsite (a global yachty website) we repaired to the Port Captain's office to check in. He shook his head pleasantly and walked us round to the local police station and explained we needed to check in there once it had re-opened. He couldn't say that would be though!

We therefore found a local bar and burned €3 of our €12 on two small beers. Originally we thought it was €3 each and were very relieved to discover our mistake.

After further verbal faffing over our plans, we resolved nothing other than to try and check in. By this time the Police Station was open and despite initial confusion about which of the two officials we should talk to we completed our check-in painlessly enough - with only one one page form having to be completed. Unlike 10 years ago, they were now operating a one stop shop for checking in which was a great relief to us. The only downside being they hold on to our ships registration document until we leave and check out.

After a walk around the locale we headed back to the boat. A British flagged Wharram Catamaran was nearby and we considered stopping for a chat but no one was home. Also nearby was an Irish registered boat of similar vintage and type to Bonny. She turned out to be a Nicholson 32 and was 10 years older than Bonny!

Just after we got back to Bonny the crew of the Wharram Cat got back so we went over to say hello.

Alexi a Frenchman and Charlie a Brit, were probably in their 30s and were a fascinating couple. He is a professional diver and she a Marine Biologist (and freediver in her spare time). They were out diving as we made our approach yesterday and said Bonny made a wonderful sight.

Their boat is their home and they work as they travel; running diving courses and undertaking marine biology research wiith the local communities they visit. 

Just as fascinating is the story of their wonderful Wharram Catermeran - 'Ferrel'. They found her wrecked and abandoned on a beach in the Algarve a couple of years ago, rescued her and now are sailing her wherever their fancy takes them. They plan to visit West Africa next before heading for Brazil next May.

Shane from the Nic 32, a wonderfully laid back west coast Irishman from County Mayo, is single handing and has spent the last year or so around the Canaries and the Cape Verde, having left Ireland three years ago. He may cross the pond in January after flying home to attend to his business (I didn't find out what that was).

We have now made up our minds and will head for Mindelo tomorrow - about a 24 hour passage.

Day 6, 26-27/11& arrival at Porto da Palmeira, Sal, Cape Verde.

After a good day of solar charging we tried Starlink again. As before it took a long time - an hour plus to connect and also as has been the case since the passage from Pasito Blanco to San Sebastian the dish has not re-orientated itself in search of Satellites. It rather looks like there is a communication problem between the router and the dish. The connections are known to be fiddly but we have double checked them and they seem OK. Also, the dish does try to make a connection with the satellite network, which eventually, it does and updates on its progress are received on the App and so there must be some communication between the router and the dish. My best guess now is that the software update that automatically kicked in during the Pasito Blanco/San Sebastian passage may be the cause of the problem. Once we get a stable connection (both in a physical sense and therefore a comms sense) I'll try a factory reset of the system.

Back to the solar charging topic. I awoke from my morning snooze to discover that Mick had been checking the performance of the solar panels and had discovered somewhat surprisingly that our new panel is not performing as well as the old ones which we suspected were knackered! We have also decided that we need to relocate our two side panels further forward because they get easily shaded by the top panel. That's probably a job to do in Mindelo because we may need to buy some extra bits.

The factory reset to Starlink was not required. The dish re-orientated itself on its own. Presumably the much more stable platform we are enjoying at anchor is the reason.

From a home/family/friends perspective, I've really picked the wrong year to do this trip. I'll miss Daniel's funeral, Anna my Step Mum is not well, Sharon's been left with two domestic disasters to manage - the failure of the underfloor heating pump - now fixed thanks to Neville and the leaking pipes in the shower room, which again thanks to Neville, are no longer leaking but the shower room is out of action until the tiles are reinstated. But what are the chances of finding the same tiles? I'll also miss a flying visit by my friend Tom and his wife Nina from the USA, which of course Sharon will have to host on her own. On that front though, there is at least a reasonable chance I'll be able to video call home on Tuesday when they and all the family will be together.

During the daylight hours of Monday 27/11, we continued to make good progress towards our now confirmed destination of Porto da Palmeira on the island of Sal. The winds cooperated beautifully allowing us to squeeze by the north west coast of the island ....

... without having to gybe and we arrived off the harbour entrance around 1615 GMT, and so we covered the 806 nautical mile passage (nm's over the ground) in 6 days and 2 hours; an average of 130 nautical miles a day and an average speed of 5.5 knots. We had quite a slow start which I guess explains why the exhilarating sailing of most of the last three quarters of the passage did not result in a higher average speed. 

Our Pilot Book (guide) describes the anchorage here as "somewhat bleak" a phrase that the Mate rather latched on to, indeed, he went further and described it as a "shit hole". Personally, I think that is rather over stating the case for the prosecution, especially given we haven't even got off the boat yet! I think it has a rather battered charm of its own.

We dropped anchor close by Aura who left San Sebastian two days before us. There was no one home at the time but Lasse and Birgitte arrived back a couple of hours later. It turned out that despite only arriving yesterday they were about to leave for Sao Nicolau about 80 miles to the west. Perhaps Porto da Palmeira is a bit of a "shit hole" after all! Mind you it was Lasse and Birgitte who had received and relayed to us, positive reports about Sal in the first place!

25-26/11/23

My turn to cook again - after yesterday's fried pork chops and roast potatoes, I did a sort of pork chop stew with the white new potatoes and a plantain with cabbage on the side. A little strange but quite tasty.

Sleep once again was difficult to come by; partly due to the boat's rolling (the wind is almost directly behind us along with the main swell, but with another from further west) but also because my diurnal rhythm refuses to adjust to life at sea. I find myself cat napping all too easily when I'm standing my watch but earlier in the night,  I'm just not tired enough to sleep whilst being shaked, rattled and rolled!

The gas cylinder ran out just after cooking dinner which was I suppose, pretty good timing but it means no hot drink for me whilst on watch - we had better wait for daylight and hopefully calmer conditions before changing it. Hopefully we can get it re-filled in Mindelo! I've been struggling to remember when the other cylinder ran out (which I got re-filled in Gran Canaria) - it may have been Porto Santo.

Up at 0130 on 26/1 to relieve Mick who reported spectacular surfing down the waves earlier in the night but that things had calmed down a bit now. We are still moving along at 5-6 knots however. If we keep this up we may make Sal tomorrow evening. We've been tracking a bit too far to the south for the last 24 hours and so will probably have to gybe later today (26/11) or tomorrow to make Sal. 

24-25/11/23

In an effort to reduce our power consumption we turned our attention to the two fridges. We have a small portable one that came with the boat that's capable of freezing stuff and another powered by a 12 v Isotherm compressor. In 2022 I bought the compressor and installed it and made and fitted an insulated box under the draining board in the void in which the boat's original door fridge was located. This box is getting on for twice the volume of the portable fridge but the compressor looks very similar to the one in the portable fridge (and draws the same 3-4 Amps) which Mick suspects, is also better insulated than my home made box, given its construction of plastic and injected foam for insulation. I have to confess to being a tad insulated at this assessment given the trouble I went to, to find and fit good quality insulation around the box

But there you go, he has a very annoying habit of being right in such technical matters. However, even if he is wrong, 'my' fridge compressor would have to work twice as hard as the portable fridge in order to cool down twice the volume.

Having bought 8 meals worth of fresh meat in San Sebastian and given the portable fridge was full of beer, we put the meat in the big fridge and turned the temperature down to achieve a challenging 3°C. The portable fridge meanwhile was still running at a pretty relaxed 6°. I suspect you can see where this is heading, but at the time we weren't focused on our electricity consumption. At anchor in Pasito Blanco with both fridges running at about 6°C, the batteries were fully replenished by around 1400 each day and that was before fitting the new solar panel on the sprayhood. Performance in the marina at San Sebastian wasn't so good but our panels were shaded in the afternoon by a sports fishing boat moored on the next finger pontoon. I rather carelessly assumed that once at sea away from obstructions we would load up the Amps. This, as mentioned in a previous post, turned out not to be the case.

Anyway, back to the relative power consumption of the fridges. After measuring how long the compressor for each one ran and rested for, we (Mick) calculated that the large fridge was consuming 1.5 Amps an hour and the portable one, 0.5. Therefore, every 24 hours the big fridge is burning through 36 Amp hours, as against the portable fridge's 12! That's a total of 48 Amp hours, which is exactly the Amp hours we generated yesterday. That's better than we were doing when we had the flexible panel fixed to the sprayhood but doesn't give us any extra Amps for powering the water maker, water heater or Starlink.

So, we decided to adopt the blindingly obvious course of action: move the meat into the small fridge and turn its temperature down to 3° and turn the temperature of the big fridge up (to around 10"C). Unfortunately, because the two fridges have very different temperature control systems the switch over consumed a lot of power. The portable one has a thermostatic temperature control which resulted in the compressor running continuously until it got down to temperature. I don't know how the big one works but it takes a long time to equate the fridge temperature with the control setting. This means that its on/off cycle rate only changes slowly in response to changes made to the control knob. As a consequence, for some hours the two fridges consumed even more electricity than before! The net result being that by the time there was enough light to start the charging process again, the batteries were down to 43% of their capacity compared with the previous morning's 48%!

In other news, the AIS's remarkable performance of a couple of days ago has ceased and the antenna is once again only picking up transmissions within about a 10 mile radius.

We're making good progress and have been storming along all night at 6+ knots and surfing down waves at 8 knots which produces a loud prop noise as it rotates. As of 0845 on the 25th we had 314 miles to run to Sal in the Cape Verde. Our most recent weather information indicates a few days of light winds will follow our arrival in the CV area and so we'll probably stop off there and visit both the island of Sal which is the closest to our present position and Mindelo on St Nicolao.

Further calculations on the electricity consumption of the big fridge at the higher temperature setting reveals we are saving 12 Amp hours a day but we stll need to work out how much more the portable fridge is now using!

Devastation

A new star shines brightly in the cosmos tonight, the 23rd of November 2023.

Devastating, but not unexpected news came through when we fired up our Starlink satellite connection on Thursday afternoon (24/11). The son of my best friend from University days, Daniel, died of bladder cancer after fighting it for 5 years or more. Daniel was a similar age to my boys - early 30s. Full of life, talented, gutsy, positive, friendly, determined... The list goes on, but the bloody cancer still got him. 

Absolute nightmare for Jerry. Makes bobbing around the Atlantic ocean seem a bit pointless in one way, but in another way perhaps not. As Daniel so aptly demonstrated, life is for living, we should all make the most of it while we can. 

Sharon, Stephen and I visited Daniel, Jerry and Daphne in September and even though there was then no doubt at all that he was dying, he was clearly determined to squeeze every possible ounce of living, out of the life he had left. Not a flicker of self pity crossed his face. He was just as  interested in us and the rest of our family as always. He continued to make the best of the time he had left, not just for himself but for us too. Somehow I knew that it wasn't dying that he feared, but the effect that would have on his Dad Wife and Mum.

I can only imagine what Jerry and Daniel's wife (he only got married in his last month or so) and the rest of the family are going through. 

Good bye Daniel, it was an honour to know you.

Day 2

Because the morning was mainly overcast and in the afternoon our solar panels were - thanks to our southerly course - shaded by the sails, we only got 10 Amp hours into the batteries leaving them at 67% by dusk. Given our current consumption they'll probably be down to 20% by the morning and so we'll either need a sunny day from the get go, or have to run the engine to charge them. Our weather forecast indicates the wind will drop right away tonight and so we'll wait to see what happens and start motoring if the wind does indeed fail. At 1900 we're still making 5 knots despite a drop off in the wind.

Mick's cooking tonight and it smells lovely! 

It was good - a sort of sweet and sour chicken curry served with potatoes and a can of beer. After dinner I went to bed and this time managed to get some sleep. 

We were cruising along at a gentle 3-4 knots roughly southwards and slowly converging with the African coast. Whilst this was not exactly a direct course for Barbados or even the Cape Verde, a large high pressure cell was situated to our west which we needed to skirt around in order to hold onto a breeze. During his watch, Mick had to head the boat further to the south east to achieve that. We were right on the edge of it and for a while our speed fell to 3 knots and I suspected we might lose the wind completely. However, soon after I took over the watch at 0200 we were once again up to 5 knots and so I eased the sheets and headed the boat west of south once again. In fact I steered as far off the wind as possible without blanketing the genoa with the mainsail. 

We could do with getting an updated weather forecast tomorrow to confirm what's going on, but I suspect that at some point during the day we'll get underneath the high pressure cell and be able to change to our trade wind rig of twin headsails and then head much further west.

For now (0330) we're gliding smoothly southwards on a flat sea under the stars. Perfect night sailing apart from the heavy dew making it uncomfortable to sit in the cockpit.

The only concern I have at present is over our power consumption. We're running one of our two fridges at around 3°C to ensure our fresh meat lasts, but it's eating the Amps up fast and we really need a sunny day tomorrow to replenish them otherwise we'll need to run the engine. Actually if we're going to fire up Starlink to get our weather forecast we'll probably have to anyway, A warm shower wouldn't go amiss either and we'll need to run the water maker come Saturday. We could do with a decent wind generator but they cost a lot of money. We removed the old one because the meagre amount of power it generated was more than offset by the effect of it shading the top solar panel.

The really big success of the passage to date is the new Hydrovane. Quite apart from the remote control lines making it so much easier to use than the old one - no more hanging off the back of the boat to adjust it - it steers the boat on a much straighter course and is much better at coping with changes in wind strength. The bigger rudder and vane are no doubt responsible for that. The big rudder also increases manouvrebility in confined spaces although two crew members are really needed to take full advantage of that.

I have to confess I had my doubts about incurring the additional cost of the big rudder and new larger vane, but I'm very glad I did. The crew at Hydrovane certainly know their stuff. If only there was an easy way to fit and remove the rudder on/off the back of a high sterned boat like Bonny, it would be perfect.

The very pleasant smooth night time sailing continued. Looking behind us to the north under the very clear sky, the plough stood out, standing upright on the end of its shaft - an orientation we're not at all used to in our home latitudes.

We continue to skirt the eastern fringe of the high pressure cell; when the boat speed drops off I head a little further East of south and when it picks up again I head a little further west. I hope this means we keep the breeze without going further East than needed.

A rather strange but welcome observation... the AIS antenna mounted quite low on the stern of the boat, is picking up transmissions from much further away than it used to - 100 miles plus compared with the 10 or so that we got previously. I assume this must be down to the atmospheric conditions. It will be interesting to see if this changes once again.

0550 on 23/11 and we're encountering significant phospheresence for the first time (that I've noticed). What look like large glowing globules about a foot in diameter appear in our wake as Bonny continues to glide seemingly effortlessly through the smooth sea at 5-6 knots under a gorgeous starlit sky.

By the time Mick got up at 0800 GMT, I was feeling peckish and so decided to cook breakfast of fried plantain, tomatoes and fried eggs. After that I took a nap. I woke up at 1100 with a minor brainwave for improving our solar charging.... make some changes to the flexible solar panel mounting (which is currently 'permanently'  fixed to the sprayhood with cable ties and flexed to its shape and therefore is never fully aligned to the sun) so that we can move it around and position it to always face the sun as its angle changes during the course of the day. This should be particularly advantageous on our current course southwards, when in the afternoon the panel is completely shaded by the sails and is therefore contributing nothing at all!

We experimented first by cutting the cable tie fastenings and wedged the panel in a more favourable position on the sprayhood and were rewarded with another 3-4 amps of input. Then Mick set to, to make up a pair of extension leads so that we could reposition the panel in different locations around the cabin top and side decks. Of course in more boisterous conditions than those currently experienced, it would be necessary to re-attach the panel securely on the sprayhood.

Well, it did increase the input from that panel, but now all our other panels are shaded by the sails and we are nowhere near to replenishing the Amps lost. We have therefore decided to run the engine for an hour or so. 

In the meantime, Mick has a splinter in his foot that will require some minor surgery!

Departure

post of our time in San Sebastian, only for the Keep on on my phone to go wonky and I have not yet been able to retrieve the text. Hopefully I will at some point.

Dawn was rather grey and the day has reamained rather overcast which is a bit of a shame because our batteries took something of a hammering overnight and could do with plenty of charging up. No Starlink, water heater, or water maker us today!

I came of watch at 0730 and tried once again to get some sleep but once again was only able to doze until 1100 when it was time to swap over with Mick once again. 

Once up, I took the opportunity to hang my wet bedding out to dry and tidied up the cabin which was a bit of a mess due to our rather rushed exit from the marina.

A rather annoying feature of the passage so far is the near constant VHF traffic. Lots of comms between the shore station on the island of El Hierro and various yachts and lots of inter-yacht traffic too. There have been a number of navigational warnings broadcast too, the details of which I have not been able to make out, but perhaps that is one reason for the frequent shore-station to yacht traffic. In addition over night there seemed to be quite a few drunken fishermen on the airways with all sorts of strange noises and music coming over the radio. This was something Tony and I experienced in April 2015 when crossing Biscay.

 

San Sebastian "Now and Then"

post of our time in San Sebastian, only for the Keep on on my phone to go wonky and I have not yet been able to retrieve the text. Hopefully I will at some point.

Dawn was rather grey and the day has reamained rather overcast which is a bit of a shame because our batteries took something of a hammering overnight and could do with plenty of charging up. No Starlink, water heater, or water maker us today!

I came of watch at 0730 and tried once again to get some sleep but once again was only able to doze until 1100 when it was time to swap over with Mick once again. 

Once up, I took the opportunity to hang my wet bedding out to dry and tidied up the cabin which was a bit of a mess due to our rather rushed exit from the marina.

A rather annoying feature of the passage so far is the near constant VHF traffic. Lots of comms between the shore station on the island of El Hierro and various yachts and lots of inter-yacht traffic too. There have been a number of navigational warnings broadcast too, the details of which I have not been able to make out, but perhaps that is one reason for the frequent shore-station to yacht traffic. In addition over night there seemed to be quite a few drunken fishermen on the airways with all sorts of strange noises and music coming over the radio. This was something Tony and I experienced in April 2015 when crossing Biscay.