ENGLISH POST NR° 6

Florian  14.11.2013 – 17.01.2014

Its been a while.

We had a great time on the Cape Verdes. San Nicolau was much more basic than Sal – less tourists – less „tourist industry“. The boat kids where happy with 50 cent, whereas on Sal the „charged“ 1 CVE (Cape Verde Escudo).  On San Nicolau we anchored in Port Taraffal – the „busy“ town of San Nicolau  - it was very relaxing. Friendly people, decent food, good anchorage. After three days we sailed over to San Vicente/Mindelo the economic capital of the Cape Verdes. Mindelo was completely different from what we had seen on the Cape Verdes so far. The biggest difference where paved roads, real supermarkets – a real city; Mindelo has approx. 60.000 people.

My parents came for a visit and it was a very, very nice time for us. The highlight was a visit to Santo Antao – the island just north of Mindelo. Contrary to the other islands of the Cape Verdes we had seen so far Santo Antao had some really tropical areas. We hiked the greenest valley – Valle do Paul – up, through some amazing landscape. The green was new to us.

After almost 2 weeks with my parents we got ready to leave Mindelo and sail across the Atlantic. We were very anxious to leave, afraid, sad to leave the beloved ones. So on December 6th we hughed my parents good buy, sailed out the safe harbour of Mindelo and headed west – 2100 miles of open water ahead of us – we headed for Tobago.

We shifted to transit mode. Night watches, everything tied up on board. The first two days went fine, then the wind quit and we had three days of hardly any wind. After that the wind came back – stronger than we liked. And with the wind came high waves – unfortunately from all sides. When we were about one week out – 1400 miles to Tobago – our autopilot striked due to strong winds and big waves. I tried to repair our autopilot for three days and also our second autopilot had problems keeping on course. Many times we had to get up in the middle of the night, because the autopilot was completely off course.

We were afraid that we would have to steer the boat by hand. A terrifying idea that laid heavy on our minds – we counted down the miles. Since the autopilot could not keep the course we wanted to go, we tested what course the autopilot could go – and that was Barbados. So we changed our plans – plus Barbados was the easternmost island – a pleasant thought to have less miles.

After 16 days on December 23rd, Martina finally screamed at 4 in the morning  „LAAAAAANNNNNNDDDD“ – she had discovered the lights of Barbados. At sunrise we passed the northern tip of Barbados. It was an undescribable feeling to stand on land again at Port St. Charles where we cleared in. It was a very difficult time for us and we didn´t like the crossing, but we made it and we had crossed the Atlantic – we were very proud of us!

We anchored in Carlisle Bay next to the capital bridge town and hit the full christmas atmosphere – from open Atlantic to Christmas, big difference. Our friends from Austria Dorrit and Horst spend their vacation on Barbados and celebrated Christmas evening with us on board. Silent night at sea in warm weather – very strange; I have never had warm Christmas ever before.

We hooked up with the Barbados Yacht Club – they were extremely nice and helpfull. So we also celebrated New Years at their club facilities. It was hard to stay up until midnight – we are used to live with the sun – but somehow we managed to stay awake and so we entered a new year – 2014!

Our friends had brought us a new autopilot from Austria – an Autohelm 2000+. And of course it did not fit in the place of the old one. When you are a sailor nothing workes out easy. We built an adapter fort he new autopilot drilling holes through stainless steel, grind threads, extend the power cable – four days of work.

Our friends left on January the 6th – ist always hard for us to say good bye to friends, especially from home. And then it was also time for us to leave. Making plans fort he Caribbean we decided that there was to much to see in to little time. So instead of going to Tobago as we planned we aimed for Grenada. On January the 9th we left Barbados – back to shaky sailing, strong winds, squalls, the autopilot needed quite some assistance in squalls but handled the crossing o.k.. After one night and hardly any sleep and 144 miles we tied up in the Le Phare Bleu Marina in Grenada.

We had reached Grenada just in time to celebrate Martinas 50th birthday on Jan. 11th. We had a fancy dinner at the fabulous restaurant of Le Phare Bleu – on an old Swedish fire ship. The food was delightfull, we had the only table on the open terrace. But the absolute highlight was a birthday song the owner of the marina performed with an excellent singer – Sabrina Francis. After their performance they told us this was the surprise of Philipp from Switzerland, a follower of our blogg. Martina was in tears when she heard that – it was simply incredible.

Our wind transmitter had stopped its duty as soon as we had touched Barbados. So we are right now waiting for a new exchange transmitter that hopefully is willing to work again. We do lots of repairs on board – things that had given up on the Atlantic crossing. We will be a few weeks here on Grenada, but we like the island a lot. Nice people, Caribbean as we imagined it, tropical vegetation, warm blue water – its wonderfull. Finally we are really in the Caribbean!!