Crossing the Atlantic Ocean (Day 1) Christmas Eve

Using the SSB radio and Pactor modem we sent a daily update message during our Atlantic crossing. Charlotte received our message which she then forwarded on to family and friends. The edited versions of those messages home, now with pictures added, make up the next few blog entries.

Christmas Eve was our last day in Mindelo on Ilha de São Vicente in the Cape Verde Islands. Before Mindelo shut down for Christmas we had arranged for our passports to be stamped by Immigration and visited the Port Police to get our papers back, including a departure certificate which we would need when we checked into our first island in the Caribbean. That left just a few things outstanding on BV before we could leave. Surprisingly, therefore, it turned out to be a busy and somewhat frustrating last day in Mindelo.

We had never intended to leave first thing in the morning and, in fact, we actually got the anchor up at about the time that we had hoped to (1400 Cape Verde time, one hour behind UTC). However, in many respects the morning’s activities did not go to plan. Nicky headed off at about 0930 to do a final rubbish run and a last food shop (some frozen chicken and more fresh veg), more to use up our remaining Cape Verde currency which can only be exchanged in the islands than because we needed more food.

Meanwhile I stayed on board BV to wash off some of the thick encrustation of African red dust that had been brought in during the last few days of the strong harmattan wind and then to rig our ‘tradewinds weapon’. Task one went well until I discovered that a fair proportion of the tens of buckets of water that I had thrown over the deck had found their way down below through a couple of hatches that I had thought were tightly closed down but were, in fact, open a crack in ‘ventilate’ mode. After a number of choice swearwords and much mopping up, I was then able to move onto Task 2 – the ‘tradewinds weapon’. This is a double genoa, sewn together at the luff, which we planned to set in place of our normal genoa. Using the spinnaker pole on one side and the main boom on the other the 2 sails would be spread ‘wing on wing’ downwind and there would be no need to use the mainsail, so preventing the latter from chafing on the shrouds and spreaders for 15 or so days. We’d had to get the luff rope on the double genoa replaced and had specified the correct size to fit our forestay luff foil. But, yes, you’ve guessed it, we hadn’t checked the fit before now and, of course, it didn’t fit. More choice swearwords! It’s ironic really. We had intended to hoist the ‘new’ sail (it’s not new, just new to us) when we were in Las Palmas, prior to sailing to the Cape Verde Islands but we hadn’t because the wind was so strong for so long when we were in the marina, coupled with the fact that the forecast was for quite beamy winds, not fully downwind sailing. Of course, had we tried the sail in Las Palmas we would have been in a position to have the luff rope changed again for the correct size. But instead, having discovered the problem in Mindelo at the last minute, the only thing to do was to repack the sail, dig out the normal genoa again and re-hoist that. A slightly slower evolution than it might seem from the short sentence that I have just written. So, with the enforced return to a standard mainsail and genoa rig for the passage, we needed to apply additional anti-chafe patches to the new mainsail. The last thing that we wanted was to wear holes in the new sail less than 6 months after buying it.

Leaving Mindelo    

One of the other yachts that left Mindelo with us,
 just visible in the haze    

So, with all that, and saying goodbye to friends we had made in Mindelo, I think we did quite well to leave approximately to our intended schedule (albeit without lunch). It had been blowing hard for the past several days and the passage between Ilha de São Vicente and the nearby São Antao is notorious for wind acceleration, so we took it cautiously and hoisted the main with 3 reefs and used the genoa as the throttle. There was quite a lot of wind (20-24 knots) but not as much as we had feared. But the visibility was atrocious – less than 2 nm – thank goodness for GPS and AIS! We only properly saw one of the other 3 yachts that left as about the same time as us.

Cape Verdes courtesy ensign and BV covered in red African dust    

We hit an area of calm (calm? What’s that all about?) 8nm off São Antao, which was clearly wind shadow from the mountains on the island, so we motored for a short while until we picked up the wind again. At that point the wind seemed to have settled into the traditional trade winds direction (NE to E) and there was a little, but not too much, swell. We hoped that by morning we would be far enough away from Africa to have lost the poor visibility caused by the dust in the air. However, our pilot book suggested that we could expect to find reduced visibility due to dust up to 600nm from the mainland coast.

Position at 0001 Mon 25 Dec: N16 53 W026 06
Distance run 1355-2359 (11hr05 as we put the clock back one hour to correct the local time to our longitude): 65.6nm
Distance to waypoint (just N of Barbados): 1951nm

End of Day 1 position