Week 29: Cape Verde (0nm)

After a successful (if tiring) passage down from Lanzarote, Cape Verde provided a welcome point to pause, take stock and prepare for the real challenge to come. Around our preparations, we hiked up the island’s highest peak, explored the colourful town of Mindelo, and frequented the local Irish pub (mostly for the wifi, honest!). After an early Thanksgiving dinner celebration, we ran out of excuses not to leave, so finally cast our lines and headed west for the big Atlantic crossing.

Am I just tired or was there a lot of rum in that?

Having found ourselves a great spot in the anchorage at Mindelo, we set up the dinghy and I headed for land to complete check in formalities. This gave me my first taste of the colourful town as I had to walk down to the commercial harbour to do all our paperwork. Mindelo’s 70k or so inhabitants are sprawled over two bays. The land itself is mostly desert-like, but the buildings more than make up for the drab landscape – they are a riot of colours (not necessarily matching or complementary) from every end of the rainbow. The style of the buildings is old colonial; it felt like a lot remained the same from the time of Portuguese rule. But for the most part the buildings are well taken care of and freshly painted – the town didn’t feel shabby or poor in the way I thought it might given its remote location. There were sailors everywhere, but not that many other tourists as far as we could see. It seems like other visitors mostly stick to resorts. Overall, Mindelo had a busy, though laid back, and not overly touristy feel, which made for a nice atmosphere.

Check in formalities complete, the rest of the crew joined me ashore and we sought out a celebratory lunch and drinks. Cape Verde’s speciality is its own version of the caipirinha, in a variety of flavours. We’d heard Elvis’ was a good spot and headed there to try out this delicacy! We sampled lime, passion fruit,strawberry and kiwi versions, with varying results. The strength of the drinks was all over the shop, which made them at times barely palatable… But overall it was exactly what we needed to mark the achievement of this first leg of the journey (and wish Ballin a happy birthday!). After a bit of time catching up on our emails, we retreated to the boat for some serious napping. For this first passage leg we’d done joint night watches to help get Ballin and Katherine get used to how they work, which meant we were all a bit sleep deprived – so catching up on sleep was high on the agenda!

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“Ballin’s Gate”

Day two saw the crew feeling much rejuvenated and ready to be a bit more adventurous. Katherine had devised a fun game that would allow us to jointly celebrate Ballin’s birthday and also see some of the island, which was dubbed “Ballin’s Gate” (after Balder’s Gate, a video game that Ballin likes and had been playing during the passage). We started with a visit to a local abandoned fort, which, though in a state of disrepair, offered amazing views across both sides of Mindelo and especially the marina and anchorage (so many boats!). Next up, we set out for Mount Verde, the island’s highest peak. It was meant to be a beautiful hike up to the top, which sounded like exactly our cup of tea. We hailed a taxi in Mindelo, who (after much haggling on the price) dropped us off part way up the mountain. The road is also the hiking trail, so we just got out when there was a good turn around spot for the taxi. Hiking the rest of the way up took a good couple of hours, which was well worth the effort for the beautiful surroundings and exceptional views!

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As we ascended, the climate changed. The air became cooler and wetter, which was reflected around us by increasing amounts of vegetation. We discovered that the locals use this microclimate to their advantage – huge tracts of the mountainside had been converted into corn fields. Each side of the mountain that we traversed offered varying vistas: over the east side of Sao Vincente and out to the other islands of the archipelago, to the west and north over Mindelo and the island of Santo Antao, and, from the top, over the south side of the island with its tiny hamlets and resorts. We mostly had the place to ourselves but we saw a few other people. Most notable was a jeep of Dutch who were looking for baby aloe plants (which we learned fall off the old plant as individual bulbs), but also a surprising number of local teenagers.

After taking our time enjoying the views, we turned our thoughts to how to get back to Mindelo. There weren’t any taxis around, so we just started walking back down the mountain and figured one might come by at some point. The first car that came along was actually a pickup truck that a group of other tourists had rented. We waved them down and they agreed to let us ride in the bed of the truck down to the bottom of the mountain. What a ride!! It was a bit bumpy but a lot of fun :).

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They weren’t heading to Mindelo, so they dropped us off at the bottom of Mount Verde and we continued back towards town on foot. After maybe 30 minutes, an alugar (a local bus) happened by, which we hopped on to get the rest of the way. An adventurous morning indeed! We celebrated our success with lunch at a local yachtsmen’s restaurant, where we tried Cape Verde’s national dish (cachupa – a corn-based stew). Completely beat after such a big morning, it was then back to the boat for more naps and chilling.

Fact: everywhere has an Irish pub

That evening, Alec and I decided to go visit the local Irish pub, Simpatico, where we’d heard there was decent wifi. We just happened to arrive as the Ireland vs. New Zealand autumn international rugby game was kicking off, which of course they were showing on their big TV. It was very serendipitous! We got to chatting with a bunch of Irishmen from the ARC (the big sailing rally doing the crossing at the same time as us) who were also there watching the game and we had a ton of fun with them cheering against New Zealand and swapping stories about the trip down from the Canaries. Ireland won, and since its always exciting to see someone beat New Zealand it was a very good evening indeed!

The place did also have great wifi, which meant it would become a frequent stop for us over the remainder of our time in Cape Verde (partly also because they made a mean chicken wing). It was a good find, and definitely worthy of inclusion in Alec’s book. “Alec’s book?” you say? This is mostly a joke between us, but we often talk about Alec writing a book about great places to watch rugby around the world (we recently extended the scope to include great wifi spots around the world), since he often finds himself in some unusual country or other when a big game is on. 😊

Final Preparations

The next days were a mixture of R&R, exploring Mindelo and preparing the boat for the next big leg of the journey. We gave Serenity a good once over, checking the rigging, deck hardware, engine, electrical and plumping systems, and reviewing our spares and provisions. In Mindelo, the local market was a particular highlight. You could go there to barter for all sorts of fruit, veg and other fresh food. They also had stalls that stocked art, shoes, clothes, etc, which were especially interesting because a lot of the artisans had their little workshops at their stall. You could watch them make whatever it was they were selling, which was both fun in itself and made the wares more special than the usual “toot” you typically find sold in touristy places.

We finally managed to get a spot in the marina on Tuesday, which then gave us a good base to finalise our prep and best enjoy our last few days before the next big passage. As part of our prep, we reviewed together what had worked well on the way down from the Canaries, and what we thought we could improve. One thing that we all noted was that it had been easy to slip into a slump because the days didn’t have much structure. We knew we could do better, so this led to the introduction of a planned activity for each day, a daily DJ, and a “hype man” (person who was in charge of rallying the troops and leading the day’s activity). Katherine bravely volunteered to coordinate this and expertly planned out our schedule, which gave us an awesome array of fun stuff to look forward to, from games to lip sync battles, bracelet making to storytelling and all sorts in between. This instilled much optimism for the upcoming journey and would prove invaluable to making it a success!

Giving Thanks and heading out to sea

We’d hoped that, before we headed out across the Atlantic, we could take a day to go east to the tiny, uninhabited island of St. Luzia to enjoy some great snorkelling and a fun night at anchor before our departure. But, sadly, immigration and police refused our request for permission to go there. It is a protected nature reserve, and you are now only allowed to go with a special naturalist permit, which we couldn’t get. From what we’ve read online, it seems that people ignore this rule regularly and go anyway, but we didn’t want to get into trouble with the law right before trying to cross an ocean, so we shelved plans and decided we’d just start our passage a day earlier.

That meant the day of our departure was due to be Thanksgiving, so we decided to celebrate the holiday the night before. I had looked in vain in both the Canaries and Mindelo for some of the staples of a traditional Thanksgiving meal, but little was to be found, so, we improvised. Alec and Ballin grilled a beer can chicken on our barbeque alongside some unusual local squash, while Katherine and I whipped up cornbread, mashed butternut squash (can’t have too much squash) and all the fixings we could think of. A bit unusual, but all the more special for it! It was a great way to celebrate our impending journey, and also to force us to step back and acknowledge both how far we’d come and how grateful we were to have such a great group to do it with 😊.

Finally, Thursday dawned, and it was time to cast our lines. The ARC had gone the day before, but we ended up leaving at the same time as the big French rally (technically the Route des Iles du Soleil, but we called them the French ARC, or ‘FARC,’ which we thought was much funnier), which provided a fun mini-racing element to our departure. Racing the ARC and FARC boats became a theme of our journey – we were determined to beat as many of them as possible (even if we did start a day behind the ARC!). We’ll let you know how we did in our next Atlantic passage blogs!

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Overall, admittedly, Cape Verde felt a bit more like a rest stop than a proper visit because of all the admin and boat prep we needed to do (plus all the sleeping!). But, we’d always known it would be a busy stopover, so I’m grateful for the exploring we did manage to fit in! For me, that hike up Mount Verde was worth the whole visit in itself – it was amazing! I also think that knowing the big passage was about to start was a weird weight hanging over everyone, and ultimately we were keen to just get going. We’d been talking about crossing the ocean for so long, and now that it was right there it was hard to focus on anything else. So, we finally took the plunge, pointed west and sailed off into the sunset…