After a fairly full on sail down to Cape Verde it was great to be ashore again. We were the 12th to arrive in Mindelo and fortunate to arrive during the day on Friday. It had been a quick trip for us, a day faster than when we did the event in 2018. The leading cat arrived nearly a day before us and had kept it’s spinnaker up the whole way despite the conditions. The first three cats clearly hadn’t read the “it’s a ra..ra..rally” memo! Over the weekend the majority of the fleet arrived, although the last two boats didn’t arrive until the Tuesday morning; they had both had problems at the start and had to return to Las Palmas for a day. The experience is a bonding one for all the boats and war-stories were swapped on the dock. We all had work to do on the boats but most preferred to defer that for a day or two.

On the Saturday morning the first of the island tours was arranged; a 3 hour tour round São Vincente island. We had taken this tour in 2018 but this time the island was noticeably greener as they have had some rain this year. It’s still pretty barren and definitely feels more Africa than Europe. Around 60,000 live in Mindelo, the second largest city in Cape Verde, which has a total population of 600,000 spread over the 9 inhabited islands. The economy is mainly driven by tourism (mostly on two islands with sandy beaches and modern hotel resorts but the visiting yachts contribute to the northern islands); marine trade; fishing and food production. Little food is produced on São Vincente island itself due the the lack of water and most comes from the larger neighbouring island of Santa Antão which is mountainous, cloudy and has abundant water as a result.

On Sunday we went back to boat checks and fixing. We knew we’d had some minor bits were quick to address:

  • We’d had a sheet caught round the top of the starboard dagger board which needed a small gel coat repair
  • The same incident also caused a deck plate to lift so we stuck this down with structural glue and rescrewed in place
  • We’d exploded a block when using an electric winch without properly uncleating the line (silly mistake) but had spare blocks to replace
  • We also decided to do another rig check so Adrian went up the mast and we discovered some wear damage on a halliard. Fortunately this was on one side of the halliard and only on the extra dyneema cover we’d put in place on high chafe risk areas. The cover had done it’s job. After analyzing the pictures we realised we could turn the halliard through 180 degrees and we are pretty confident this will now bear on the undamaged side.

We were lucky, there were many worse problems across the rest of the fleet, mostly torn sails, damaged jib cars, chafed sheets etc. The worst two incidents were a broken forestay on a large mono (fortunately they have two forestays so the rig stayed up and a horrible wrap on the largest cat in the fleet, an Outremer 5x. The spinnaker collapsed and wrapped itself around their rolled genoa and pulled so tight that they couldn’t release it and had to sail nearly 400nm to Mindelo on mainsail alone. Even on the dock they couldn’t remove it and in the end the inevitable result was that the knife had to come out to cut off the very expensive sail.

We had a bit of partying with a reception on Sunday night and a prize-giving on Tuesday evening, no awards for us this time but we had a good evening both nights with the growing number of friends we are developing in the fleet.

Anne-Laure and Lucy also found time on Wednesday for a trip to a beach on the other side of the island to swim with turtles!

Probably the highlight of the week was our trip to the neighbouring island of Santa Antão, we hadn’t taken this tour in 2018, deterred by the very early start. We did this in two groups on Monday and Wednesday. The island is a real contrast to Sao Vincente, mountainous, verdant with a booming food production industry of grain crops (in an ancient caldera of a long extinct volcano), bananas, sugar cane and fishing. Of course the sugar cane production also means rum distilleries, although rum tasting at 0930 before an hour hike up the hill wasn’t perhaps the best timing!

Lucy and I are just heading off the the skippers briefing. We start again at 1200 tomorrow on the 2200nm leg to Grenada. The weather looks tricky but light winds this time rather than strong. We’ll keep you posted!