Sailing around the world

Rafted up
Banana Cut

Rough seas off Columbia

Sailing to Trinidad and Tobago
We sailed off early morning with Lloyd and Ngaire on their Leopard trying to keep the boats sailing at the same speed. Their head sail and spinnaker are both bigger than ours while our main sail is bigger than theirs. Getting the combination right in the days and more importantly the nights conditions took a couple of days. After that it was plain sailing with our boats rarely being more than a couple of miles apart.



It made a change for us to have company on a long ocean passage - nearly 2000 miles. Lots of chit-chat on the radio along the way and for L and N lots of sail changes. Those who know James, (and it has been said that if someone sneezes James will adjust the sails), will know that he always has to have the boat sailing at its optimum. No slacking!



One night in particular started off with a cautionary sail reduction before sunset. Think we dropped the spinnakers, reefed the mains and unfurled the jibs. A couple of hours later the strong wind didn’t materialize and a reef got shaken. Then the waves weren’t right for that sail combination so the main was dropped. That made things too slow, so the jibs got furled and the spinnakers went up. It wasn’t long and another reef was shaken. In between the boats weren’t matched so it was other up and down, in or out on one boat or the other.

Adventures on the high seas.

What a cruisers paradise.

My expectations of Brazil…well, I didn’t have any. Never really gave it much
thought. It was merely a country on our way somewhere else.
We have been tootling around here for about a month (completely lost track
of time) and it has been fantastic.

It feels like we have barely scratched the surface in this immense bay of
hundreds of islands. They say 365, one for each day of the year. More than
that, each one has umpteen stunningly beautiful coves and beaches and it
would take years to explore them all. From our first stop we have said “this
is the best” only to repeat that phrase over and over almost on a daily
basis. In recalling a place one of us has said “….at your favourite stop…”
“the one with the church?”,
“church, what church?”
“with the jumping fish”,
“big rock”
“the fishing boat”
“the yellow mooring bouy”
and then the charts come out along with the log book to try and remember a
stop that at one time had been considered THE BEST.

There is so much space here too. Unlike the Caribbean we have ...

So there we were a couple of days away from the South American coast. It is in the early hours and while doing my two hour stint I’m standing at the chart table making notes and plotting our position and I hear the water slopping around. That in itself is not unusual. Sometimes the incessant noise of the water slopping, slapping and swishing past drives me to distraction. Somewhere on our music collection is a song and the words go “on the silent sea”. No way! While at the farm with Mom and Dad I relished the sounds of
silence. The cocks crowed every so often and a cricket hiding in a crevice chirped constantly but that was nothing. The place was quiet. Silence.

Back on the sea it is a never ending slap, slop, and swish but now tonight it sounds much closer than usual so I lift up one of the floor boards. To my horror I see the water in the bilge is almost up to the level of the floor boards. It is sloshing backwards and forwards like it has its own wave machine going.