O bicho pegou

Submitted by skipper on 17 April, 2013 - 13:21

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road

We persevered in lovely Natal for a fair few weeks, once again at anchor up a mangrove-lined river. Arne trundled in by bicycle and joined us for some of it. The fortunate occurrence of the launch party for a silly-looking TV series ("Flor do Caribe") in the marina on our very first night got us litres of free bubbly, as well as getting us in touch with a few pleasing locals, who were by all accounts also just gatecrashing this weird event.

There was a big Norwegian goodbye party; with 15 souls on board at anchor, I spent most of the night ferrying people back and forth. Niklas, who had proven an excellent party companion, departed around this time, and Texan Katie arrived. Time was just flying by at a speed I've only ever experienced in Brazil. The easy going, one day at a time attitude that pervades even the locals' grammar, simply doesn't leave any space for tédio. Richard, whom I shared last season's hedonist swan song down the trashy holiday resorts of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura with, showed up for another stint.

Eventually up anchor and set sail for Fortaleza we did. We buddy boated this 200-something mile stint with Harald, a crazy German on a wooden racing boat, dodging a range of oil platforms and fishing boats on the way around the shallow north-eastern end of South America, Cabo Calcanhar. Wind and current were on our tail; this and the fantastic tropical ocean blue once again made me feel grateful and pleased for having made it to the tropics.

Kyle caught a small tuna somewhere near the cape. As tradition demands, I begged its pardon. We then sashimied our new-found friend right then and there. We arrived in Fortaleza in good spirits the next day. There was a bit of confusion about the location of the marina, since the pilot station's staff got confused and tried to send us to the wrong end of the harbour.

The docking maneuvre turned into a medium-sized nightmare; we had to place our anchor and dock stern-to, a technique German sailors call römisch-katholisch by reference to missionary (as in the sexual position). Kyle was on the anchor winch, while I was using the bow thruster extensively. Both failed simultaneously, prompting me to check what was going on. I ran into the nasty stench of burning plastic from a cable fire in the room. I went back up on deck to announce "fireeee on board!" loudly, just because I'd seen that in some film, and went back down to give it a quick, yet firm going-over with the engine room fire extinguisher.

All was forgotten after a few docking lagers by the pool later. I'd inadvertently parked boaty inside a 5 star hotel. Fortaleza proved good fun, and we celebrated our arrival by way of a naughty naughty week's worth of hedonism. Richard narrowly avoided getting mugged outside the hotel, only to be saved by hotel security, whom I was ironically at war with over their restrictive policy regarding visits.

Once again Arne showed, having biked up from Natal with the Norwegians. We were also reunited with some local charmers we met at the Carneval. Our Carioca neighbour Toto, captain on a fairly sizable catamaran, also proved to be excellent company. It was also a privilege to meet Ariadne Arantes here, participant in the 2011 Big Brother Brazil, and also the first transsexual to be queen of a samba school at this year's carnival, a bit of a historical moment for that particular movement.

It's week 3, and we are still persevering in this odd island of luxury, enjoying our last moments with the kind, mild-mannered natives that make this country so very special. Fresh crew has arrived in the form of Leentje, and I am ready to depart towards French Guyana shortly. But, to borrow the words of the late Terminator T-101 in the film of the same name: I'll be back.

Voltei pra defender nossa bandeira

Submitted by skipper on 7 March, 2013 - 16:13

Indem wir leidenschaftlich in etwas glauben, das noch nicht existiert, schaffen wir es. Das nicht vorhandene ist, was auch immer wir nicht genug gewünscht haben.
(By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.)
Franz Kafka

The Carnival was hard work, and we were all thoroughly hungover. However, there was plenty of cultural anthropology to be done. We befriended the local boat taxistas, who took us for rides around town. A seemingly endless round of barbecues ensued in the company of local couchsurfers Viny and Alice, we did beef and fish, round and round, while I was trying to find a mechanic who would touch my diesel injector pump.

Our stay at Pernambuco Iate Clube on the main breakwater was a pleasant affair. We sailed the harbour extensively, and gymmed it up in neighbouring Brasilia Teimosa, a former favela on sticks or Palafita, nowadays a lovely, down to earth community overshadowed by the nearby malls and high-rise predios. For some reason, rich locals love living vertically. Brazil is changing, and not necessarily entirely for the best.

We had to abort our attempt to collect oysters in Recife's filthy river due to health and safety concerns, perhaps a good thing; we ended up purchasing some on the beach. We got hold of the cheapest blender I could find, and started an enormous caipifruta orgy with all the tropical fruit we could muster at the municipal market. The blender expired following the introduction of carrot and onion, which we had added in an attempt to produce an Andalucian-styled Gazpacho. I got a warranty replacement in the scope of their generous 48-hour guarantee the next day.

All of these festivities were really a big series of goodbye parties for Transat and Cernival veterans Jo and Arne, who left to continue their crazy bicycle mission. Sad as it may have been, living conditions improved considerably, since Swedish Niklas had joined around this time, meaning we had a bit of a crowd on board at all times.

Eventually time to move on it was, and we set off on a swift overnighter to nearby Joao Pessoa. Conditions were superb and what I had become accustomed to for the tropics: Steady, mild winds and very little swell. We barbecued my Frenchie friend's filleted fish under way, and arrived in good form the next day.

I elected to anchor near Cabedelo behind Ilha Restinga in front of a village called Fort Velho, a village whose inhabitants received us with classical Marsian stares. I later learned that a yacht got robbed and boarded there just last year. I attribute our immunity to this to boaty's slightly less than shipshape looks and the presence of several males on board, as well as our friendly interaction with the locals.

Dingy #2, Wet Dream, was packed to the brim for our pleasing, lengthy expedition of the mangroves up Paraiba river's tributaries, drifting all the way up Rio Guia or Sarapo on a rising tide. I felt like Huckleberry Finn on this occasion, fantasising about my retirement cruising pretty rivers. We never saw any alligators or sea cows, and just about made it back to the ranch on the last fumes of petrol.

We spent another week anchored off Philippe the Frenchie's marina at Jacare, a suburb of Joao Pessoa, and are now getting ready to move on to Natal in Rio Grande do Norte for a crew change.

We come in peace

Submitted by skipper on 23 February, 2013 - 13:32

Let those who wish have their respectability- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic.
Richard Halliburton

We spent a few relaxing weeks in Cabo Verde licking our wounds and enjoying the exotic weirdness of what was once essentially a slave-trading post, and eventually our one month head start on the Brazilian Carneval had melted down to a mere 16 days. I picked up two German cyclists, Arne and Jo [their blog, German], mainly to make our watches more comfortable, since the charming Cecilie had decided to take the sensible route to Brazil (by airplane).

We tried to hoist the troubled Genoa in Mindelo, but had to abandon our attempt due to the vicious katabatic winds in the harbour. I decided to set off without the Genoa with the intention of hoisting it in the middle somewhere. We had strong winds for the first few days, and the nights were still a bit chilly. My Starbucks cup, which I had once stolen myself, died somewhere off Guinea-Bissau; we jettisoned its remains without much ado. We also managed to catch our first fish around this time also; a beautiful, albeit smallish Dorade. These pelagic predators shine in the most beautiful colours, as did ours, until I saw it off with a winch handle. I asked fishy for forgiveness, and we BBQed the poor beast right then and there.

We were slowly approaching the equator, it was finally getting hotter, and the water turned a tropical dark blue, artificial-looking in its intensity; in fact, the only thing I could compare it to is the packaging of Nivea skin cream. The winds got weaker, just as indicated by our weather forecast. Thanks to the US taxpayer by the way, now just stop funding war on the civilian population of Palestine and we'll be best buddies. We managed to hoist the 80 sqm Genoa on the fourth attempt, an essential tool for driving 25 tons of steel at 8 knots of wind.

As the degrees and miles towards the equator were melting away, I started having the most bizarre dreams, commonly involving old acquaintances I haven't seen, let alone thought of, in years. Among them a an entirely lucid recollection of an implausibly pretty hippy girl called Emma I'd met on Nottingham campus back in the day; she was sitting at her dorm window, I invited her to "come out and play", initiating an afternoon of playing childish games around campus. I also spent much of my time daydreaming, extensively planning a tour on my childhood stomping ground of the Grevelingen sea and Oosterschelde delta for next summer, anchoring around the little islands and sailing on swell-less, lake-like inland seas on the family's boat with a better half (TBA) in a miniature, harmless version of our global ambitions.

Both swell and wind died down as we entered the inter-tropical convergence zone, a bizarre, windless strip of calms just by the equator, with mild swell coming from both the Northern and Southern hemisphere. The squalls are not subject to any wind shear, and sit just above the water with huge castles of steam towering above them. On came the engine, I packed away the backup GPS in the safe in case of lightning, and we jogged along at a lazy 3 knots for an entire two days. The squalls never turned out as viciously as expected and brought us a welcome fresh water shower.

We also went swimming, and I used my snorkelling gear to stare deeper down into 3,000 something metres of that strong blue. The crew got silly euphoric on this event. We had grown into a superb combo, and this passage was actually a rather smooth operation. The elite of Kyle and Timo were on top form, and I went around fixing things with Jo "MacGuyver", doing up corroded cables and attempting to fix the pressure switch of the drinking water pump. I felt rather stoic on this voyage, just regarding it as my job to keep the show on the road.

There was a bit of a nervous moment when we had a major leak of the hydraulic system a few hundred miles of the coast, and as we were drifting backwards at 2 knots, with the vessel technically "not under command". Or when the starter motor just kept clicking, luckily I had already learned a stuck starter motor relay just needs a firm hammering. At times I felt haunted by the endless series of minor and major breakages, but, as an atheist, there is no good or bad luck or indeed any causality in my universe. Just a series of sometimes shitty random events.

We crossed the equator, narrowly avoided the rocks of St Peter and Paul, Brazilian territory in mid-Atlantic, and went on a bearing of 220 towards Pernambuco. We calculated our average speed time and again, trying to work out whether we were going to make the Carneval. I also had a EUR 100 bet with Timo going on on that front. Arne proved to be an excellent chef, somehow turning the durable foodstuff we were reduced to in week two into edible meals time and again. Which was just as well, since we started running out of things; first, it was chocolate and snacks, meaning we could only eat at mealtimes, next came the methanol crisis (which I use as cooking fuel). Luckily Cecilie had purchased lots of charcoal, so we started cooking anything from coffee to pasta on the BBQ.

As we were approaching South America, I thought of Alvares Cabral. He was headed further south to find lands in the half of the globe assigned to the Portuguese by his Popeness. Even though Columbus felt he had reached India and thus demonstrated that the world is round, the Popists couldn't accept this for obvious reasons, and divided up the newly discovered bits into bits for the powers that be. Ironically, the Christians were sort of accidentally correct on this occasion.

We arrived just in time for the Onlinda Carneval, the biggest welcome party/docking lager celebrations yet, in the company of Cecilie, her friend Alice, as well as newcomer Swedish Niklas. Happy days!

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