The officers look at John slightly disapproving, and immediately I said I had a pair of trousers for him in the backpack, it was so hot...

I explained we couldn’t go much more to the shallows and that we were just waiting for the night tide to come in although we were having tro

When we set about on this passage we knew that this was not just yet another long passage. This was a challenging route driven by three mome

Everyone already knew we had arrived before we dropped anchor, not because of our AIS or some fancy monitoring system.

It’s quite an interesting experience to hand steer a 50ft through a mooring field of 30+ft boats after spending more than 10 days at sea

We look at our beast! It is gorgeous and will keep us fed for really long time, nothing will go to waste.

A lot of discussion of our track and decisions and we still think our planning was the best bet that involved minimal time in the doldrums

After a near sleepless night going through what it felt like the deluge of a lifetime we needed to complete the installation of the tiller

After a few hours rest we start working on John’s plan to sort out a structure to mount the tiller Pilot we bought specifically for this

We did a quick test of the autopilot now that it had cooled off but it seems it’s dead. It was just too much pressure from the sea weed

No matter how we trim the sails we seem to be doing less speed than before, can only imagine how much of this seaweed we are trailing

Since we lost the 240v on the first day the menu consisted of room temperature seafood paella twice, room temperature

For some reason I’m not being able to settle the hydrovane on an angle of 110AWA but I can 120-130 and even 80-90AWA but not what we need. (

We spent the entire first half of the day trying to catch up on our sleep but not very effectively, too many things going through our minds.

More discussion, after all there was no fat chance to get it fixed in the Cape Verdes so we decided to proceed and shut the raw water intake

With all that done it was time to relax in the cockpit. My mind however had different plans and was constantly going through lists

He explains he will keep our boat registration documents and that before moving on to another island we need to come here to get a clearance

That’s when we came to full realisation of our mistake. We should have made landfall on the most Eastern island of the archipelago, Sal.

Logbook extract for the sailing trip from Canary Islands, Spain to Mindelo, São Vicente, Cape Verde  849 nautical miles in 152 hours

We kept the two sails poled for a short while and until after sunset when the wind decided to pick up more than we felt comfortable with