Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can... 🙂
Before leaving a faraway country for one even farther afield, you need to make sure, well in advance, that you:
Try the national dish. This should be done almost as soon as you arrive in the country, so that if you like it, you can feast on this food of the gods right up until your departure. Besides, after a couple of weeks, it will seem as though you still have heaps of time and will manage everything. Don’t believe it—it’s the devil talking :). For in the final days before departure, you will realise that getting something to eat under the circumstances is by no means the most important thing in life. Doshirak instant noodles will do. Because that is all you have the time and energy for amid the endless emptying and repacking of lockers and cupboards, packing and unpacking belongings, and fighting to keep the yacht dry when it will not see land for at least three weeks.
Buy useful things, even if they are not strictly essential. Such as spices from the market and local medicinal herbs that can replace lingonberry leaf and echinacea. You need to go and get them as soon as you find out where they are sold. For the same reason given in point 1.
If you work online, build up a reserve of posts for all the projects you run. So that for the three weeks you are in the ocean, the office keeps publishing even though the writer is away.
Dawn over Mindelo, the cultural capital of Cape Verde
Wash all your clothes. Because during the final two days, a force majeure in the form of torrential rain will turn a trip to the laundry into a pointless whim. Twenty kilos of dry clothes will get soaked on the way back, and there will be nowhere—and no reason—to dry them for another three weeks. By then, the clothes will have grown moss.
Send letters and postcards to your family. Well, doing this on the eve of departure is completely beyond the bounds of what time permits... Especially if you have not bought any stamps, the envelopes are soggy, and you have to travel to the post office by camel.
Take the child for a bicycle ride. Before the rainy season hits with a vengeance (which it inevitably will).
Seal all the leaking windows. Again, before it hits.
Collecting fresh water without leaving the cockpit 🙂
Find out where the hell the parcel of spare parts from the States has got to after leaving Jamaica two and a half months ago. By the time you are clearing out of the country, you have neither the parcel nor the money, nor any confidence that you have done everything possible to get at least one of them back.
Call Mum.
Afterword
And so, the crew of Lady Mary is setting out to cross its first ocean—the Atlantic.
“Mum, are those seagulls flying after us?”
The prolonged rains shortened one list of tasks and lengthened another. Thanks to them, we now know for certain what we need—and what we absolutely should not take—on a round-the-world voyage by yacht. Until the arrival of the great deluge, or “the time of puddles,” as they called it in the Cape Verde Islands two centuries ago, we had been under certain illusions on the subject. We will publish a list of those things once we are in South America :), so as not to make fools of ourselves again. We suspect Neptune may make some additional adjustments to it.
We will try to send brief updates from the ocean regularly.
For now, here are a few more photos:
You head towards the sunrise, while I, it seems, am bound for the sunset...
This photo is not about the sea, but the sky. A respite during the rainy season. Blue—it really does exist! 🙂
The captain in the Atlantic surf zone off uninhabited Santa Luzia
Sailor and young sailor dropping anchor
Off the island of Santo Antão, Cape Verde
Mindelo Harbour
The crew of the sailing yacht Lady Mary in Mindelo Harbour, Cape Verde Islands
Follow our news and keep your fingers crossed for us! Fair winds and may all your plans come true :).
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