Port Mogan to Cape Verde

 

January 11^th: Didn’t sleep so good last night. Heidi made her infamous fish burgers in the morning they are so good. She uses the same method for the beef burgers and they are the best. We had to email the recipe to Starlet as they wanted to make them.

Today we had lots of dolphins and they were jumping out of the water and then swimming on the bow wave for ages.

Heidi and I Sat in the sun and read and then we all played 500. Conditions were not so good today there was a 3m swell and the winds were up to 15 knots. It was a bit uncomfortable but not too bad.

Robbie made a fish curry Thai red curry for dinner it was very nice. Every day Peter sets his camera up to take a photo of us all in a different part of the boat. Today it was in the cockpit.

 

 

 

January 12^th:

 During my watch from 3am to 6am I went down to get my kindle from the bedroom and took the torch and there was a bird sitting at the bedroom door. He is missing one foot. I gave him some sashimi and fresh water. Later on he was bathing in the water and Robbie saw him cleaning himself with his beak. The green rope you can see in the photo is the jack line. Robbie has put this right around the whole boat, so if it’s really rough and we have to go on the bow or the boat deck, we can clip ourselves to the rope on the harness on our life jacket. We used this when we had the incident with Stormvogel in the Coral Sea.

Heidi and I cleaned a bit and did 3 loads of washing and hang it all out to dry on the lines. We had a few games of 500 Robbie and Heidi seem to have the winning streak at the moment. We had lots of dolphins again today, they are such cool creatures and we get excited to see them every time. Today there was a tiny baby, aww so cute!

 I heard the rod hook up and saw a huge a big fish that was jumping but it broke the line, you know the story – the one that got away! He did manage to take the lure with him thou

I Cooked roast chicken and veges for dinner in the convection oven with my homemade secret recipe stuffing. The chicken came out beautiful but the roast veges don’t come out as good as the normal oven but they were OK.

Today our photo was in the kitchen.

 

January 13^th

Had an uneventful watch, although there were a lot of ships on the AIS but they were all a fair way from us, they were going around the coast of Africa. Conditions had calmed down a lot and it was quite pleasant. I slept until 10.30am and got up to a readymade breakfast from Heidi of mango, apple, kiwifruit, yogurt and mueslis. Robbie made a chicken omelette for Peter and himself.

I tried to feed the bird some shushimi but he wasn’t interested. We also tried him on bread soaked in water but he wasn’t interested in that either. He is really only a baby and at first I thought he only had one foot but he does have two but one doesn’t seem to open out like the other one. I think also one wing is damaged. I just left him in a bucked with the milk and water and a tea towel over the top. 

Conditions were so good that Heidi and I got into cleaning the fenders, and then we scrubbed the decks and gave the boat a bit of a rinse. Robbie complained about how much water we were using but it was all good the water maker soon fills it up again.

We had the homemade pumpkin soup for lunch with crusty bread rolls and we tried to give our little bird some more milk but he only took a little bit.

The boys both went below for a sleep. They have a plan now for our arrival. We will anchor out in the bay near the marina when we arrive around 3am, get some sleep and then head into the marina in daylight. They’ve changed the watches around a bit and Heidi will do 7 to 10, Peter will do 10 to 1am and Robbie will do 1 to anchoring. I get a bye but will get up to help drop the anchor. Heidi and I did a lot of cleaning today so as to maximise our time ashore on Mindelo. We don’t know when we will get the weather window to start our crossing so we don’t want to waste precious land time cleaning!

Heidi and I prepared dinner early, homemade pizzas and my special coleslaw. Not long after we finished cleaning up the port rod went off but it dropped it. 5 minutes later the starboard rod went off and Robbie hooked a beautiful Mahi Mahi. They are so pretty yellow and blue, we ran around like mad chooks getting the gaff and Robbie got him into the cockpit. Peter had woken up by this stage and he was getting his camera ready. I had to get Robbie the bonnie knocker and he was holding the fish and he said I have to give him (the fish) a knock on the head. Not nice. But I tried, but then he did a backflip out of Robbie’s hands, over the step, through the door and off over the swim platform. He gets to live another day, but probably with a sore head from the bonnie knocker. Robbie was disappointed but we did get photos!

It has been really warm all day and a few clouds around. It’s now 6.45pm and the breeze has freshened up and it feels cooler and like it’s going to rain. The water depth has been 4000 metres, really deep. Around the islands it shallows out to 100 metres in less than half a mile. This means we are going to get some big wave action.

Today our photo was in the pilothouse around the captain’s chair.