Crazies on the Ocean

The time has come for us to release our lines from the beautiful Recife Marina and continue our journey north.

We will now make the 850nm trip to Belem which sits on the edge of the Amazon, this is our first leg and will take us approximately a week, we will not clear in, most likely just a quick stop for some fuel and move on.

We are expecting to have some challenging weather and big swell along the way. Eric & Lester have checked the weather and we are good to go, besides the fact that we may feel like we need seat belts.

After Belem, we have our eye on French Guiana which is technically France, just with more mosquitos and less croissants. I expect it will be a short stay, as from what I hear there is not a whole lot to do there. Then again I should probably avoid predictions, as we were supposed to be in Brazil for much longer and that did not work out. We were also only supposed to be in Port Owen for 3 months and that turned out to be 18 months. 

Maybe getting a little head of myself now, but we have started tossing the idea of going to Trinidad, but lets wait and see where the wind blows us.

Right now we have both the main sail up and the genoa out and we are cruising along beautifully.

Perfection simply cannot remain. At 17:04 Brazilian time yesterday we had an incident that was too close for comfort, a small rickety fishing vessel was spotted, with no AIS, and is not detectable on our radar as it is a wooden boat, and he is coming at us with high speed. He certainly was not sticking to the rules of the sea, clearly he missed a day in sailor school. Strictly speaking we should be passing port to port. Since we have all our sails up he should be giving way to us. But no, this muppet kept coming straight at us, needless to say we have to do whatever needs to be done to avoid collision, so even with full sails up Eric changed direction and put both motors on at full throttle to avoid this total idiot, sails now flapping around, however we just managed to avoid him, and disaster was dodged.

There seems to be many of these guys around and this playing chicken with sail boats seems to be a sport for them. We now need to be extra vigilant especially at night with poor visibility, to be noted again, we cannot pick these vessels up on our radar, so all we can rely on is our site and our ears. Based on this we have taken Makyla and Angela off night shift for now, normally they would wake someone up if there is a problem, in this case they would not have had time to wake anyone up as it all happened too fast. All is well and our nerves have settled. Thankfully this happened during the day so that we could make the necessary adjustments for night time sailing and ensure that we are extra alert for safe sailing.

Now that it is dark it feels even more dramatic, as all the ocean lunatics have come out to play, they are everywhere and the harder you look the more you see, really is the wild west out here at the moment. Once again we had to veer off our wind angle to avoid out of control pirate. 

Besides the crazies on the water, overall the wind and the swell have been good during the night and very much in our favour. At first light we hoisted Mr Oxley and now he flies us along proudly at a beautiful 9 - 10 knots.