I’m awoken at 0330 local time by the call of nature on our eighth and likely penultimate night in the Marina Mindelo on Ilha São Vicente in the Cabo Verdes. In the dim light from the marina’s dock lights I see Max sleeping peacefully on the settee. Hazel is too small for any kind of private “guest room” (or let alone private master stateroom) but no matter—we will be at sea soon enough and out there, privacy and who-sleeps-where are trifles.
The marina and Mindelo Harbor are rather open to the sea and we’re in the middle of the the Atlantic Ocean in the breezy trade winds so there’s a lot of surge in the water which causes a lot of surge to the moored boats (movement forward and backwards that is limited by the hawsers or mooring lines). As I work my way aft from the forepeak to the head I have to use Hazel’s handholds to steady myself with the surge. It’s kind of like one of those funhouse rides that’s not really a “ride” because your walking through darkened passages with strobe lights, wavy mirrors, eerie sounds, artificial fog, and—at one point—a section of the floor is moving back and forth. As I walk into the head I look out the companionway at the amber streetlights of Mindelo in the haze and notice that something is off. Hazel’s angle to the town has perceptibly changed…odd.
After my business, I look out the port portlights in the saloon (the windows on the left side) and that the big catamaran that’s moored next to us is also much closer. Hmmmm…odd.
Up on deck, the middle-of-the-night mystery is solved. Sometime after we turned flukes, the days of stretching and releasing from the incessant surge was too much and Hazel’s starboard bow hawser (mooring line) chafed through and ruptured. After it broke Hazel’s bow moved to port and the remaining bow line and closer to the other boat (that’s what fenders are for).
While I thought about waking Max to help me sort it out, I elected to let him sleep. While it would be good experience for him to see, he too needs his pre-passage sleep. Especially tonight as earlier in the night he’d been hanging out with another Max. This other Max is also a young man but from Germany and he and his father Jan are sailing across the Atlantic as well. To the concept of reuniting with fellow sailors and following breadcrumbs of islands from our last post, I met Max and Jan in Almerimar Spain this fall when Hazel and I were on the hard for a month. Their boat Sirenas was also in the yard, a few boats down from us. While I always liked their style and spirit—father Jan with the heel of his hand to his forehead while explaining yet another boat problem, happy-go-lucky son Max pursing his lips and audibly exhaling with a dismissive hand wave at the problems (and just wanting to get to the Caribbean as quickly as possible)—we only said hello and chatted quickly between our various boat projects. Although we were friendly neighbors for a month in the yard in Mediterranean Spain we never shared a meal as our foci was getting our respective boats back in the water. A month or so later Rhett and I ran into them briefly in the Canaries when they were anchored outside a marina and we were going into the marina but—again—we never got together. Finally, we reunite in Mindelo (totally unplanned) and a couple nights ago we shared a meal of cachupa (the emblematic Cabo Verdeian dish) and talked about our sailing plans. It’s ironic that with our various and uncoordinated routes and dates out of the Mediterranean at Gibraltar and through the other Atlantic Islands, our planned date to depart Mindelo bound for the Caribbean is the same—Saturday, December 21…the shortest day of the year. After dinner Jan and I said our gute nachts and our good nights, but Max and Max stayed back at the marina’s waterside bar to talk a bit more.
As I drifted off to sleep that night I thought about how good it was that Max and Max were hanging out. It’s so valuable to have friends from other countries, to me it reframes one’s mind from the citizen of a country to a citizen of the world. As the rising tide of sleep started to wash over me, I think about breadcrumbs, migrations, and the chance and fate that introduces me to Jan and Max first in mainland Spain, then in the Canary Islands, and finally here in the Cabo Verdes.
Back to the remains of our night and our broken hawser: half an hour later I’ve got the port hawser re-rigged and it should be fine until we depart in a few days. Once we’re sailing, I’ll cut out the chafed line and short-splice the two halves of the hawser together. It will be a good chance to introduce Max to the craft of splicing.
Regarding the title of this post, perhaps a few sticklers for language, or grads of the US Naval Academy of veterans of the Navy may nitpick with, That’s a typo Dan…the fight song is “Anchors Aweigh” not “Anchors Away.” However, in this instance I truly mean anchors away.
In nautical parlance, to “weigh” anchor is to pull the anchor up off the bottom and start sailing. Thus “Anchors Aweigh,” meaning that sailors are preparing to set forth on a voyage from an anchorage.
For Max and me one of our preparations in Marina Mindelo is to remove Hazel’s anchor off her pulpit and store it away—specifically below decks in the quarterberth (affectionately called “the garage” given all the random stuff that’s stored there).
“Why bother removing her anchor?” you say. Or better yet, “What if you want to anchor for a night on your sail?” For starters, just 10 miles west of Ilha São Vicente we’ll be in 1,000 meters of water and it only gets deeper from there. Hazel carries 50 meters of rode (anchor chain) so there is no anchoring for the next 2,000 miles or so. Secondly, while the foredeck and pulpit can be a magical place on the ocean when sailing downwind in good weather, it’s brutal and unforgiving when the weather turns and when sailing upwind. In those cases the anchor takes the brunt of the ocean’s pounding and all the securing in the world won’t stop it from starting to work loose and bang around. Going forward to secure a loose anchor in a blow is not fun. For short sails the anchor is generally OK up there. However for 15-20 days of sailing, better to have it stowed safely below. It’s kind of ironic that in the quarterberth the anchor (designed to get to the bottom of it all) is wedged in next to the life raft (designed to keep us afloat in any conditions).
As we were working on the anchor together, I got philosophical and told Max that whenever I’m doing a final-prep job like this, my mind wanders to the question, So…where and when will I un-stow the anchor and bring it back up to the bow in preparation for landfall? Although I’m planning for the Windward Caribbean Island of Grenada, I’m not 100% sure. At the end of the day, who can be honestly 100% sure of anything? Max and I muse about that thought as we go about our work and I realize how good it feels to talk to someone about something that’s not just “news, sports, and weather” rather than have that thought just rattle around in your own head.
Hazel and I arrived in Mindelo on Thursday, December 12th and I wasn’t sure what to expect. Our Welsh sailing friend Martin (also highlighted in our previous post) had advised me that when you’re in the Cabo Verdes, you know you’re not in the EU any more.
Once I’m back in Florida I’ll post more about the Cabo Verdes and Mindelo, but for now I’ve got to wrap this up and get some sleep as we are sailing tomorrow. The spoiler alert about the Cabo Verdes is that it’s been and excellent visit—just what we needed.
Please, stay tuned to our home page and, as with other passages, we’ll do our best to make daily posts as to what’s going on onboard Hazel and in the captain’s head. Who knows, maybe I’ll turn the micro-blog helm over to my “nephcrew” Max. If I do, you’ll know by the quality improvement in the posts.
Fair winds and following seas!
As a Christmas gift, we’ll leaving you with some final images of the Cabo Verdes in roughly chronological order…
