Crossing from Senegal to Brazil

It all started well when we left the Casamance ont Feburary 19th with a wind of10-15 knotts from the NNE. For the first six day, we moved broad reach at 5-6 knots. Then we arrived in the doldrums. In case you don’t know, the doldrums an Intertropical convergence zone located around the equator. In this zone, one will usually find thunderstorms and little wind coming from different directions. The cloud formations are usually quite impressive. It’s usual spand is 200-300 nautical miles. So we expected a few days without much wind and thought we could get through them using the engin. In fact, the doldrums this year covered 450 nautical miles. We ended up spending 8-9 days without much wind. We weren’t really worried since we had plenty of water and food to last well over a month. Gaston caught two bonito and two dorados so we had plenty of omega 3. What was I saying? Oh right, the weather was hot and the lack of wind gave us a chance to go swimming. The thunderstoms spared us. We only got a few rain showers. The depressing bit is that everything we downloaded weather preditions, they always showed no wind for the next 7 days. We have a diesel tank of 140 liters and two jerrycans of 20 liters each. In the hopes of finding some wind, we decided to use up the content of the tank to head south. All the way, the wind would come back lightly but enough to sail for some time and then die again so back to the engin we went. When the engin stopped from lack of diesel, a light breezy of about 10 knotts SSE was starting to come our way. Very happily, we raised the sails but the wind died down shortly after. This time, not only was there not enough wind to raise the sails but the current was making us drift NW at 1.4 knotts. Great! We are going back to Canada and at this speed we will be there for next X-mas! We kept on telling each other that we would have to put up with it. However, we have diffenrent definition of the expression. In my can, this means cuddeling with a good book and wainting. In Gaston’s case, in means turning around in circles like a lion in a cage. We even asked a cargo ship to change is route because we didn’t have enough wind to avoid it. During 3 day we wondered if we should knowing we needed the engin to go up a river upon arrival use up on of the jerrycans to do and extra 10 hours towards the south. We took the decision on February 1st to change our heading to the Island of Fernando de Noronha because it’s closer than Jacare and they sell diesel. However, it’s also a natural reserve

which means an expensivetourist trap. On this same day, wecrossed the equator and gave Neptune the traditionnal glass of rhum. Once again, when the engin stopped a slight breeze started to blow in our favor. We managed to sail all night but the wind died again the next morning. Ok! Now were are starting to get impatient! Do you know how you can tell that there is absolutely no wind? You can see the reflection of the clouds in the water! Furthermore, there is no waves but the boat moves from side to side aggresively. Lukely, the wind started blowing at about 10 knotts from the SE a few hours later and did leave us again until we arrived on February 7th. The last night we even had to reduce our sail so that we would go slower and not arrive in the dark. Kind of ironic don’t you think? Finaly, now that we had an established wind, we decided to go back to the original plan of landing in Jacaré. A good decision since we learned on arrival that the cost of staying on the Island of Fernando de Noronha is 120 Euros per night. Ouch! Apparently, it is very nice however.