Starting our first ocean crossing

Our last night in Cabo Verde

On Sunday 11 January, having completed our departure formalities with the marina and the authorities, we were ready to leave Mindelo Marina for our crossing to Fernando de Noronha in Brazil. Or at least, so we thought. The one thing we had still to do was to fill up with diesel at the marina fuel dock. Once that was done, we were going to head to the SE corner of the island to find an anchoring spot for the night.

Unfortunately, though, upon arriving at the dock we found that the attendants had decided to call it quits for the day and had closed up a couple of hours early. No stress, this was Cabo Verde after all, so we spent our last night tied up to a fuel dock rather than anchored in a nice bay.

A visitor from Groningen

In the end, this worked out quite well (as things tend to do) as a new arrival on a nearby pontoon recognised our Groningen flag (Groningen being the province where I – F – grew up) and came over for a friendly chat. This was Johan from Termunten (the Netherlands) who was on his way back to the Netherlands from Patagonia.

On hearing our plans, he invited us to join the Cruising Patagonia WhatsApp group. This will no doubt be very useful later this year when we’ll be cruising through that part of the world, but it proved immediately useful in that a quick introductory message from us got us a second invitation to its Brazilian equivalent, the BRallyCurrentYear WhatsApp group. These WhatsApp groups are an invaluable source of current information and assistance, so invites to them are gold.

Departing in a good weather window

The next morning at 1000, having taken a mere 20 hours to fill up, we left the fuel dock and headed out into the Santo Antão channel. Though we had done a number of passages of up to seven days duration before and had crossed seas a number of times, this was to be our first crossing of an ocean – exciting!

The forecasted weather window for our 1320nm passage was good with solid NE trade winds around 20kn, slowly dropping to 10kn and veering to the E over the next 8 days.

The swell and waves seemed reasonable as well, given that this was the Atlantic, with 2-3m waves forecast for most of the way, with these eventually dropping to 2m later in the week.

Importantly, the doldrums, that pesky bit of windless water near the equator, looked like it was going to contract in size by the about time we would be crossing them if we headed far enough west. This would minimise our time in uncomfortable low or no wind conditions.

Whether we would run into any squalls with strong winds, rain and thunderstorms remained to be seen though as these local storms are difficult to forecast but the CAPE and rain predictions suggested that we’d probably be fine.

Planned route

Our game plan then was to head south from Cabo Verde keeping the NE trade winds on our port quarter. As the trades began to veer more easterly closer to the doldrums (also called the inter-tropical convergence zone, the ITCZ) we would follow them (and the current) west until roughly 27-29°W.

Somewhere around these longitudes the ITCZ should be at its narrowest and with a bit of luck we’d find enough wind to take us across them. If not, then hopefully we’d find a narrow part that we could get across with the minimum delay.

Settling in to our routine

The first couple of days were spent getting into our routine of 4hrs on, 4 hrs off 24 hours a day, and figuring out the best sail configurations for the conditions. The Cabo Verde islands left a surprisingly long imprint on the wind and the waves, making it a bit difficult to decide on the correct sail set-up.

As it turned out that we didn’t need a lot of sail out in order to make good progress, so for the first few days we sailed on a port tack, mostly with 2 or 3 reefs in both the mainsail and genoa to keep the steering light and the windvane working properly, and still easily managed 6kn on average.

Sloppy waves

Once we had left the islands well behind, the wind settled down to a nice 15kn average, however, the waves were another thing altogether. Arguably, they were smaller than forecast, but boy, they were sloppy! There was a 2m swell coming from the N and born of the continuous train of large low-pressure systems passing further north in the Atlantic, while 1-2m wind waves came from the NE and E, presumably the offspring of the trade winds and something else coming off the Sahara.

While not big by any standards, they combined with the swell to become a sloppy and rolly mess that made life on board rather uncomfortable. With so much movement everything became difficult and time-consuming which effectively reduced our activities on board to either being on watch, or lying down, sleeping, and reading. Unfortunately, this didn’t change until we arrived in the doldrums a week later.