Exploring Baía de Todos-os-Santos

Looking for some peace and quiet

Carnaval had been an intense time and our two weeks in Salvador had been busy. So, by way of recovery, we decided to spent some time cruising in the bay west of Salvador, Baía de Todos-os-Santos, apparently one of Brazil’s premier cruising grounds.

Armed with recommendations for good anchorages and places to visit from local sailors and other cruisers, we set off first to explore the western-most corner of the bay and its tributaries.

Scarlet ibis

Our first stop was the thoroughly recommended island of Bom Jesus. Here we anchored in the protected shallows between the low islands of Bom Jesus, do Frade and Santo Antônio.

While for our informants the attraction of this site had been the crowded but apparently quaint village that occupied 95% of Ilha Bom Jesus, for us it was the mangroves that fringed the islands and the scarlet ibis that foraged along their margins at low tide and roosted in their branches at high tide.

Scarlet ibis are simply outrageous. To describe them as flamboyant in the extreme is almost an understatement and borders on doing their intense colouration an injustice; indeed their only nod to modesty is their black eye, bill, legs, and the tips of their outer primaries, everything else is a brilliant and uncompromising intense scarlet.

A diet rich in carotenoids might well explain the biochemical origins of their colouration but one can only assume that their predators are insufficiently advantaged by the colour for natural selection to act against it.

Happily for us, Yuma was anchored in a position where we got to watch them all day as they flew back and forth from their nesting area in the mangroves on Bom Jesus and their feeding areas on the surrounding mudflats. Perfect birding!

Macaws

A bonus too were the blue-and-yellow macaws that flew high over us on their way between their roost sites and the mainland in the mornings and evenings. Watching them one morning we realized that the flock included an interloper, a red-and-green macaw that appeared to be paired up with a Blue-and-yellow.

While Frederieke wished hard for them to come and join us on the boat (as we were told they sometimes do), David, having experience of their destructive potential from where he lived in Central America, was concerned about their strong bills and our relatively delicate wind instrument, VHF antennae and fittings on the mast. (Un-)fortunately, they flew on past us.

In the end time spent birding meant that we never made it into the village of Bom Jesus. No regrets on that score though.

A river just like home

Our next stop was the Paraguaçu river. We had learned about this river in, of all places, the Museu Nacional de Enfermagem (a museum dedicated to the history of nursing in Brazil) in Pelourinho. Ana Néri, considered to have been the woman who introduced modern nursing to Brazil and the country’s equivalent of Florence Nightingale, was born in the town of Cachoeira de Paraguaçu in 1814.

Given that our charts did not extend all the way up to Cachoeira, we didn’t make it all the way up to Sra. Nevi’s birth place, but did we spend a pleasant day cruising up and then back down this river.

The Paraguaçu felt, looked and smelled remarkably similar to the Wet Tropic rivers back home, especially the Daintree River. Its steep hills were covered in tropical forest, regrowth, and pastures dotted with grazing cattle. The only things missing were large estuarine crocodiles which is not necessarily a bad thing for relaxed cruising.

In a side channel, we got our first sighting of a few Tucuxi dolphins (Sotalia fluviatilis) feeding in the shallows. Very cool.

The mouldy ruins of the Convento do Santo Antônio do Paraguaçu, rising imposingly from the encroaching green forest, added a certain sombre note to the scenery, one which was only slightly enlivened by the bright yellow and blue fronted ‘Bar do Amor’ that sat adjacent it on the river bank, suggestive of a shift in the preoccupations of locals since the abandonment of the convent in 1855.

Ilha de Itaparica

Our last couple of days in Baía de Todos-os-Santos were spent anchored off the towns Salinas da Margarida and Itaparica. At Itaparica, we caught up with Martin from SY Asherah, enjoyed a bit more birding, wandered through the pleasant little town, and kept an eye on the weather for our trip south.

But before we could sail south, we first needed to return to Salvador to clear out with the Capitania dos Portos and the Polícia Federal.