Pollywogs become Shellbacks!
Degrade des Cannes, French Guyana, 1010nm North-west from Fortaleza
Songerie is a slow boat and normally sails about 100nm per day. We thought we need 10 days for this trip.
Ollie and Myra just came down from Trinidad and advised us to head out till we hit the 1000m depth to find the best current and less swell. (They also lend us their hard drive to copy another 100 movies onto ours.)
On Sunday morning 23 August (pushing our luck with Brazilian immigration) we head out of Fortaleza for French Guyana.
On the first day we sailed a second best of 158nm (our best is 160nm on the SA east coast with 35knt wind), day 2 - 152nm…. In 2 days 310nm! We had very strong wind and high swell and strong current, the first 48 hours and had to steer all the time. By Monday evening at midnight Jaco got our Auto pilot working. This was a huge relieve.
From day 3 the wind was 20knts or less and we could start to use “Helmut” our wind vane. It is a custom (good luck) for sailors to offer their best food and drink to Neptune when crossing the equator. One is called POLLYWOGS if you have not crossed the equator by boat before and become SHELLBACKS after. I love cooking, but is a VERRRRY bad cake baker. I baked a corn cake at “rock and roll” conditions for Neptune. We crossed the equator at midnight at Full moon…….. I offered a tot of my Hennessey cognac & cake; Jaco offered a tot of his Glenfidich whiskey and cake.
We sailed 135nm on day 3.
Day 4 (142nm), we hit the halfway mark and caught a Blue Marlin, but decided to release it, cause its to big for us and considering we have no (working) fridge on Songerie. We get by, by taking condensed milk in our coffee (how spoilt can one be), get now and again ice for cold beers and otherwise we preserve food. Still tired from the struggle with the Marlin, Jaco hooked a big about 15kg Mahi-Mahi. This one we kept, we ate fish for lunch, supper and following day breakfast and the rest we salted and dried to prepare bacalou at a later time. We did not waste any food.
Day 5 we sailed 146nm, the sea is much calmer with hardly any swell.
Day 6 (150nm) the wind died down at midday, we were in the doldrums and had to start our engine. We were entertained by 6 Common Bottlenose Dolphins tail slapping, head slapping and aerobatics during the afternoon. This night we went through an area with short swell coming from the front (no wind)….. Very, very strange situation. We are not sure what caused it.
Saturday, Day 7 (109nm) still on engine, we got the counter current from the front. We realized we are too deep and started to head towards land to get the Guyana current again. Muddy tried in vain to hunt the group of spotted Dolphins riding the bow wave of Songerie. About 100nm from land we passed the next strange phenomena of the blue Atlantic meeting a green-brown current. We think it was the Amazon River that reaches that far.
