We left Baia Da Mordeir a day or so before Extress, but the day after Danae, so decided to just head to the same anchorage as Danae!
This brought us down south to the next of the Cape Verde islands.
The approach was quite interesting, as there was a heavy swell coming into Cape Verde at the time, and it was managing to curve around most of the headlands and island features. The approach also had some shallows to the south also causing breaking swell. As a result, there were breaking wave all over the place, but also a nice clear path into the anchorage.
In the picture to the right, you can see the general swell direction (red arrows), as well as swell lines curving around the land (red lines), which lead to swell from all directions (green arrows). Our approach was roughly the white dotted line.
This also led to lots of opportunities to catch little waves surfing later, from all kinds of directions 😉
In fact, in the middle of the protected area, there is a sand bank that gets hit by a swell from both directions. Here, if you are lucky, you can catch small waves both to the south and then ride a wave back north again!
The swell continued in this anchorage the whole time we were there. The swell would push us forward a few meters and then the wind would blow us back on the anchor. Again, not super uncomfortable, but annoying to be moving all of the time.
In Sal Rei, Kathryn went Kitesurfing and Adam went Windsurfing, but we are pictureless!
The plan was to try wing foiling again, but unfortunately, the wind didn’t really behave.
We stayed in Sal Rei for a number of days before heading off to the next anchorage with both Danae and Extress, coming in the next post.
This was our final stop on the island of Sal after leaving Palmeria.
As you can see, we didn’t make our way directly to the anchorage, instead sailing around the bay a little.
What were we doing you might ask?
Playing around on the SUP behind the boat we would answer!
This anchorage ended up being a lot of fun. The exception was the seemingly hundreds of flies that would fly through the boat every single day…
The snorkeling was pretty good, the water was clear, and warm enough to comfortably stay in for hours if you wanted.
We kept seeing turtle heads pop up above the water, but no matter how often we tried to see them under the water, we always failed.
While at anchor we did a little fishing off the back of the boat after seeing the tasty-looking fish swimming around the boat, and we were actually quite successful.
We caught a couple of little tiny fish which we used for bait, as well as a set of small fly lures which landed us a tasty little sea bream
The live bait did get a bite, but unfortunately, the line broke and we never found out what it was.
This prompted a little BBQ aboard Extress with Danae too where we all got chatting more.
We discovered that Danae had a wing foil setup, and the next day we were invited to have a go! On the whole, we were pleased at how well it went! Maybe this is the next toy we should buy? 😉
As the swell picked up, it curved around the headland corner that was protecting us and started to bring swell directly into the beach.
This led once again to another little SUP surfing opportunity, this time within paddling distance of the boat (though it was straight onto rocks)
As the swell continued to build, it also started reaching the beach which made for some better surfing (but we didn’t get any pictures). The following day multiple surf schools showed up to surf this break.
This also lead to some quite interesting swell rolling straight through the anchorage.
By this point, Danae had left to head on to the next island, but alongside Extress we stayed for another night. Extress threw out a stern anchor and we moved further off shore into some deeper water to lessen the effecter of the swell.
Although this swell rolled right through the anchorage, it didn’t end up being an uncomfortable nights sleep for us.
After waiting out all of the wind, we were finally ready to set off across the Gibraltar straight to our next destination.
We hadn’t decided if we were going to stop at Tangier or not, as we had heard from some friends that it was going to be full, so also had a plan to head all the way to Rabat.
Not long after setting off we quickly got the rod out as Kathryn saw a giant tuna leaping out of the sea. Within a few minutes, there was a bite, and we spent the next 15 minutes (it felt like) reeling in our catch whilst underway.
A tuna! Our first catch since northern Spain (we think).
As we approached Tangier we saw a whole bunch of boats leaving. This was the moment that we started re-evaluating weather options as well as considering how long customs can take in Morocco.
Rather than stop in Tangier, as we were a week behind our plan, we decided to keep going to either Rabat, Essaouira or the Canaries.
Very quickly we found ourselves 3 days into a 5-day sail.
Throughout our sail along the coast of northern Morocco, there was quite a lot of sand in the air, making everything very hazy, kind of like fog.
The weather dropped and shifted, making it look unlikely we could make it to the Canaries before getting caught in the worst of some horrible swell. As the weather continued to develop we were weighing up Essaouira, Agadir or Lanzarote. Also, playing in the sea 😉
The wind shifted back to something more desirable, as we went for it, all the way to Lanzarote!
While talking about how we might be able to go faster with the wind almost directly behind us, we realized that we had not yet used the mizen staysail.
It’s meant for use when the wind is from the beam to almost dead behind the boat, so perfect!
We spent some time figuring out how to hoist it for the first time, and up it went.
We kept the mizen staysail up for at least 1 day, and it managed to keep our average speed at above 6knots. Epic!
This was the point where we saw a large navy ship behind us. Adam also realized that we weren’t listening on channel 16 (we had switched to listen to some weather, but never heard the broadcast).
Upon switching back to channel 16, the navy ship was hailing us (they might have been for some time…).
They wanted to know the details of the boat, how many people were aboard, and if we had any kids of pets. After a lovely little VHF conversation, they said to have a nice sail and then continued on past us.
The wind and swell continued to build, the staysail came down, and we continued the rest of the sail with a reefed main and a working gib.
In the last 12 hours the swell was probably somewhere between 2 and 3 meters, and quite mixed up. There was a primary swell from the north at 2-2.7m, but also some other swell from somewhere east or south ish that made things quite interesting…
The worst of this came at night, but here is a short video from the daytime before, where we capture the swell size quite well we think.
We came in between Lanzarote and the northern island of La Graciosa at about 5am on Saturday, before getting to our anchorage at 6am ish.
The moon was quite full, but unfortunately obscured by clouds so it was quite dark.
The anchorage was full of boats, but we snuck around all of them right to the front next to the beach and dropped anchor in what we hoped was sand according to the satellite view. We held well and headed for some well-deserved sleep! (pictures of where our anchor landed coming in the next post)
