Cape Verdes - 26 Sept
by Kate Laird

About to head off...it was an extraordinary visit to the Cape Verdes...odd to "pop in" somewhere for 24 hours. Totally superficial, because we are in a big hurry to get south for the charter season. It took Hamish the entire morning to do customs and immigration - even with our "local fixer" organizing the route between the various offices. The number of people involved with clearing us in was incredible...big rooms with banks of clear desks. While he was waiting, Hamish watched one man sweep his desk several times, and then spend the next ten minutes separating two paperclips. I imagine it does get busy when the big ships come in, but definitely one yacht this month - or whatever we are - was not taxing the system. One very large woman typed the forms with carbon paper and a manual typewriter, then walked it to another woman for signing who managed to hand them back to the first woman with a look of utter disdain as if this annoying her piece of paperwork was getting in the way of her incredibly busy day, and then went back to inspecting her nails and shuffling paper.

We then motored across the harbor to the new "Japanese Port", a new pier built with Japanese money to top up diesel and water (from the desalinizing plant, because there has been a severe drought for the last 20 years), then motored back to the anchorage. Hamish dove on the bottom of the boat and cleared off a wall of barnacles on the propeller that had grown during the three weeks in Las Palmas (the rest of the boat looked fine, though it probably won't by Argentina). We changed the masthead light and put more antichafe on the main halyard. Sailing in light winds is harder on the boat in many ways than the 40- to 60-knot blows we were in on the way to Greenland and Scotland; the sails don't hold their shape, but rather flip and slap when the boat's rock causes more wind speed than the real wind speed (we're often sailing in apparent winds of 5 or 6 knots).

By 4:30 we were ready to go see town. Carlos, the boat keeper on the next-door boat in the anchorage, gave us a ride in the dinghy belonging to the boat he was watching. He was the one who found us Sydney, the young man who walked Hamish around the port offices and took us to the fuel dock. Apparently much of the theft here has been slowed, but it is still custom to hire a local to take you around, and quite a few of the boats have watchers sitting on the deck all day long. When you clear in, you sign a paper saying that you will have a watchman on the boat at night, either a crew or a local appointed by the port captain. We're not sure how necessary it is anymore, but it is clearly a good racket. Since the GNI here is $1800 a year, one cannot blame them for enjoying it.

It was really good for Helen and Anna to see that not everyone has as much as they do...everywhere they've been, there has been a level of comfort that is missing here. Seeing grubby children doesn't phase them (they are rather envious), but they really took notice of a man missing a leg, hobbling around on crutches. When we were in England, we were very well looked after at the Lydney Yacht Club for a couple of week; the commodore had a prosthetic leg, but we would have never have known if he hadn't been wearing shorts. He was fit and able, and leaping in and out of sailing dinghies and over Seal's extra-high lifelines without a problem. By contrast, the Cape Verdean man could barely get around...and of course, with the crutches, he was also without the use of his arms. They talked about it long into the night.

It was an interesting contrast, because the Canaries, while geographically in Africa, were indistinguishable from Europe, but the Cape Verdes are African, and it was hard to see much Portuguese influence, apart from the language and one old building.

We failed to get a CD of Cesa (sp?) Evora because we didn't have enough money. Big sign of the times - when Hamish was here 25 years ago, the dollar was king and everything was dirt cheap. Now it is the Euro, and the dollars which we'd carefully bought in Las Palmas in preparation were about 75% of their "true" value against the Euro. (But things were even expensive by Euro standards). We walked around the fish market and the town, splashed out on ice creams and drinks, then headed back to the boat before sunset.

Anna was most impressed by the fish market. We saw a beautiful dorado there. It would have been worth $150 in the Durham market place, but it was horrible - it had probably been caught the day before, and sat in the heat, without ice, flies all over it, without being gutted. There were feral cats running all over the market, and women scaling the fish with butter tins with nail punch holes in the bottom to make a grater (we may have to give this a try).

Helen and I were impressed by the women walking around with bags and boxes and enormous plastic "washing up" bowls on their heads. It would benefit all our postures to walk around with stuff on our heads. We passed a woman with carrying a bag of rice on her head that weighed probably 25kg. Most of women wear a woven pad on their heads under the object.

You can learn more about the Lairds and Seal at their website www.expeditionsail.com.