A New Year's to Remember,
Part One.
By Dave and Jaja

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Around Christmastime last year (2003) we wrote a web entitled The Coast Of Christmas Past. In it, I mentioned that we nearly lost the DIRECTION on New Year's Eve 1988 at Boa Vista Island in the Cape Verde Islands. Here's how it happened...

After a few days of hanging out at Isla Sal we'd had enough of the place. The anchorage, although protected, was little more than a commercial harbor. A cement breakwater framed one side of the bay, and a row of dilapidated houses framed the other. Not too pretty.

The landscape was reminiscent of the images sent back to Earth from the Mariner Expedition to Mars in the mid 1970s. Red rock, red dust, and unvarying dryness. Unlike Mars, however, the Cape Verdes had locals. The kids on Isla Sal ran in packs wearing dirty underwear and grungy T-shirts. The men sat silently in the shadows of their houses, or else they lounged on the breakwater in the shade, fishing. The women, typical of a third world nation, were in the town at the central market sitting on the ground selling roots, grains, fruit, and beans out of burlap sacks.

We bought a stalk of bananas at the central market. They were very green and hard, but the woman who sold them convinced us that they would ripen nicely. They never did. We had those bananas for two months and they never got past the "Styrofoam covered with green leather" phase. We also bought oranges that were 50 percent rind, 45 percent seeds, 4 percent pulp, and 1 percent juice. They looked good but tasted like your average crummy orange.

From Isla Sal, the next anchorage at Boa Vista Island was about 30 miles away. No problem: a simple 5 to 6 hour sail. Unfortunately, the red Sahara dust persisted. What should have been a carefree daysail became a navigation headache. I had the RDF blipping away in the cockpit (see Coast of Christmas Past for details). Although I knew our course was accurate, there was no way to tell how far we'd sailed, or how far we had to go. The beach finally appeared through the murk so we followed the shoreline until we located the bay.

The head of the wide bay was rimmed with steep sand dunes. We anchored in 18 feet of water, and about 150 yards off the beach. We were close to the beach, but twenty-five knot easterly trade winds were blowing us away from the land. Staying close to the beach ensured there was no chop in the boisterous wind. Looking westward, the bay was wide open to the ocean. But the trades were locked in and the chance of a westerly in the month of December was statistically impossible.

We dinghied ashore. The village was intriguing. The houses were one-story mud-and-brick affairs, whitewashed, but tainted red by the dust. The irregular facades meandered down narrow lanes like card houses. In the distance the pure blue sea acted as a reassuring counterpoint to the poverty. It was difficult to see into the houses, due to the glare on the street, and the gloomy rooms, but every so often we caught sight of an old person sitting patiently, staring out through the open doorways. There were no children here.

Back at the town landing, which lay at the head of a shallow lagoon extending off the wide bay, the fishermen ignored us. I was reminded how the pirate-like inhabitants of the Cape Verde Islands, back in the 18th and 19th centuries, lured sailing ships onto the beaches by randomly relocating the lighthouses to the tops of inland hills. Captain Cook was wary of this trick and placed zero faith in the navigational aides of the Cape Verdes.

Night fell quickly. We ate the fish we'd caught on the sail over from Isla Sal, then we faded after our long day of sun and salt. I awoke near midnight. Something was not quite right. The motion felt odd and I swore I heard surf. I poked my head out of the companionway. A half moon was high in the hazy sky.

What I saw shocked me. The wind was still steady out of the east but a gargantuan ground swell had materialized from out of the west; the byproduct, no doubt, from a distant, mid-Atlantic storm. Jaja joined me on deck. What used to be a calm bay was now a wide open roadstead rife with surf. What amazed us is 4 hours earlier the bay was a mill pond. Now, one line of surf was breaking violently, about a mile distant, on the bay's south side. The churning, crashing, crests glowed like fluorescent tubes in the moon's light. On the north side, the water over a solitary rock sprayed geyser-like into the air.

The surf pounding the beach in front of DIRECTION was a worry. The swells rolled up under the boat, gathered momentum, then smacked the sand. We were in a quandary. Our fear said lift the anchor and go, but our instincts said sit tight until first light. The moon was racing in and out of the murk, which altered the scant available light from not-too-bad, to just plain dark. It seemed safer to sit tight and await developments.

Morning took its own sweet time arriving. We had eagerly awaited first light and with the first rays we saw mayhem. White water everywhere. Jaja put the mainsail up and I began to pull the anchor aboard. The shrieking wind and the ground swell, which had increased, made it rough going. I'd leave the rode cleated until the surged passed, then, as DIRECTION sank down into the trough and the line went slack, I'd heave. When the swell rolled under us again I'd quickly cleat the rode to prevent having it yanked out of my hands. On the tops of the swells Jaja said the the water depth was 15 feet. In the troughs, 11.

Each heave-and-cleat cycle put us a few feet closer to the beach. When I got to the anchor chain things became a little hairier. I'd wrap the links around our oversized cleat and as soon as the boat began to rise up the chain would straighten out and yank the bow downward. The surf line was now two boat lengths away. As each swell peaked just one last time before dissolving into white water, the wind got under them sending a fine spray over DIRECTION. It felt as if I could reach out and touch the crests.

As soon as the Bruce anchor tore loose from the bottom, Jaja got the boat turned and sailing down wind. I heaved the last of the chain aboard. We made a beeline for the open water between the north and south breakers. It seemed easy in the sunlight but would have been a nightmare in the dark. Current was setting us southward but it was easy to make course corrections with visibility. When the depth went off the scale, and the last of the surf was astern, we relaxed and let the seriousness of the situation subside. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Fortunately, stupidity with a happy ending only manages to needle one's pride.

It was New Year's Eve morning, 1988. We set a course for the south end of Boa Vista where we hoped to find a suitable anchorage. With the wind ripping in from the east, and the swell ripping in from the west, there were not too many choices left. An indentation on the southern shore looked promising.

Ahead of us was the most eerie night we would ever spend on the boat.