Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Interruption

You may have noticed on the blog that our entries stopped mid passage. We did not fall off the edge of the earth but we did have a medical emergency. I will not write the details now but suffice to say that we are both okay and back in Seattle. Windarra is at Caravelas and soon to be moved to Aratu, near Salvador.

Not sure if or when we will return to Windarra.

I will write more later,

Elaine

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Day 2 to Salvador

19 25.981 S, 039 26.468 W

On Monday we took a tour of the Garoto Chocolate factory in Vitoria. It is the only chocolate factory in Brazil and supplies Brazil as well as 60 other countries. As Rich and I were the only ones that did not speak Portuguese, we got a personal tour. It was very impressive and there was a tasting room at the end. How sweet is that! My favorite is the dark chocolate covered coconut.

Tuesday morning we left Iate Clube Espirito Santos at 9:45 am bound for Salvador, a distance of about 475 nautical miles. Unfortunately we have had a 2 knot counter current and our progress has been slow, with a speed over the ground averaging 3.0 knots. We have only done about 74 nautical miles! I doubt our 24 hour total will be over 100. Ouch.

Hopefully things will improve.....

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Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Vitoria

20 17.935 S, 040 17.255 W

The second night was much better than the first. We did some sailing and motored the last bit. While it was not the plan we did come into the harbor at night and by 3:00 am we were anchored. After a bite to eat we went to sleep.

Later in the morning we went into the Iate Clube Espírito Santos and are now secured, bow to the dock. We need to use the dingy to get back and forth.

We met a couple on the small sailboat next to us. Modris is from Latvia and Maria is from Sweden. They are heading south so we will exchange some information with them.

Port captain tomorrow. Hopefully better than Rio.

Sent from Elaine's iPhone

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

It was a dark and stormy night...

21 25.181 S, 040 31.468 W

Yesterday to anchored at Buzios after the overnight passage from Rio. Since we continued to have a weather window, we decided to leave at 5pm and continue north to Vitoria.

All was fine when we left, light winds and motoring.

But... then around 7:30 pm, we could see squalls closing in on us. For the next several hours we had lightening, thunder, rain coming down in buckets, the seas were churning. We had to dodge small fishing boat with no running lights so we could figure out what direction they were going, only a sign white light. Sometimes they would not be on radar but would only just show up out of the darkness. We were soaked as well as everything in the cockpit. We put on our foul weather gear (hard to imagine). I put most of our portable electronics in an anti static bag and then into the microwave, just in case.

Early in the morning it finally cleared up.

Now we are sailing along under the staysail making good progress. Hope to be in Vitoria some time in the morning tomorrow.

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