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Brainstorm - 10/1/22 Surreal Start



After a week of preparing and waiting for curly COVID, who was stuck in South Africa, our start was a little unreal. Hein had received a negative PCR the day before, after a positive one 2 days earlier when Michiel and I already scored negative. Menno did a test early in the morning as all crew needs a negative result from the port of departure and a daily temperature log throughout the cruise.

 

We had a call with our weather boy Jelle who keeps track of us and the weather systems around us. During we got confirmation on 1) the north route has depressions with rain, waves and likely some thunder, 2) the straight route has no wind and 3) the south route has good wind, some calm spots but a big dip down south, adding to the distance to cross, is required.. Jelle recommended we go north, we said we’d give it a thought. With no change in weather to be expected we concluded we best leave as soon as possible. We hung up, decided to tank 350 litres of diesel in jerrycans, on top of the 300 already in the yachts tank and head south: towards Cape Verde it is!! Half an hour later we’d spoken to our families, purchased and loaded all jerrycans from the tank station and we were off 😃

 

None of us felt like we went to cross the Atlantic as the boat was neatly stocked with just some fruit nets in sight, it felt more like a day trip for now. The wind was at a calm 11 knots around Gran Canaria and we hoisted our gorgeous orange womper (gennaker). After seeing the sun sink into the ocean we had just enough reception to see we were catching up to our friend Pieterje from Amsterdam on his classic Swan called Peak.



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