Great trip. Well done. I wish I was with you. 

This was the trip in which we had the best performance of Songster so far.
We are constantly learning how to sail her, but we definitely know her polars pretty well now, and we are doing it good. Every since Captain Kloek made his statement that the only reason for us to have a boat speed lower than 6kts should be because of lack of wind and not lack of skills, we stopped being lazy sailors and we started working on deck.

Mizzen sail, mizzen stay sail, main sail, spinnaker, 150% genoa, Yankee, pooled out foresail.. we use them all, in all different configuration. 
In this trip it wasn’t different and we were constantly flying about 6,0 kts boat speed. Songster is an amazing lady.

We were ready to leave Tenerife with only the two of us and Christopher, but a good friend of us contacted us an said he had a friend in the canaries looking for a boat to go to Brazil. We said we already had crew for the crossing but we could take his friend to Cape Verde if that would help him. That’s when Jörg came into picture.

On our second night, hundreds of miles away from the coast, surfing down some serious waves (and beating speed records of 10kts SOG), our autopilot decided to stop working. At this exact moment, I was so happy that we had an extra pair of hands with us 🙏🏽

After 12h of hand steering, our autopilot was back to life!!! Phiew, what a relief.

Now I understand why some sailors even give their autopilots a name - they are definitely the most valuable crew onboard, always! 
We need to name ours as well. 

I think the main highlights of this trip were:
-we saw whales as soon as we left the marina in Tenerife!!! Pilot whales, that came swimming right besides Songster, we could almost touch them! 
-The wind was constant and decent. And we found a perfect sweet spot with the sails that allowed us to forget about them.. we didn’t touch a rope for 3 days and didn’t have a boat speed lower than 6kts.
-blue skies: we haven’t seen one single cloud the whole voyage.
-gummy bears: we had a 1kg Christmas box full of them!
-we entered the tropics! Yeeeee! At 23 degrees north we crossed the Tropic of Cancer line!
-We had our first Christmas onboard and Santa found Christopher at sea! 
-our generator would stop working after one hour due to low pressure on the oil. It means it was difficult to use water maker and we had to save as much water as we could! We did a good job on that, but I did have to stop using the washable diapers from Christopher and unfortunately switch to throw away regular nappies, generating lots of stinky waste in a week.

Overall it was a great trip, much faster than forecasted.. we arrived 2 before schedule.
At the end of the Christmas morning we dropped the anchor in Palmeira, at the island of Sal. Yeeee! We are in Africa again! Time to go exploring around!

Tenerife - Cape Verde

Crew

Crew Logs

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