We left Fortaleza 1 week ago!
Ready to take on the equator doldrums, NE trades, heat, rain, thunderstorms, the Amazon river and other unforeseen adventures. On board are of course Bob Angle for his 4th voyage in a row (boarded in Darwin AUST), Tom Main the ear and eye doctor and 23 year old Chris all are from the US this time.

Prior to departure it had been raining for days already, so it came as no surprise that it was pouring rain when we left Fortaleza with no trade winds to be seen anywhere!

We left the harbor then immediately turned back and anchored. I hate being out on the water with lightning.

The first night out very near the coast kept us up and running all night!
We encountered a fish boat that started following us approaching us closer and closer.  We can now hear the crew talk - they are looking for us, checking us out. We are only sailing at 2 knots and can run away from nothing.
We change course drastically so do they and again we change, so do they, they keep coming at us.
Now they are only 100 meters away kind of on a collision course. I hit the switch on the hand held spotlight I am holding. Bob is steering, now the engine is running and we are doing 5 knots. I light them up like it is daylight, we can see them standing on deck waving their arms. They follow us for a while longer and then finally veer off and leave us alone. Pfhttttttt.
"What was that all about?" Pirate's? Who know's?
A few hours later the wind die's and I take in the towing generator.
"Hey Bob look, there is a piece of fishnet caught on the generator's prop, you think we scooped their net?"
I guess after the killing of Sir Peter Blake and all the pirate stories you cannot help but  get a little edgy!

"Splash", a few feet of the boat a large blue green dorado leaps out of the sea to snatch one of the thousands of butterflies that are filling the air. The sails, the deck, the dodger, the inside of the boat, our bodies, the air, they are everywhere, beautiful, colorful butterflies, all sorts of different species. Some of them are glued to the mainsail and look quite large with their wings all spread out showing us their fantastic colour schemes. When a shower arrives they fold their wings and just stay put, with only a few still flying around. All this is happening while we are about 50m offshore of the Amazon river. Never seen anything like this before! It only would last a day, the next day only a few dead bodies around and the rest of them all gone. Wonder what they do here out at sea and how long they live for? Aren't they supposed to stick to the land?

We can safely say we crossed the Doldrums, and are now in the NE trade winds.
A week of rain, thunderstorms and blasting squalls where we had to hand steer a lot. More and more downpours, cold, lot's of scary sheet lightning and more tropical downpours. Calms for only a few hours, no motoring to speak of and now all the wood work on the boat is swollen and squeaks and Yaaah, a fridge that still works after all the work done to it in Fortaleza.

We crossed the equator early this morning while most of us were sleeping. "It did not feel any different".

We decided to skip the Amazon river visit.
Too much rain, out of the way, hot. Lots of motoring and of course the recent Peter Blake robbery/killing.
Why look for trouble?
So now we are sailing for Island de Maraca.
This rarely visited island lies well North of the Amazon River and should make for an interesting landfall!
 

Friday March 15 1500 hr

Some nights are magic.
Some nights are nice.
Some nights are just "shitty".

It's 3am, Toms watch it is and I am sitting in the pitch dark in the cockpit soaking wet and cold to the bone, bleached out hands and feet, harness on rainjacket with hood up, short's, goosebumps.
Squall number 8 just came barreling in with more dark sky's, wind gusts of 40 knots plus torrential rainfalls, a fishboat at starboard and another one to port!.
I am hand steering the boat through all these squalls, because every time a gust hits we are over powered, then I have to steer the boat further downwind to ease the pressure on the rig and sails!
Waves splash over the deck and fill the cockpit, another one hits us both. "Just another night in paradise!" No sleep for the skipper tonight!
With the arrival of squall number 1 I went forward over the deck to close the hatch and take in the windscoop. This is when my pinky toe doubled on the antiskid deck with quite the painful result. "No worries", the blood got washed off the deck in the pouring rain. In squall number 4 I had to change the blade on the windvane for a smaller one .
During the change over the bigger blade "blew" or should I say "flew" out of my slippery cold hands into the ocean! We are sailing at 7knots goodbye "blade" you stupid thing! I hate myself for making stupid mistakes like that, there happens to be no windvane blade store enroute to Trinidad.
It's 5 am, Bob's watch.
I lie in my bunk trying to sleep without success! ."Bang..splash..bang", the boat gets covered by a wave, "second one in a row!". I had noticed a little earlier the different wave action, I turn on the depth sounder and it tells me we are in only 25 feet of water.  Unbelievable, we are still 40 miles offshore from Maraca island now. These waves are building and are becoming way too steep in this shallow sea, another breaker sent us flying!
"Hey Bob we are out of here" I announce "let' s harden up".
"Sorry  no Maraca Island this is just getting way too dangerous"

It's cleared up. We are in sloppy seas with 25 knot North Easterly winds working jib and 1 reef in the mainsail sailing at 6 to 7 knots  in "muddy waters", the dirtiest water this boat ever has sailed in.  "Just like brown soup", the Amazon river is still with us!
Right now we are 50 miles offshore ( it's only 58 feet deep ) and have changed course.  Our new heading is for Cayenne in French Guiana, about 250miles to the North from here.
 

Wednesday March 20 1145hr

And then there where 3 sailors left.

"I'll be in Miami at about 9 pm after several stops in the Caribbean". Tom is waving his Air France ticket around as we are saying our goodbye's over a French coffee at the Cayenne airport. He decided out at sea to end the trip and fly home to support his wife who had cancelled her berth on this leg because of her unexpected health problems.
 Goodbye Tom, thanks for all the great times. Fairwinds!

Hot, rainy, expensive, interesting city, good coffee, first time using Euros, parlez vous Francais? That sums up Cayenne.

Thirty five miles from the Cayenne harbour lie 3 Islands, Ile les Salut or better known as "Devils Island".
Remember the movie Papillion with Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen?
It plays on Devils Island for many years, France's Prison colony!
The ruins are open to the public. Some of it is restored, a lot of it is also being  reclaimed as rainforest.
Very interesting, scary, haunting and also very strange to see what we as humans do to each other.
Here in the middle of the ocean on this hostile little island, surrounded by a sea full of dangerous currents and shark invested waters we put our political outcast's and other criminals. Then we built a prison with small little cells and walls all most a meter thick, place iron bars in the window's, steel doors with big locks and guards, even isolation cells where some prisoners spent years alone slowly going insane! No light, no sound  no people! Just to make sure that they "what"?  stay  "locked up" to pay for their "sins"!
How many thousands of years do we need to live on this earth before we realize that this system of "punishment" does not solve any problems, never has, never will!
The sails are filled, a broad reach wind NE 08, gray sky's, a little rain 20 miles offshore. 15 meters of water, 180 miles to go! Where to? We are sailing for Paramaribo in Suriname. Yeeeah, old Dutch territory (skipper is looking forward) - we are going for a Heineken!
 

Monday March 25 1400hr

Finally,  no more rain with squalls and we are now sailing "true blue waters" again.
We are a day out from the Paramaribo river in Suriname.
Sailing in 10kn NE tradewinds, starboard tack, 5kn boatspeed, with fluffy friendly tradewind clouds following us.
Now that is what the brochure promised!

Definitely quite the experience visiting Paramaribo.
We had to sail up the river for about 15 miles to get to Paramaribo, we were blasting along in strong gusting winds at about 6 knots but we also found a 3 km current going "full bore" against us. A few hours before dark we approached the city with seemingly no yacht friendly place to be found anywhere at all. This harbour caters to major shipping with concrete docks and lee shores. But we finally found a wooden pier sticking out into these muddy waters, This was the only place that looked kind of nice from the water, the rest of the water front was totally depleted and in ruins. So down went the anchor in 14 feet of clay and mud. Well we must have had a good nose, this happened to be the best nicest and most luxurious hotel Paramaribo has to offer.
Leave it up to a bunch of "foreign sailors" to sniff this place out.
We where welcomed by the barman with a friendly smile and handshake. For only $10us per person per week, we where invited to use the pier for our dinghy, swimming pool and all other facilities that the hotel offered, including a casino!.
Then after checking in with the reception we all became instant millionaires and got thousands and thousands of Guilders for only a few us dollars. Mind you a cup of coffee is "a thousand guilders please".
We would not have dared asking for more!  Lucky or what? Never made it to the casino though!
Dutch is the language spoken so I was in my element and made the perfect translator for the crew.
Three days we spent here. We ate good chicken sate (almost every day) bami, goreng and nassi goreng with Parbo beer that just tasted like Heineken. Life could have been a lot worse!
Why they drive on the left side of the road is a mystery to me, "this used to be a Dutch colony".
Bob and Chris booked a 12 hour tour and traveled up and down rivers, rapids with piranhas and met local tribes people including a rainforest medicine man.
I had a chance to practice my Dutch while speaking to all the Netherlanders that flooded the swimming pool.
No other yachts, just us! Kind of nice for a change, because almost every where you go these days there are always other yachties there.
What's next? Well we are off to Tobago with about 500 miles of open ocean ahead of us.
Since we are well ahead of schedule (because we never encountered any doldrums at the equator) we hope to squeeze a few days in at the beautiful island of Tobago before we set sail for our final destination of Port of Spain in Trinidad We all like this bonus!

Thursday March 28 2045 hr

'Splash', it's night and as I open my eyes underwater I can see my hands clearly lit up by the moonlight. There is nothing better than 'skinny dipping' with a full moon shining brightly. I can even see the keel underwater without goggles!
We are anchored just off the beach in Charlotteville in Tobago. What a great little town this is. Very friendly people nice little wooden shed type shops with local goods, NO TRAFFIC, hardly any tourist's, great little restaurants on the beach, affordable, nice clean water, beaches, palmtrees, what else could you ask for?
This is ,just one of those great little treasures you once in a blue moon run into when you travel long enough.

"Do you mean we broke the ships record?" Yeah and not by a small margin either" But we did not go all that fast last night!. It is unbelievable how fast we traveled on the way to Tobago. In one day we covered 178 miles in a 24hr period. This beats the old ships record of 161miles in all honesty,  "thanks to the current" even though we did sail 142 miles through the water we got pushed 36 miles by the current that day. That is 1.5kn of current on average! That is a lot of current.
Therefore it only took us 3.5 days to get to Tobago, it looks like we just cannot help but being ahead of schedule on this voyage!
 

Sunday March 31 1400hr

It is always a good feeling to get underway, better yet, under sail again.
A nice SE wind fills our no 3 genoa, giving us about 5 knots through the water. We don't want to sail too fast tonight because we only have 90 miles to go to Port of Spain in Trinidad and we like to arrive in daylight hours. It will be Easter Monday when we arrive, everything will be closed but Bob is flying out the next day, a few days earlier than planned, it's TAX time in the US.

Large gently wafting leaf coral covered the bottom in Tobago's Englishman's bay, how beautiful, what a great color.Every time I stick my head in the water to go snorkeling I am amazed at all the things you see and live there. It is truly "magic" to be able to visit this magnificent underwater world alive with a thousand and one different creatures and plants. At one point I was surrounded by a school of thousands of little fish, the early morning light made them shine like pure silver under water. A few of them were totally see through just like gel. "Just float around and let them come to you", they are just as curious as I am - they will approach you within an inch of your face, you make one move and this big ball of fish skitters away and then comes back to check you out again. Go around the corner and find a moray eel looking at you from in between some rocks, surround your self by a school of zebra fish all with beautiful yellow stripes, see a small shark cruising the edge of the reef but don't stick your hand or finger in one of the many large clams you'll see, it will close and hold you down tight, watch the small octopus crawling around. Take a deep breath go down 15feet and propel your self along the bottom trough, large coral heads with colorful fish feeding on them they graze the coral like cows, you can hear them chomping away underwater.
I often feel like I am swimming in a very large aquarium but this is real nature, the way it is. This is the way it has been created, the way it lives and functions and how one creature cannot live without the other. Everything is in perfect harmony, what a magnificent creation! I am so lucky to be able to see this!
Then when you are back at the surface and you stick your head up look around and all you see is just water in Englishman's bay with nothing to it!

Wednesday April 03 1000hr Port of Spain Trinidad

The Trinidad and Tobago Yacht Club is going to be home for the next 2 weeks. A nice funky place with very friendly people, restaurant, bar, laundry, fuel, showers, propane pick up, and a nice slip with ocean view, what else could one ask for after another successful sail and learn voyage.
We sailed 1800 miles, motored a total of 24 hr, burning 66 liters of diesel.
Trinidad is very yacht oriented with plenty of marine stores, services, marinas, customs, sail makers etc.
Also many people store their boats here for longer periods of time, too far south for hurricanes.

Thanks to the great crew, the creator of all that is, boat, stars, waves and wind, for another wonderful adventure trip.

Fairwinds to you all

Paul Mulder