We set sail from Lanzarote in the Canary Islands on June 23, 2024 and had the LoveBot rig set up astern within minutes of getting underway. Immediately we knew there was something wrong! It wasn’t able to recognize a course which meant we still had some tweaking to do. The Monitor Windvane (LoveBot) self-steering system is a truly rugged piece of kit but, make no mistake about it, it must be finely tuned or it doesn’t work at all. Because our Monitor sits so far off our Norwegian stern, working on it while underway posed some serious problems.
The cool thing about being in an island chain in the middle of the ocean is that there are plenty of bolt-holes to drop the hook for emergency repairs or adjustments.
About 35nm from our anchorage off Lanzarote was a very nice little cove tucked into the island of Fuertaventura, one island west of Lanzarote. We made very little to-do about the fact that this was the first time we’d sailed west in well over a year but we did have a few other things on our minds.
We put the hook down in a lovely (although rolly) little cove called Pozo Negro (Black Sands) and went to work on fine-tuning the LoveBot the very next morning.
It took us about an hour to get LoveBot dialed in but we made the mistake of looking at the 10-day on Windy! I (James) have been grumbling about that stupid app for a few months now because, for me, it seems to be a little too much information with totally scary graphics to illustrate their predictions. Now granted, weather tech has exploded in accuracy the last few years with Elon’s lower orbit bombardment of high albedo telescope distortion but at some point a sailor just has to get-the-fuck underway. Sure, we looked at all the models and they all said the same fucking thing and that was…we’d have intense seas within 100nm off the African coast and winds to match in the Canary Islands acceleration zone but we were done with the Canary Islands…we have a totally awesome sailboat…a bunch of great food aboard so, yeah, we’re out!
July 3rd, 2024, was an absolutely perfect sailing day! With a single reef in the mainsail, we sailed off the hook from Pozo Negro on a downwind run for an island chain only 1000 nautical miles due south and a little west of where we were on that day.
Dena gave the Monitor one more adjustment from the cockpit and we haven’t had to worry about it since then. We set the self-steering system up before we left the anchorage and didn’t strike it again for a week after leaving the Canaries. LoveBot drove Cetacea with a sublime perfection that truly blew our minds. Every little gust and wind-direction change sent the air vane over and the water paddle immediately twisted and then swung to pull the tiller the right direction decisively if not with suddenness, depending on how fast we were going through the water.
One of our favorite stories about our sail to Hawaii way back in 2006 is about the complete lack of ship traffic. We saw a total of four ships the entire 20-day trip and only one of them, a dumb cruise ship, didn’t answer our hails and provide us with a weather update. For this leg of our global circumnavigation, that was not to be the case.
Because of that stupid war in the Middle East and the drought in and around the Panama Canal, ship traffic around the globe has been forced to reestablish the more traditional routes from days of old, meaning Cape of Good Hope around South Africa and Cape Horn around South America. Every ship that has to make either of those capes from Europe or the Mediterranean heads south from the Straits of Gibraltar, hugging the western shore of the African coast…right about where we were over the past couple of weeks. And we saw literally hundreds of ships! At one point, I saw 18 AIS signatures within 10 miles of us and most of those ships were in excess of 600 ft. long. So even though LoveBot was holding our course like a champ, we still had to maintain our watches, steadfast and alert 24/7.
During the day it was easier because it never happens fast. Even if a 1000 ft. ship is coming at us at 13 knots, we didn’t really have to do any avoidance maneuvers until we were absolutely sure they couldn’t see us and they were on a collision course. At that point we’d hail them on the VHF, tell them where and what we were and hopefully all agree to change course enough to miss each other, allowing for a 100% survival rate aboard both vessels.
At night it’s a different story all together. At one point, I gybed the boat three times on one overnight dog watch to avoid three different enormous ships traveling at about 12 knots (a little over twice our speed at the time). We don’t have an AIS (Automatic Identification System) transceiver, only a receiver, meaning we could see them but they couldn’t see us unless they were actively looking at their radar. Most of those ships didn’t know we were there until we told them we were. Usually, it was no big deal for them to adjust their course for avoidance but sometimes the shipping lane was so packed that any course adjustment for a giant ship at sea was a dangerous one. We dodged as necessary.
Ultimately we adjusted our course to go about 15nm further offshore and that more or less did the trick. The problem was those giant ships stacking up around that pinching point between the Canary Islands and Morocco and us being right in the middle of it all. Once clear of all the ship traffic and the island acceleration zone, we were able to relax a bit and enjoy the ride.
The days flowed with the seas behind us and memories blended into each other like the yellow sunrises and sunsets. One reef in the mainsail then two reefs then back to one was all we did to our sail arrangement until we could feel the influence of the Cabo Verde chain of islands. On day 9, I (James) spotted land off the port bow about 5 nautical miles out. It was the island of Boavista. We had been electric-motor-sailing on glass water for about 18 hours so we were seriously considering dropping the hook off Sal Rei, the capitol of Boavista, for a few days of propulsion battery charge but, as we rounded the point of the island, we felt that wind freshen up and opted to continue on.
The Cabo Verde Islands are warm and friendly not only in their weather patterns but also in the people we interacted with almost immediately after making landfall. Our approach to the Republic of Cabo Verde’s capitol city of Praia on the island of Santiago was like so many approaches we’ve experienced through the years of being underway on this beautiful planet…it was like a dream, a dream that you have always wanted to live in the real…a dream about living your dreams.
Landfall, Praia, Santiago in the African country of Cabo Verde, Saturday July 13th. Ten days, eight hours, and fifty-three minutes from our anchorage off Pozo Negro on the island of Fuertaventura in the Canary Island chain, and we are home once again.
