Dena and I (James) met about 28 years ago at a performance of a play written by a friend and former band mate of mine. After that show, we made a date for about a week later. The date was set for October 25, 1996, and the occasion was the Black Dog Forge’s annual Halloween party, a Seattle hipster mainstay event for well over a decade. Dena came to the party dressed as a flapper with long black feathers in her hair and I wore a suit. Even though she had classes from 8am to 7pm the next day, Dena and I stayed up most of the night talking and we have been very much into each other ever since.
About 28 years later, we sailed into a crystal clear cove indenting the island of Brava in the country of Cabo Verde in the middle of the Atlantic flow of the Earth’s one big ocean. Still so into each other!
The longevity is a side effect of being people who made promises they could keep, promises we continue to want to keep. We continue to work at this and our intertwined adventure continues.
Our adventures since that first year in Seattle have taken us most of the way around this big blue world. From the Pacific Northwest to San Fransisco Bay under sail. From the Bay Area to Hawaii. From Hawaii to India, India to the United States Eastern Seaboard. From Florida to Bermuda. Bermuda to the Azores. The Azores to Madeira, on to the Canary Islands and down the African coast to the Cabo Verde chain, where we are anchored today. 28 incredible years of this!
After we sailed into the tiny cove on the southwestern corner of the island of Brava for some much needed rest and repairs, it suddenly occurred to us that we were only about 48 hours away from our 28th anniversary. We’re never in any big hurry to get any particular somewhere so we opted to celebrate this year’s turn around the sun in this beautiful place.
A couple of days before, we hiked up the mountain (the only way to get there from the cove) to the village of Tantum, scoped the place out pretty thoroughly, and discovered there wasn’t really a venue for celebratory occasions. Oh sure, there was a very cool bar that has live music at night but we wanted to start our day early, before the sun pounded the mountain trail, and end it well before dark so we wouldn’t have to do the precipitous descent by flashlight. We launched the little boat and rowed in before 9am to catch a ride into the island’s capitol, Nova Sintra.
The praia may have sand down there somewhere, but it’s well hidden by smooth rocks that slide and turn underfoot. James lined us up and I (Dena) launched myself out of the dinghy holding the painter. I ended up on my ass in the water, no big deal because I was in my swim suit, and then scrambled up so I could pull the dinghy up higher with each wave. The swell was bigger than we’d yet seen but we handled it.
The climb, this time, seemed less taxing. I think it’s partly familiarity, partly pacing, but also our leg muscles have been tasked with a lot of hard cycling over the years and they’re very responsive to exercise. I believe that we were actually, literally, stronger the second time we climbed that cliff.
We arrived in good time to catch the first aluguer (hired conveyance for people and goods). The driver watched some kids play ball while folks got their orders together.
The driver of the four-door small truck ended up with a bunch of lists and money, and a passenger contingent consisting of James, me (Dena), and another woman in the back seat (poor lady, having to be next to my sweaty self!) plus another woman sitting shotgun. I thought this was a full vehicle and I wouldn’t learn better until the afternoon.
We were fully halfway there before the guy got out of second gear into third. Most of the trip was done in either first gear or second. He was no slouch, either. He rocketed around blind switchback turns with breathtaking insouciance and took straightaways at breakneck pace, but we got to Nova Sintra whole and hearty.
And hungry! A little sightseeing, strolling along the monthly flea market (a sales-tax-free day that brings out all kinds of goods), got us through the too-early-for-lunch period and we went seeking sustenance. A guy who heard us talking stopped us for conversation. He’d been raised partly in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, but got deported at some point and enjoyed speaking English. We talked a while, compared notes on the whole set of towns we have lived and worked in around the Narragansett and Boston areas, and asked for advice on where to get a special celebratory meal. He said to look for the hotel that’s like a castle, so we did.
No joy. Maybe we have different ideas of what castles look like? Instead, we ended up at the Secreto.
Though lapas (limpets) were on the menu, they didn’t have any. We got two orders of the garupa and figured we’d be overfed and happy by the end. Boy, were we right!
You wouldn’t think that grocery shopping would be a thrilling part of an anniversary celebration, but we are about to head back out on the big blue, so provisioning is crucial. By the time we leave, we will have eaten an extra, unanticipated two weeks worth of food. Re-upping a bit felt good, though we kept it as light as possible given the need to carry it all down the cliff before we could get it to the boat.
Shopping done, we were still an hour early for catching our ride. We sat in the town’s central garden, drank a shot of grogue each, and admired the flowers.
The same driver who brought us to Nova Sintra would be returning to Tantum and said we should meet him at the Mercado de Peixe at 2pm. We were about ten minutes early.
Like we said before, the driver of the aluguer had stocked up on lists and demands from the locals of Tantum and had an admirable memory to say the least. From the fish market, we loaded up humans (8 at that point), about 80 liters of fuel from the local gas station and a shit ton of various bags of fishes bound back to Tantum.
From the stinky gas station, we went back to the fish market (!back!) to pick up the rest of the crew.
As we left Nova Sintra, we had a total of 11 adults, two children, 80 liters of fuel, about 60 kilos of fish, another 50 kilos of measuring equipment and two backpacks of our groceries.
…and that’s before we stopped in Nossa Senhora do Monte so that all of the other passengers could go grocery shopping and then stopped again at a school where a self-acclaimed charmer joined us four(!) on the left-side bench. All-in-all, I would say that poor little pickup truck had maybe two tons of people, food, fuel and equipment aboard…just another Friday on the island of Brava. Not only was this the longest 10 kilometer ride of our adult lives, it was a whole lot of fun. It took about 2 and a half hours to cover that distance, which we maybe could have walked faster if it weren’t often steeply climbing or descending, but we absolutely made the best of it, each and every cobblestone along the way. When we got back to Tantum, all we had to do was descend a mountain (don’t worry, this time we had both socks and water) and row our little boat back to our anchored sovereign nation, S/VSN-E Cetacea.
And just like that we were back on the boat with our kitty, reveling in another incredible celebration of another turn around the sun together.
