Jill started sailing at the age of three weeks and spent her formative years messing about in racing dinghies in Chichester Harbour. She made her first blue-water passage at the age of 18 but it was to be a further ten years before she was shanghaied by the skipper and started her career as an ocean-going hobo.
Jill has written a handful of books and has many more in the pipeline, but her true vocation is as an artist.
Jacaré is a fishing village situated on the eastern bank of a small muddy river. Rather than carve its way directly out into the sea, the river, on reaching the coast, seems to hesitate. It veers to the north and waits a while before finally taking the plunge. If you care to take a look at a chart of the eastern coast of Brazil you will see that most of its rivers behave in this irrational way. Each one has…
For yachtsmen sailing to Brazil or to the West Indies, the Cape Verde islands lie only a biscuit’s toss from the proper route across the North Atlantic. Like the Canaries, the Cape Verde archipelago makes an ideal stepping stone for the seafarer – and yet remarkably few yachts put in here. Those that do stop tend to go only to Mindelo (Sao Vicente) or to Palmeira (Sal). It is true that the number of visitors has increased radically over the…
The shortest route is not necessarily the quickest or the easiest The passage from the Cape Verdes across the Atlantic to the north-eastern corner of Brazil is pretty much the shortest ocean crossing that one can possibly make – it’s less than half the distance of the passage between the Canary Islands and the Caribbean – but although the miles are far fewer, weather conditions on this route are apt to be somewhat less favourable. Somehow or other you have…
Discounting domestic animals, there are only 13 species of mammal resident in the Cape Verde islands. Three of them are bats, one is a mongoose, and the others are all dolphins and whales – which is cheating, if you ask me. There are also 19 or 20 reptiles living here – but don’t panic, because none of them are snakes. In fact, five of them are turtles, which come here to breed, and the others are all lizards, skinks, and…
Unless you have never visited the islands and have been entirely fooled by the name, flora will be the last thing that comes to mind when you think of the Cape Verdes – but in fact the place is actually quite interesting to a devoted botanist. Of the plants which somehow managed to reach the archipelago without man’s intervention (thereby earning themselves the name of indigenous species) there are 80 which have evolved to become genetically different from their ancestors…
Bearing in mind the nature of our lifestyle, it probably goes without saying that Caesar, Xoë, and Roxanne are all home-schooled. Caesar once spent about two weeks at a school in St Helena, in the South Atlantic, and Xoë has sampled both the English school curriculum, as applied in St Helena, and that of a Spanish school. Two weeks of each was quite sufficient to enable her to form an opinion of The System and to stick with our DIY…
Inasmuch as it consists of just a few fragments of rock, flung far away from the continent and strewn across almost two hundred miles of ocean, the Republic of Cape Verde is superficially similar to the Canaries or the Azores; but in reality, geographic structure and a similar sort of lingo are pretty much the only things that this archipelago holds in common with those other two places.
Las Palmas, political capital of the Canary Islands, has been nominated as Europe’s Cultural Capital for the year 2016. Well… I don’t know what a city has to do to qualify for this role, but I would have thought that it might involve having a bit of… well, you know… a bit of culture, and all that… European cultural centres which spring to mind include Rome, Athens, Venice, London, Lisbon, Edinburgh, Paris, Avignon, Seville, Toledo, Santiago de Compostela, Cadiz, Granada;…
El Hierro is probably the least visited of the Canary Islands. Certainly it is the smallest and the most remote. Until recent times there was no regular ferry service linking it to the rest of the archipelago, and there is still no airport. However, do not be deluded into thinking that this means that El Hierro is entirely rustic. It is certainly rural and it is surprisingly green in parts, but it is not the “peasanty” pastoral place that we…
Some months ago we gave you our thoughts on hitch-hiking. If you’re a singlehander then the advantages of having an extra crew-member aboard are obvious, but so too are the disadvantages; and if you’re not short of watch-keepers then there is no reason whatsoever for allowing a complete stranger to take up residence in your home. Having established that fact we then provided some words of advice for that class of persons who hangs around on the waterfront, confident in…