Day 7 Canaries-Martinique

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 Saturday 15th Nov '25

A long day today.

We were running a little early to enter the port of Mindelo in Cape Verde so we slowed right down to enter at first light as it's an unknown area to me so safety first.

It started getting light around 06.30 as we slowly entered the port area with 2 other yachts a few miles behind us.  The plan was ot go straight to the fuel dock, hope nobody was there, and wait till 09:00 for it to open. 
As luck would have it the dock was empty so we tied up along side and was told by a member of the marine staff that we needed to move along a bit to allow for another cat to tie up.  Thankfully we were first in the line for when it did open.

We timed it perfectly as 2 other boats arrived looking to top up but had to anchor and wait.

When the guy came down to open up he found there was an issue with the one and only diesel pump - it was broken and we had ot wait for the engineer to come and fix it!  It's early on Saturday morning!  So Richard and Kel put there back packs on and ventured into the town to get some fresh supplies only to come back 45mins later pretty empty handed.  Not a very successful shopping trip but they did have a couple of interesting encounters with some colourful locals - they must have had a good Friday night out! 

The fuel pump eventually got fixed aftera couple of hours and we topped up with 700lts of diesel, untied the lines and headed back out to sea for the final leg to Martinique.

After so many days of motoring the wind started blowing in the right direction so we pointed the noise westward, unfurled both the head sails started sailing the trade winds.  Leaving the islands in 20+kts of wind and sailing along at 8-9kts even topping out at 10kts, about frigging time!  Since then, about 14hrs ago, we have settled into nice downwind sailing rhythm and averaged around 7.5kts without the motors.

Only 2,150nm to go.......


Departing Mindelo, Cape Verde 




Wing on wing sailing 


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