Bahia de Todos os Santos at Salvador was discovered by the Portuguese in 1501 by Amerigo Vespucci. In 1530, Tome de Souza was the first governor of Brazil (named after a tree with dark wood which was used by the indigenous people to make a red dye - pau brasil) based in Salvador da Bahia, the country's first capital.
No sooner had we sent our blog, whilst cooking breakfast, the generator overheated. There ensued four days of “heads in generator compartment”. We checked fresh water coolant for seawater ingress; pumped a sample of oil from the sump looking for water; checked hoses, clamps and plugs for leakage and it remains a mystery why we’re losing around a litre of engine coolant a day. The good news is we have 20 litres of coolant and when we replace each day, the litres that we have lost, we have no overheating and we can continue to cook and make water. To be investigated more fully and hopefully solved in port.
How do you cross 3,700 nm of ocean in a vessel that only travels around 6 nm an hour? The answer is obviously slowly! For planning purposes we work on covering 150 nm per day and as you can see from the chart we started our trip on a bit of a flyer. Several days we almost achieved 200 nm. Since then our progress has slowed and at current rate we expect to be in Salvador on Thursday. A total of twenty-three days at sea.
Salvador will be the first time either of us has been in South America and we look forward to reporting our findings soon.
Leaving the V&A waterfront in Cape Town, was an exciting if nostalgic feeling. Looking back as we motored through the Bascule and Swing bridges into the bay, taking the last photographs, made us reflect on how far we had come and how lucky we were to be living our dream.
This past week at sea has been notable, as on the 20th of January, we celebrated leaving Antigua, twelve months previously, after spending an extra two weeks there having emergency rigging repairs. Additionally, to date, we have sailed 21,873 nm on this rally.
As we sailed with Jaz out of the fog and witnessed the magic of Table Mountain before us we were excited about our Cape Town visit. This early impression was not a false start and we did indeed have a wondrous time in Cape Town.
South Africa claims to be the “cradle of mankind” and north of Cape Town,ancient fossilized footprints were discovered and believed to belong to the Sans and Khoekoen tribesmen, the first known humans.
