Floripa - Baia Sul

When Dave stuck his head out of the fore-hatch in the morning, he was staring into the whites of the eyes of one of the fishermen. It turns out we had anchored right in the middle of one of their spots, and they were hauling nets all around us. We took this as our cue to leave. It was going to be an upwind sail to the top of Baia Sul, so we figured we'd get at it before the northerly wind got up too much.

We are hard-core, so we went out with ONE reef in the main. But no headsail. There's a narrow gap to get into Baia sul, with a really strategically placed fortress on the one side of it. Good on you porra's of old. When we turned the corner, the upwind part wasn't as arduous as we had expected. The only part was having to tack up the channel which was quite narrow in places. The depth alarm was set at 3m, so it was much akin to doing one of those tack-on-the-whistle exercises that you do when you're training.

At a point, the breeze dropped down, so we shook out the reef and put the #3 headsail up. The channel had become wider, and we could go a bit longer before slamming the alarm crash-tacks in. A cool thing that we saw was a military chopper and RIB practicing a search and rescue maneuvre. I will admit that I may have soiled myself when the chopper flew overhead and dropped a smoking package in the water near us, but no harm done.

We arrived at the yacht club and got ushered to the diesel jetty by a guy named Berto, who was the skipper of a little yellow cruising boat in the marina. The staff were friendly and helpful, and even told us about the 2 free days that we get without us having to ask/beg/negotiate in broken portuguese for it. Berto even talked the manager into giving us a walk-on mooring so we didn't have to moor outside. 

The three items of good news for the day were:

1. We have a free walk-on mooring for 2 days

2. Ricardo's arrival at 7pm

3. Goldy's arrival at 11pm

  3.1 The zoo biscuits that Goldy brought from home

  3.2 The 5 Roses tea that Goldy brought from home

  3.3 The Futurelife that Goldy brought from home

  3.4 The home-made biscuits that Goldy brought from Ricardo's mom

The evening brought a massive storm with plenty of cloud and wind and rain from the west (funny direction). We figured that Ric would probably have flown through it. It put spanners in our braai plans, let me tell you that. We weren't stoked to be cooking our meat on the gas stove inside the boat while it poured outside.

Ric arrived with a lot less beard than when he left us. It's taking some getting used to. I am still not convinced that this guy is Ricardo, but he talks the talk.

Goldy arrived close to midnight, and woke everyone when he arrived. Pretty inconsiderate if you ask me, but he did bring the Zoo Biscuits, so we'll overlook that.