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A Lady - Sailing around the World with the World ARC



Wednesday, 23rd February 2011
 
Another beautiful morning, and skipper hopped over the side and cleaned the rest of the boot top/waterline on the port side, Looking at the boat from close quarters in the water, she is beginning to show the wear and tear of 33,000 miles at sea, not to mention the sails.
 
Later, we went ashore with the Garbage and filled a few 5L bottles with spring water. At the top of the pier, there is this
little park, a spring water park with 4 big tiled covered circular tanks, each with about 8 taps and they supply fresh spring water 365 days of the year. There is always a steady stream of locals filling their water jars, like in the "Biblical" times. While we were there, a group of council workers were busy chopping down a huge tree, not with a chain saw,but with a "machete" can you just imagine, and whats more, they were efficient and fast.
 
Midday, we hauled the anchor, washed down the mud from the chain with our fresh water power hose, (this used about 400L of sweet water) and set sail westwards towards the river, the tide was flooding.
 
We were heading for Maragojipe, a distance of 15 miles, and about 10 miles up the river. We passed half a dozen or so working sail boats or skiffs, these are beautiful to look at with their huge loose footed gaff mainsails and real tiny headsails and they sail along real fast and easy. We also passed a massive ship building dock before entering a lush green tree filled valley with some wonderful old colonial buildings dotted here and there. The river was wide and deep and with 20 knots, we sailed with just the headsail until we reached our destination. Of course, there were 3 other World ARC boats here, Tzigane, Voyageur, and Tucanon.
 
We also learned that some of the Americans who were kidnapped by the Somalie pirates have been shot. Now thats real sad news, and a bad day for sailors.
 
Later, we met "Bubbly Bev" and Moe as were went ashore, and explored the village with them before having a 1L bottle of beer each, well thats Mo and Skipper, the girls had minerals, now the beer was the equivalent of 1.5  for the 1L bottle, thats the best value we have seen in Brazil. We tried chatting with some of the locals, who were very friendly. Moe made a good hand of getting our messages across, the rest of us,  ........ double dutch..........we were like monkeys talking to monkeys, but it was funny and we had a good laugh.

Ohhh, the buses were like something from the 1st world war, the buildings were in an awful state, the churches were totally closed down and almost falling down, a real poor, but happy place. On the pier, there were plenty of people fishing, with as many more in the water swimming around the place, all laughing and giggling and generally enjoying themselves. And no crocodiles...
 
We returned to our respective boats when it got dark, we had a Lasagna from the deep freezer, listened to some music and generally enjoyed the solitude and stars sitting on this river in the middle of Brazil.
 
That's it,
 
Signed :-   Stephen  Hyde  ( Skipper )

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