Update by guest John Heller (13 years old)

2 January 2013

“The journey from São Nicolau was the longest and by far the roughest; it was over 24 hours long.

The trip started after the tour of the island because we wanted to be at Boa Vista to celebrate New Year. Normally we would have had a BBQ on the beach. Floris told us that the time of arrival would be around five in the evening the next day so they could do some last minute shopping. This was told us after a stunning meal of Indonesian rice table made by our ships chef Wouter. While we were eating dinner the ship had already set sail, well actually we just motored to get past the east point of São Nicolau, “Or else we would be at Santiago if we started sailing now.” Floris told us.

I had watch from four in the morning to eight so I went to bed after dinner.  So I wasn’t there when they raised the sails, but the mizzen, the main sail, the schooner and the foresail were all up when I came on deck. I came to the aft deck and saw that we weren’t making the best of progress, we were just beyond the east point of São Nicolau and had made one tack and we were only making three knots. In our watch we raised the inner jib and tacked once. When the time for breakfast arrived we had a buffet instead of the usual sit down breakfast because it was so rough. There weren’t much people for breakfast and after breakfast I took a lovely snooze and stayed in bed most of the day ‘conserving energy’ and came out for lunch, Wouter had made us some asparagus soup which was very nice, but hard to eat in the rough swell. We had a dinner of lasagne that I must say was one of the best I ever had. After dinner I went up to the wheelhouse and checked our position, we expected to drop anchor just before twelve.  At five minutes to twelve we where there and we celebrated the New Year with champagne and partied until three in the morning.”