A start I wasn't expecting!

I left Las Palmas with an enormous sense of pride and excitement but also an element of anxiety as we set off for Cape Verde.

As we left the harbour entrance at midday on Sunday to

make our way to the start line, there was brass band music blasting through the speakers and we were surrounded by horns beeping. The breakwaters were lined with crowds cheering and the end of all the pontoons had

people waving us off. It was a rallying atmosphere, very friendly and a send off we were not expecting. As each of the boats went through, the guy on the speaker would shout/sing ‘goodbye’ in their language, which gave me a sense of pride and a rush of adrenaline.

When we made it out of the harbour we were then faced with a maze of around 70 boats all sailing around at decent speeds of around 5/6 knots in quite a confined space, waiting for the start, it was like a game of dodge ball, trying not to be hit. It was quite scary at times as the wind got up so we were constantly tacking to avoid collisions and some of these boats are immense. There were also big coast guard boats around so it was quite a stressful start! We managed to time it well so we crossed the start line with the gun even though we are not racing but this only meant that this maize of boats were funnelled into an even smaller area. We came close to a collision when a ketch that had all 3 sails up was on autopilot and no one on watch but we were also being sandwiched by another boat. Manfred started shouting at them, which sorted the situation, but I have never sailed so close to another boat in my life. Quite quickly the bigger boats started to show off by putting their spinnakers up and boomed off into the distance whilst we were left bobbing around with a couple other boats going at around 1 knot in very little wind. One of the biggest boats in the fleet, 62 foot Halburg Raasay, which had an incredible spinnaker with blue and white stripes with a enormous bear in the middle, came speeding up behind us at about 7/8 knots which was pretty exciting as its sail was just so huge but it did take the little wind we had.

After a while we gave up and put the motor on which we continued until Monday Afternoon when the wind finally picked up from the NE. Just before we had dinner we had some visitors- a pod of dolphins, which were lovely and very playful, even one hit our anchor, which shows how close they were. They also stayed much longer than usual giving us a chance to attempt yet again to get some video and photos. It is much harder than you may think to capture them but we finally got some descent video but it needs a lot of editing! We then started to rocket off and boomed through the night at around 7/8 knots, which is pretty insane for Teko Too!!