Sao Francisco Do Sul

Hello to one and all who have the staying-power to still check here for the intermittent blog posts. As we approach the one year mark for this trip, the comments solicited regarding my blog postings ranging from “too short” to “too long” to “needs to use a spell checker”. So I shall endeavour to keep this at strictly minimum length, and the spell checker is in full force (I'd like to point out that up to this point, sans a laptop and hence writing all blog posts at internet cafes, using a spell checker on a Portuguese computer isn't of great use).

So a bit of past and present geography – after spending the last 3 months, gives or take, in Isla Grande, we have finally moved on to a new location, Sao Francisco Do Sul, which is 300 odd-miles further down the coast. We are now in technically a “southern state”, Santa Catarina I think, which is famed for a cooler climate and Germans.

The sail down was very good, considering that there's a general glut of any wind whatsoever. We had some windless hours - where we resorted to using up a the little diesel we had in the tank - but it was quite a mixed bag, having a first night of force 6 winds from the south, a good 6 hours of 15 knot wind from the north, and a last night of strength from the east. 4 days for 320 miles we consider a pretty good run.

Our new home for the next couple of weeks is a quaint little town for a large industrial shipping port. When we signed in, the last yacht here was Sula, a boat owned by an our Aussie buddy Ron who we met in Isla Grande and who left Sao Francisco about 6 months ago. We know this because they worked out how to do our paperwork by copying the sign-in form from Sula. So quite a change from the tourist-happy trappings of our last stop.

Now back in civilisation, we can now get back to normal boaty life which we've missed out on since Rio: cooking real food; sleeping during the night and generally being awake in the day; wearing shoes.

I am fastly approaching “mid-sized” blog post, so I shall use the last paragraph for a brief overview of what is planned the next few months. We have 3 months on our Brazil visas, which we will be using most of here, Rio Grande, and perhaps a stop or two in-between. We want to leave for Cape Town at the beginning of November – a month-long sail – so two or three months in Brazil leaves a couple of months each in Uruguay and Argentina, where we will start to get prepped for the crossing.

We are now back with a camera, so I shall get uploading some photos – mostly scenery stuff from the last month to make you all jealous, but perhaps the odd shot of Jennie drunk and, for the ladies, of John wearing his thermal gear, so watch this space.