It all reminded me of a comment a newly recruited crew member made to two of my racing friends (and blog followers), as they sailed their new cruising boat out the Med.
TIME BANDIT RACING CODE
gybe to port, gybe back, code zero up, code zero down, code D up, Code D down and on it went for days on end. Having spent the last seven days, sails up and down like a â¦â¦ better not sayâ¦. Of course, the wind didn't play ball and we had a dead run pretty well right up to this morning where we are finally on a broad reach hurtling towards the lee shore that is Recife, Brazil. Part of the cunning plan to make a brief stop at Ascension Island was that it would give us a better chance of a broad reach where we could sit back and relax rather than a dead run where we're always on edge waiting for the crash gybe. Out of context, it never quite tasted the same. it's nearly midnight and then, with a rush, and a splash of Amarello over the side, well, about half a bottle actually, we A) toasted Neptune and B) got shot of the rather sickly, Baileys type cream liqueur that tasted so good of a late African evening, sat on the front of the safari 4WD, watching the hippos grunt and fart in the pool as the sun went down. The afternoon passes as does the eveningâ¦â¦ It's now dark and, like a boiling kettle, we donât seem to be getting any closer, no matter how hard we stare at the lat/long. I hope Neptune liked it or we're stuffed. it's nearly midnight and then, with a rush, and a splash of Amarula over the side, well, about half a bottle actually, we A) toasted Neptune and B) got shot of the rather sickly, Baileys type cream liqueur that tasted so good of a late African evening, sat on the front of the safari 4WD, watching the hippos grunt and fart in the pool as the sun went down.
Quite different from the last time in Indo, as us old Asian hands call it, when about twenty of us anchored on 00.00.00 and had a bit of a party - just before a squall blew in catching some revellers up their masts taking pics, some swimming between boats clutching a glass and others not on their boats at all. All day we've watched the clock as we hurtle north west up the Brazilian coast, our fourth equator crossing looming on the distant horizon. I'll just use the old ear plugs I thought. One of these houses was playing some very loud music the night we arrived and, pretty tired from our trip, I was on the verge of giving them some, "I say chaps, how about turning it down a bit?" when one of the party goers walked down to the water's edge and blew some fruit bats out the trees with his pump action shotgun. We are moored off some suspiciously large houses (Suriname is apparently quite well situated on the drug trafficking route).
Sitting in the luxury of Recife's luxurious Cabanga marina I thought Suriname was just around the corner, albeit the north east corner of South America, which is quite big, and it came as another surprise that it was yet another mega passage of nearly seventeen hundred miles to the mouth of the Suriname river where of course, having knocked ourselves silly with multiple sail changes to squeeze out an extra knot or, we arrived at midnight and dawn was at the wrong end of the tide.Ĭonsequently, after waiting on time and tide we motored up the river to where you find us now, twenty miles from the sea and just off the yacht club at Domburg. Suriname is South America's smallest country and something of a melting pot, populated by the descendants of escaped African enslaved labourers, Dutch and British colonialists, Indian, Indonesian and Chinese indentured labourers and indigenous Amerindians. To add insult to injury these "superpowers" would then play swopsies, "Hey, I'll swop you (or indeed, swap) Suriname for Manhattan. In return the locals would get inadequate accommodation, just enough food to survive, paid, or more likely unpaid employment, measles, typhoid and STD's.
The modus operandi was then to implement the Viking business model, or indeed, the Putin model and basically murder, rape and pillage until the locals were adequately subdued then ship their country's wealth back to the "mother country".
These bold adventurers went around the world claiming countries, if not whole continents, in the name of their then present king or queen. You really have to admire the sheer brass neck of the early European and British explorers. well, about 5% of Recife, we headed off to catch up with our Dutch cruising buddies on Red Max who were in Suriname, checking out their old colony.
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