The shortest route is not necessarily the quickest or the easiest The passage from the Cape Verdes across the Atlantic to the north-eastern corner of Brazil is pretty much the shortest ocean crossing that one can possibly make – it’s less than half the distance of the passage between the Canary Islands and the Caribbean – but although the miles are far fewer, weather conditions on this route are apt to be somewhat less favourable. Somehow or other you have…
Articles by Jill Dickin Schinas
Discounting domestic animals, there are only 13 species of mammal resident in the Cape Verde islands. Three of them are bats, one is a mongoose, and the others are all dolphins and whales – which is cheating, if you ask me. There are also 19 or 20 reptiles living here – but don’t panic, because none of them are snakes. In fact, five of them are turtles, which come here to breed, and the others are all lizards, skinks, and…
Unless you have never visited the islands and have been entirely fooled by the name, flora will be the last thing that comes to mind when you think of the Cape Verdes – but in fact the place is actually quite interesting to a devoted botanist. Of the plants which somehow managed to reach the archipelago without man’s intervention (thereby earning themselves the name of indigenous species) there are 80 which have evolved to become genetically different from their ancestors…
Bearing in mind the nature of our lifestyle, it probably goes without saying that Caesar, Xoë, and Roxanne are all home-schooled. Caesar once spent about two weeks at a school in St Helena, in the South Atlantic. Xoë has sampled both the English school curriculum as applied in St Helena and that of a Spanish school. Two weeks of each was quite sufficient to enable her to form an opinion of The System. Based on the reports received from her…
Inasmuch as it consists of just a few fragments of rock, flung far away from the continent and strewn across almost two hundred miles of ocean, the Republic of Cape Verde is superficially similar to the Canaries or the Azores; but in reality, geographic structure and a similar sort of lingo are pretty much the only things that this archipelago holds in common with those other two places.
Las Palmas, political capital of the Canary Islands, has been nominated as Europe’s Cultural Capital for the year 2016. Well… I don’t know what a city has to do to qualify for this role, but I would have thought that it might involve having a bit of… well, you know… a bit of culture, and all that… European cultural centres which spring to mind include Rome, Athens, Venice, London, Lisbon, Edinburgh, Paris, Avignon, Seville, Toledo, Santiago de Compostela, Cadiz, Granada;…
El Hierro is probably the least visited of the Canary Islands. Certainly it is the smallest and the most remote. Until recent times there was no regular ferry service linking it to the rest of the archipelago, and there is still no airport. However, do not be deluded into thinking that this means that El Hierro is entirely rustic. It is certainly rural and it is surprisingly green in parts, but it is not the “peasanty” pastoral place that we…
Some months ago we gave you our thoughts on hitch-hiking. If you’re a singlehander then the advantages of having an extra crew-member aboard are obvious, but so too are the disadvantages; and if you’re not short of watch-keepers then there is no reason whatsoever for allowing a complete stranger to take up residence in your home. Having established that fact we then provided some words of advice for that class of persons who hangs around on the waterfront, confident in…
Much as we enjoy gawping at the super-yachts and at the Big Stuff going about its daily business on the other side of the port, for us the best thing about Las Palmas is the other cruising folk. As I said at the outset of the previous article, hundreds of yachts pass through the port each year and amongst this little lot there are bound to be friends, old or new. Usually it is the boats themselves which attract our…
You meet some nice people cruising. Nice people, and interesting boats. A few months ago we happened upon a multi-national team of English, Indonesian, and South African nationals who were sailing a Phoenician ship around Africa. And then we ran into a bunch of really crazy guys who were just about to set off across the ocean on a plastic raft. One of the best places to see a wide variety of interesting boats is Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. The…
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