Amigos, Gringos, e Muito Mais! Besides providing a snug, safe anchorage and access to a great sailing playground, Itaparica also boasts various other facilities of relevance to the visiting yachtsmen, and not the least of these is the bar which, effectively, functions as an international yacht club. Amigos BBQ was founded some three or four years ago by Willem and Robyn der Merwe, a South African couple who arrived here in their yacht and liked the place too much to want…
With a coastline 5,000 miles long reaching from the equator right down to the Tropic of Capricorn and beyond, Brazil ought to offer almost unrivalled opportunities for yotties – and so it does. Here, in this one country, we can sail past palm fringed beaches one month and pine covered mountains the next. We can swelter in temperatures of over 100°F (38°C) while friends, cruising further to the south, shiver on a frosty morning and wish they had fitted the…
The Rio Paraíba, already a popular point of entry for visitors to Brazil, now boasts a new mooring facility intended expressly for low-budget yotties. Situated five miles from the river’s entrance and the port of Cabedelo, the Ribeira Adventure Club lies opposite the well-known cruising venue of Jacaré. Although the channel leading up to this mini-marina is not sufficiently deep to admit the average deep draught cruising yacht, centreboarders, catamarans, and smaller yachts can get through. Once a quiet fishing…
Our friends have been writing to us lately asking whether we’re okay. At first it was just the folks back home in England. Then people as far away as Fiji and South Africa started commenting on our situation and suggesting that we might be in some kind of danger. To be honest, we were a little bit worried ourselves before we crossed the river from Uruguay. Surely, it’s not a good idea to go and visit a country when that…
Jacaré is a fishing village situated on the eastern bank of a small muddy river. Rather than carve its way directly out into the sea, the river, on reaching the coast, seems to hesitate. It veers to the north and waits a while before finally taking the plunge. If you care to take a look at a chart of the eastern coast of Brazil you will see that most of its rivers behave in this irrational way. Each one has…