Recife was a nice stop. We stayed two nights. After refuelling, Pete and I went in to the town centre along the waterfront for immigration and the police – what a performance! No Portuguese on our part and no English on theirs. Luckily the police didn’t seem very interested in any paperwork and guided us to the Port Capitaine’s office, which we would have struggled to have found on our own! We sat for a while as it was lunch time and finally got out of there with some stamped signed paperwork around 2.30. After a very nice long late lunch we went to an enormous mall and topped up groceries. Galen spent the day in appalling heat sanding and fixing up our new second hand gang plank for when we have to “med moor”. (that’s backing up to a dock and getting on and off from the steps, for those of you who don’t know). He’s working off his food bill! The marina/yacht club had nice facilities with a pool and bar/restaurant but a very, very narrow shallow channel to get in and out! We only just made it and did run into mud on the way in. “The World” was in port. That is a liner where you buy an apartment that is yours exclusively and it travels endlessly round the world in extravagant luxury very expensively. Pete and I did a tour of it when it was in Sydney some years ago. Super retirement village but a bit out of our range!
We left Recife and picked up some fishing rope on the way out! Both rudders and one prop. Luckily we had only used the engines briefly before stopping them to sail and when we noticed the lines streaming out behind us no damage had been done. It did however take Pete a snorkel on one and a 1 hour scuba dive on the other to hack out melted nylon line! Hero! After that it was a easy sail till we hit two squalls that cleaned the boat for us and had all three of us up for a few hours…..after that easy sailing again. The other boats have nearly all left the island they went to and are heading for Fortelza. We should all arrive tomorrow, Sunday 28th.
Arrived Fortaleza. A pretty ordinary marina with bits of floating dock here and there with sort of power and water! But the hotel is very nice with alovely pool area and cafes etc. Pete and I checked in to the hotel for air con, internet reasons and so far have spent most of the time drinking wine by the pool with all the others! Forteleza is a nice looking city with some very nice clean infrastructure as well as the falling down grafittied old ruins that we have noticed everywhere in Brazil but, like Recife, is cleaner and safer than Salvador. We leave here on the 3rd for Granada – about 12 days then we’ll finally be in the Caribbean! Leaving Brisbane in May 2015 till nearly now!
