Cape Verde

Cape Verde — Cabo Verde, officially, and increasingly in English too — sits some 570 kilometres off the coast of Senegal, ten volcanic islands split by the trade winds into windward and leeward halves. This dossier keeps to the windward group: Mindelo, on São Vicente, whose flooded-caldera harbour has been sheltering ships since the age of coal; Santo Antão next door, one narrow strait away and among the sharpest hiking country in the Atlantic; and Sal and Boa Vista further east, low, dune-blown islands built for wind and open water. The climate barely varies — dry, sun-struck, carried by a trade wind that rarely drops — and every November it becomes something else again: the last proper landfall before a few hundred boats point west and do not see land again for two or three weeks.

“Eight hundred and fifty nautical miles out of Las Palmas, and Mindelo is still the last harbour worth the name before the trades carry a yacht clean across the Atlantic.”

Provisioning has real limits here, and it pays to plan around them. Mindelo carries the best-stocked supermarkets and the only proper fresh market among these four islands, though what is on the shelves shifts with whichever supply boat called last; meat and cheese thin out fast once you leave São Vicente, so the sensible move is to load up there before running on to Sal or Boa Vista, and load up again before any Atlantic crossing. Fruit and vegetables travel better — bananas, papaya, mango, whatever Santo Antão's terraced valleys are sending down that week.

Signature anchorages

Four islands, one trade wind, and almost no shelter that was not put there on purpose.

• Mindelo — Porto Grande Bay, São VicenteA flooded volcanic caldera and one of the Atlantic's great natural deep-water harbours — a coaling station for steamships from the mid-1800s, now home to Marina Mindelo: 144 berths on 720m of pontoon, yachts to 50m LOA (length overall), draft alongside to around 4.5m. Bigger yachts anchor off in the bay itself and tender in; Cabnave, the state shipyard around the point, is the only proper repair yard for a long way in any direction.
• Sal — Palmeira & Murdeira BayPalmeira is the island's official port of entry: an open roadstead outside the small harbour, 6–12m over sand, good holding, exposed to the trade-wind gusts that also keep it from turning sloppy. No marina, no pontoons — clear in with the harbourmaster and immigration, then move round to Murdeira Bay, a reef-sheltered marine reserve near Santa Maria's hotel strip, for the stay itself.
• Santo Antão — Porto Novo & the interior on footSanto Antão has no harbour worth the name; the crossing is the point. The Canal de São Vicente funnels the trade winds into a short, sharp strait, gusts to 30–40kt through the winter months, so most yachts send the shore party over on the Porto Novo ferry — under an hour — rather than fight it by tender. Ashore, a road climbs to the Cova crater, a farmed volcanic caldera at around 1,500m, for the walk down through the Xô-Xô valley to Ribeira Grande, or the cobbled coastal path north from Ponta do Sol to the cliff-edge village of Fontainhas.
• Boa Vista — Sal ReiAnchor off the islet of Ilhéu de Sal Rei, 4–6m, protected by the reef and its outlying rocks, and dinghy in to the quay or the beach — no marina here either. Ashore: fort ruins on the islet, the dune-blown Deserto de Viana a short drive from the airport, and the rusting wreck of the Cabo Santa María on the north coast, aground since 1968. Boa Vista also carries the majority of Cape Verde's loggerhead turtle nesting, June to October — outside the crossing season, but worth knowing.

The scene

Carnival in February, a free festival on a full-moon weekend in August, and the club that still carries morna's name.

Table & stay ashore

Four addresses, one on each island — none of them chasing a star, all of them the reason to go ashore.

A week, sketched

Pair with

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