It is high time for a new post. So many miles have been sailed and so many things have happened since our last one. We are anchored with a dozen fishing boats, in a small bay at Petit Martinique. As the name says, a very small island with a few hundred inhabitants just South of…
by Captain Bart de Zwart The South African Wild Coast runs along a rugged coastline of untouched shores and shipwrecks and is one of the most dangerous places of water in the world. Not only are there frequent storms, coming from the South-West, there is also a 4-knots current going against it. This sweeps up the waves…
by Captain Bart de Zwart It is already our last day in the Maldives. The Sun is just setting on the horizon. A few clouds make this one even more spectacular than the many others we had. Earlier we found a perfect anchorage in a pass right next to a barreling right hander and we…
by Captain Bart de Zwart The Cabrinha Quest is finally on its way. We have all waited a long time to go and travel the world again. We do this in our own style, always in search for the perfect anchorage, to do what we love most; Kiting, Surfing, Stand up paddling and winging. The…
While we were in Maldives isolated from the rest of the of the world we had access to the news and media, but everything seemed very far away. Could it effect us? Would it effect our season? Living on Discovery, having fun everyday, exploring remote atolls, looking for wind and waves it’s easy to feel the news cannot be real, that it must be overblown.
On the 21st we sailed up to Huvadhoo atoll, the world’s largest. Discovery had been in this exact same spot 10 years ago when Gavin was the skipper and I was excited to ply some of the surf he’d scored.
We stowed the kite gear, battened the hatches and pulled anchor off the shoulder of Nungas, the break we’d spent so much time surfing. With a little prawn curry in hand, curtesy of Chef Jason, we hoisted the sail and set out on the 65 mile crossing to Sumba.
The last time Discovery was in Sumba was 10 years ago. I was stoked to come across a scene that was exactly as described in Gavin’s logs nearly a decade ago.
This is the dialog we were greeted with upon anchoring in a small, touristy bay in Lombok, Indonesia. Safe to say- we, and the Aussie, ended up paying the $5 equivalent for “protection”, in what was probably the safest area on the island. Sure enough, a local boy no older than 18 showed up at sundown to guard our boat. We all laughed. Our crew and the locals knew there wouldn’t be any trouble and that the “protection” was just a ploy to get some cash out of the westerners on the nice boat in the bay. It felt silly to even deny them such a small sum.
This trip was more than perfect wind and bombing sets; it was about something bigger, something way more profound than finding an untouched wave in flawless conditions. This trip was about the urgency of our warming Earth and supporting the women who are willing to devote not only their careers, but their entire lives to making a difference.
Between three exhausted crew members and five jet-lagged guests, there would be no late night game of dirty clubs, one of the staples of the Quest. But we woke with the sun to the best accompanying wake up call there is- steady wind. After some espresso everyone was kiting or foiling across an Alice in Wonderland scene; swerving in and out of the 150ft dizzying drop offs surrounding the scattered atolls.