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…
A mutual desire to seek out the world’s most remote and dynamic kitesurfing and surfing locations, while building awareness and inspiring solutions to the environmental crisis has culminated into a five year agreement between Cabrinha and Offshore Odysseys. The expedition is called The Cabrinha Quest.
Jody gets another cover and a 17 page spread of her work around the world!
I asked her to do this because I knew I wouldn’t have the words to describe, to explain, to illustrate what the expedition has meant to us, or to those who have joined along the way. Of course photos are only a slice of the picture, a fabulous collage pieced together somewhat magically and very haphazardly as we slowly worked our way around the world. There’s been a plentiful supply of blood, pain, laughter, disappointments, discoveries, and of course moments that are too special to ever try to represent with words.
I’ve been trying to write our final log of the Cape Verdes for over a month now. It’s not that I can’t remember what happened, and it’s not that I don’t have a story to tell. I experienced some of the most magical days of my life in those dry islands off the west coast of Africa and I’d like to describe how that feels.
A few days before the tsunami hit Japan and the horrors that followed life on board Discovery seemed to be almost on autopilot. Cape Verde had been serving up heaping platters of wind and waves and while my list of projects had grown beyond the boundaries of our “to do” whiteboard, none of them were all that critical. Well, other than replacing a prop, which had mysteriously fallen off. A three thousand dollar rather critical component vanished to the sea floor.
The Cape Verdes lie in the path of this hazy swath which resembles the locust swarms we’d seen in Madagascar- thick and inescapable. But as soon as we left port on that first trip before the fall of the New Year another place and country began to take shape. … On the way to the guests’ hotel I made one final effort to find a portable generator I could run on deck (previous attempts had come up empty), struggling to communicate my need to the taxi driver using a mix of Spanish, English and very poor Portuguese, which was all he spoke.
We’ve put together this 2010 highlight reel for all our owners, guests and well- anyone who has ever had interest in playing in the Indian Ocean as we covered just about all of it this past season. This will be mostly a slideshow from the field but I’ll give you a little run-down as well. Don’t miss the slideshow at the end!
I feel like I’ve been chewing on cotton. My lips are cracked and my hips are sore and I look again to the east, hoping again for the grayness of dawn to arrive. We have no food and our only jug of water has been contaminated with ocean and sand. I am huddled down with 7 other people in a bed made of two nylon paragliders. The fabric becomes an alarm clock every time we are blasted by wind or when one of us struggles to find a new spot on their body to relieve from the hard sand. If I had a watch I’d check it for the thousandth time. The blanket of night refuses to lift. I try not to think about water and cuss silently to myself for orchestrating this mess. My body begs for sleep but my mind stammers off again, reconstructing how ended up here.