It's 2:30 a.m. on Saturday and we left Brazil at noon on Wednesday. Aside from the first two days there, where the intense post-race clean up and normal repair efforts were accompanied by the utterly delightful presence of my Columbian friend Claudia (a fellow hang glider pilot fluent in seven languages who'd flew from Columbia to Brazil just to share those two days with me...bless her...and also help all our crew and even the entire race organization with language issues), the rest of the stopover was an exhausting and never ending effort to prepare for the next leg. I was, therefore, content to leave.
It seemed that we only felt prepared (and just barely) late, late on the last night, mere hours before slipping our lines at 9:00 a.m. Wednesday morning. Once back on the water, it seemed almost peaceful to fall back into familiar routines. I'll have pictures of the stopover to post here once we're in Durban.
We're headed south of the direct course to Durban to avoid the high pressure systems (and therefore low winds) that typically form on what would be the shorter course. In the end, it's worth it to add a few hundred or even a thousand miles to go faster over all. It's cooler, which makes sleeping easier, so I feel rested and content. My face and arms are as tanned as possible but that might fade in the next weeks.
