Who: Laurence and Lucas, Maya, Titouan and Lou
Where: Sine Saloum, Sénégal
Multihull: Looping 50
Blog: www.cattleyaalamer.wordpress.com / www.voilessansfrontieres.org
We are writing to you from the Siné Saloum: two pirogues are passing each other, a cart pulled by a donkey passes in the distance, pelicans are flying around the boat and the sun has finally appeared after a day of rain. It’s already been a month since we’ve arrived in Senegal. After a rather trying stay in Dakar, marked by hours spent in taxis and traffic jams, we set off for the calmer lands of the islands of the Sine Saloum. The approach to Djiffer at the mouth of the river was not charted, but the pass was buoyed. We dropped anchor for the night among the tied-up pirogues, picked out by a spotlight and in front of what we thought was a pontoon. The next day, we sailed up the main arm of the Saloum, happy to stop in the heart of the mangrove, opposite a village. As soon as we arrived, we tried swimming: very pleasant in the warm, salty water, with a current which was sometimes strong and with which the children loved to play. A dozen schoolchildren from the village quickly came to join us. Their presence on the boat’s sugar scoops at first proved to be a bit disconcerting, but finally very friendly! The mangrove is inhabited by monkeys, which delighted us with a visit, the surroundings by hyenas and jackals, which we sometimes thought we heard in the evening. We shared our first Senegalese dish, ‘yassa au cochon’, with a family, in big shared plates placed on the ground. Deliciously spicy! During our strolls through the village, the locals greeted us and often stopped to discuss with us. We witnessed the manufacture of bricks, the baker showed us his oven, a fisherman explained to us how he made his pirogue watertight and how he painted it, a woman showed us the fish dryers, a group of fishermen who had come together to drink tea told us how they organized their trips out to sea. We had lots of encounters, always pleasant and often unexpected! We don’t think we have ever shaken so many hands in our life!
