Days 126-127: Sea Days - Cruising The Bay Of Guinea Towards Senegal
For the next few days, we're sailing over 1,000 nautical miles from Ghana to Dakar, Senegal, across the Bays Of Guinea and Sierra Leone. This part of the world has always fascinated me, even when I was a young kid into geography. I remember taking a world map and carefully cutting out the shapes of Africa and South America. Then I slid them together - and .. wow .. they fitted! I thought I had made major scientific discovery at age 7. Alas, I was only 150 years late to determine one of the most visible signs of plate tectonics. But here's what happened. Up to 200 million years ago, Antarctica was joined to South America, Africa, India, and Australia as a huge supercontinent called Gondwanaland. Then, they split up, like leaving a party. Antarctica left first, and other landmasses drifted away until only South America and Africa remained. They parted company, quite amicably, somewhere around 80 million years ago, forming what we now call the South Atlantic Ocean. The picture ...