Ahoy from Batopima

Ahoy World, this is our first post on batopima!

Who is Batopima?

We're Judith (J.) and Sylvestre (Sly). J. is originally from 🇳🇱 The Netherlands and Sly from 🇫🇷 France. We've been living in 🇲🇺 Mauritius, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, since 2019. We enjoy Mauritius for its tropical climate, beautiful beaches, super friendly population and general relaxedness (what we call Island Life).

We've been going on the water together for years, but as passengers: ferries, cruise ships, water taxis, river boats, catamarans... We took every opportunity we got. We've even been on more niche water vessels such as cargo ships for Sly and offshore platforms for J.!

Being a passenger on a boat is fun and all, but have you ever felt the liberating feeling of sailing by yourself on your own boat? Well, us neither. But we intend to change that as the idea of learning how to sail has been nagging us for years. Now it's 2022, and after living through a pandemic, we decided it was time to put the plan in motion.

Spending two months in Europe for the first time after moving to Mauritius, we took our first baby steps. We spent a day on a sailboat in 🇭🇷 Dubrovnik, another one in 🇪🇸 Ibiza and Sly spent a weekend passing his RYA Level 2 Powerboat Handling course in 🇪🇸 Mallorca. It was a lot of fun! Back in Mauritius, we were hooked and wanted to get into sailing for real.

What does batopima mean?

Batopima is a play of words of "gato pima" and "bato" in Mauritian Creole. Gato pima are deep fried balls of ground split peas and are among the bestsellers at any food stall on the streets of Mauritius. The name is derived from the 🇫🇷 French Gateau Piment (🇬🇧 Chilly Cake).

Here is the gato pima recipe, should you want to try it at home.

Bato is the Creole word for a boat (🇫🇷 bateau)!

As we're starting our sailing journey from Mauritius, we thought batopima would bring us good omens and smooth sailings.

What's next?

We wanted to document our "learning to sail" adventure from start to finish, with its ups and downs, successes and fails. We've just started with our first dinghy sailing lesson this week at Wildwind Mauritius.

We hope that this site will make good memories of our sailing journey and will also keep us accountable about not giving up 😊. Bonus points if we manage to make a few of you catch the sailing bug!

Last updated: August 15th, 2022