ADVANCED ONLY - Thursday Feb. 28 - Thursday March 6 '08

PRICE - The price is £795 per person basic cost in Hotel Pontao with b/b
flights, transfer and Visas on the direct UK service. £128 board hire and £250 for fantastic Jem Hall tuition.

FLIGHT - 5.5 hours direct with the kit friendly Air Astraues

THE CENTRE - The Club Mistral centre is located directly in front of the Belorizonte Hotel right on the superb, endless beach of Santa Maria on the island of Sal. We have by far the best location in the bay of Santa Maria, because it offers the finest of sandy beach and boundless space. You will find all kinds of amenities, ranging from lots of room, a boutique, to the Atlantis bar/restaurant and an internet cafe doubling as an ice-cream parlour.

THE SAILING - The location is extremely varied: in front of the centre, the water is a little choppy with a slight shorebreak. If the shorebreak becomes somewhat stronger, the team will help you carry your material in and out of the water. Sail past the jetty from here, in-between a number of small fishing boats, and you will enter the Santa Maria speed track, where you can blast away to your heart's content or gybe through the turquoise water. Further out, there is a swell for wave novices. The cross-offshore or sideshore wind from the left allows effortless upwind sailing to the various sections of the beach. From the Club Mistral centre, you can reach two fantastic wave spots directly from the flat-water section: Ponta Leme upwind, and Ponta Sino downwind. They offer every opportunity for you to let off steam in the waves.

THE EATING - The hotels we use will provide B and B and therefore we will get to score some excellent local cuisine. There are a large variety of restaurants in Santa Maria catering for most tastes from top restaurants like Odjo d’Áqua, to some great, local back-street ‘barbecue’ restaurants. Seafood dominates the restaurant menus with much of it caught fresh that day. You have to love fish to enjoy the food here. Yellow fin tuna, serra (wahoo) and smaller fish like garopa (reef fish) are the main catch. Good steak and other meat, such as chicken, are hard to find. The lagosta (cray), either grilled or in one of the many other ways it comes (seafood risotto), is worth trying if only once, although costs from 1200$ to 2500$.

The local food offers a variety of exotic dishes strongly influenced by African and Creole cooking. One of the local dishes is cachupa rica - a stew of hominy corn, beans and meat. Cachupa guisada being the best, which is just the beans fried with either tuna or fried egg on top.

MONEY - cash points are available in town and euros are taken in many places. Travellers cheques take an age to cash - so go for the credit card and euros option with some local currency for emergencies ..

THE COACHING -

• Stance­ planing early, sailing faster both up and downwind, getting control
  Carve gybes from improving your turns to getting that elusive planing gybe.
• Tacking learning and improving this very useful and fundamental skill
• Freestyle­ introduction and improvement in lots of new and useful tricks
• Jumping- experience your first airtime, try some forwards, learn to Vulcan or any other stunts you fancy
  
• I will be coaching through use of simulators, on-water coaching and video coaching. Please feel free to give me feedback on how it is going for YOU at any time so I can give you the best opportunity to develop.

MORE DETAILS - I am very excited about my second clinic to Cape Verde and lasy year gave is plenty of wind and awesome conditions, plus the opportunity to see close up, what will go down as the greatest wave comp in history, Punta Preta, PWA wave world cup 2007. Please contact me for any more specific info..