The weather looked good for Sunday, so we rushed around for a few hours and, with the usual false starts, managed to find the right officials and got our clearance. We left the harbor at about 1pm. It was windy and gray, but the wind was in the right direction. We knew it would be a short window, but we hoped we'd get the 40 hours needed to reach the next safe port, East London (way east!) We were constantly in the company of whales and in the night actually could hear their songs right through the hull. We found the fair current a few miles out and were making 8 to 10 knots over the4 bottom for a good 30 hours. About 3 hours before we would have reached port (at that speed) the wind went around southwest (on the nose) and we had to get in out of the current. So we had about an 8 hour motorsailing slog to get into port, but at least it didn't blow so hard that we had to heave to. We tied up in East London around dawn; the wind was favorable again by mid-afternoon, so we headed out for the next leg. This time it was another 48 hours to a port called Mossel Bay. This is a big open bay with a man-made harbor at the crook of its western point. This leg was cold, rainy, and windy, with lots of freighters to keep clear of. As usual in this kind of situation, we had the radar going, since most of the time we could see ships on radar before seeing them by eye. This is not true in calm conditions, but with rain and big waves it is often very hard to see ships at a distance, especially in the daytime (at night the lights stand out). At a certain point, though, the radar flashed (I thought it was lightning!) and stopped working. I spent the night replacing fuses and reading the manual, and was feeling pretty glum. In the morning, though, it occurred to me to look up (duh) and there was the radar dome, hanging by its cable, its bracket having detached from the mast. By an incredible stroke of luck, the arms of the bracket brace had straddled the mizzen spreader stabilizing the radome. If it had been swinging from the cable, I'm sure it would have soon fallen. I decided (discretion being the better part of valor) to hope for the best and deal with the situation in port. We avoided standing under the mizzen (ie, behind the wheel) for the rest of the trip--24 more hours.
We have pretty good sailing directions for this coast and had a good idea what to expect at Mossel Bay. The harbor entrance breakwaters lie at right angles to the normal swells from the southeast, so the trick is to go past the breakwater a little and then approach from the downswell direction and make the turn into the harbor. It took a bit of nerve to follow these directions because the swells as we were approaching were as large as I have ever seen--12 to 15 feet--and they were definitely breaking across the first breakwater. But we did as instructed and entered the harbor without incident. The harbor is very tight, with a tiny marina, dozens of fishing boats, and several large oil rig support ships (like the Gay Head, for you Woods Holers) all moored there. It was still windy, and the marina slot we were given was downwind into a cul de sac which I could not have maneuvered out of in that wind, so it was a risky one-shot. Any landing you walk away from is a good one!
Technical note: After a night's rest I climbed the mizzen and removed the radome. I checked it out and hooked it up down below. Mirabile dictu, it still worked!!! What a relief. Mossel Bay has a nice compact little fastener store, The Bolt Man, in walking distance, where I bought the stainless nuts, bolts and threaded rod I needed for a bullet-proof re-attachment of the bracket. A fellow customer who was also at the Bolt Man counter has a small outboard repair shop and he offered to drill the necessary holes (no trivial task in stainless steel. He ultimately did a few jobs for me and accepted no payment. I had at the end to force some beers on him!). Back at the boat, I reworked the wiring terminals in the radome to make re-connection quick and easy. Couple more trips up the mast and we were back in the radar business.
A word about mast climbing. The usual method people use is to lift the worker up the mast using a halyard and a bosun's chair (like a playground swing seat, basically) with the tail of the halyard run through temporary pulleys to the strongest winch on the boat. The problem is that the person going up the mast needs to be extremely capable, to do the job under a fair load of stress without dropping tools or parts. But the person handling the rigging and the winching also has to be extremely capable--strong too. And sometimes, there is no second person, at all. Basically, I usually prefer to be the one going up, so I have gradually been refining a one-man method, where the deck helper is optional and not in a position to drop me. Here's how I do it. The main element is a four part block and tackle which has enough line to reach the top of my larger mast. I haul that to the top of the mast with a halyard and tie its end off six ways from Sunday at the base. The lower end of the block and tackle is attached to the bosun's chair and then I can (with a fairly major effort) pull myself up the mast. If there is a helper (s)he can provide much or most of the pull. I went up alone this time and it was quite an effort, even though the radome is only halfway up the smaller of the 2 masts. The problem is not the actual hauling, I decided, it's that I had to hold my weight (reduced, of course, by the mechanical advantage of the system) during the entire period of hauling; plus I had to figure a way to tie the hauling line off once I reached the working height. Before the next trip up, I worked out a modification that worked A LOT better: Now the hauling line--the one I actually pull down on--runs through a piece of mountain-climbing gear called an ascender or Jumar that is attached to the bosun's chair. This acts as a ratchet, so the only effort involved in climbing is the actual pulls which raise me. Between pulls, which I can time at my convenience and according to how strong I am feeling, I can let go of the hauling line to use my hands to work or to stabilize myself, or just to rest. I tested it a number of times at deck level and then used it to go up. What a difference. Less than one third of the effort. To come down I take the hauling rope out of the ascender and lower myself as before the modification, with 2 hands, and legs wrapped around the mast. That part has always been easy, but I'm still thinking about ways to make it safer too. Hopefully, though, I will always have a helper on deck which greatly increases the safety factor in both directions.
The other job I did involving nuts and bolts and drilling steel bars was making a solid mount for the second alternator. My original somewhat kluged arrangement has been failing at more and more frequent intervals as the holes in the aluminum brackets gradually enlarged. With the current arrangement I have easy adjustability, near-total rigidity, and almost perfect belt alignment. Let's see how it proves out.
We had a great time in Mossel Bay. Not just one, but two local clubmembers took us under their wings, wined and dined us, and drove us all over the place. Karin has had a chance to reconnect with her family and I have gotten to meet them.
We are working on recruiting crew and have a number of strong prospects. Karin's current thinking is that she will go along to the Caribbean, but it is still somewhat up in the air.
After a couple of weeks in Mossel Bay we set out again, this time for Simons Town, which is just around the corner from Cape Town. The geographic highlight of this 2-day run was rounding Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa, and, presumably, Blue Stocking's southernmost position on this circumnavigation. (I think I personally was farther south on my hitch-hiking adventure in New Zealand.) We will probably stay in Simons Town until we head out for our South Atlantic crossing around January 15.
Simons Town is South Africa's Annapolis, with its largest naval base. The yacht club here has the rare and attractive combination of first rate facilities--a bar and restaurant, an on-site boatyard, a beautiful clubhouse and marina--and a friendly and unpretentious atmosphere (affordable too). It will be a nice month here, I think. Simons Town is also at the end of a commuter train line right into Cape Town--about $4 round trip along some of the most dramatic coastal terrain this side of Italia. On one of the rides we met a navy guy who was quite interested in our voyaging. By the end of the ride we had garnered an invitation to tour his ship (he's chief warrant officer on one of the nearly brand-new German built corvettes stationed in the harbor.) That's scheduled for December 22 and I'll probably have something to say about it in my next post. The only slightly negative thing I can say about Simons Town is that the wind blows like stink (a near gale or more) just about all the time. Noisy as hell on the boat at night, plus I'm not looking forward to getting out of the bay (dead upwind) and around the actual Cape of Good Hope into the Atlantic and headed for South America, the Caribbean and, as I laughingly call it, home.
We've only made a couple of brief forays into Cape Town, but I can tell you it is one happenin' place! In particular it features a number of incredibly beautiful ocean coves with the whitest sand beaches I've seen yet. Wall to wall beautiful people. There just can't be any place with more contrast and extremes than South Africa. Politically and socially it faces huge challenges, but there seems to be an amazing fund of good will in the air, and my guess is South Africa will emerge as a leader and model of a truly multi-cultural open society.
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I wrote last from a position at sea south of Madagascar. A few days later we got within 5o miles of shore but still outside the axis of the Agulhas Current. One of the lows that proceeds along the coast every few days came along as predicted. We had a bit of a mini-gale from the southwest (the direction we were headed), which arose, as described, almost instantaneously out of a fairly brisk northeast wind, that is, a 180 degree rapid windshift. It seemed like a good time to practice heaving to, which is a sort of live parking maneuver used in a situation where there is too much wind to move forward comfortably and you don't want to lose much ground downwind. In our case it involved backing the staysail, trimming a double-reefed mizzen to the centerline, and locking the steering wheel toward the wind direction, as if trying to tack. The boat then jogs along on its own--as it falls off from the wind, it speeds up and the rudder effect increases; the boat heads up, but not to the point where there is sail flogging, and slows down; the rudder effect then decreases and the boat falls off a little again, speeds up....and the cycle continues. With the current we ended up making a slow course toward shore, and the boat rode quite comfortably. We stayed in that configuration until daylight, when the gale had largely abated and the wind had veered (changed direction counterclockwise down here) a little. It was another 24 hours of light wind sailing to Durban, which we entered around 8 AM. So the two important elements worked for us--planning and luck. The planning got us through the hazardous current based on reasonable assumptions. The luck was that the reasonable assumptions proved true, even conservative. Whew! We still have like 800 miles to get around to the Atlantic Ocean, with the same weather issues and the same current, but we are on the safe side of the current, we can choose our starting times, and we are plugged into the local weather information, not just relying on GRIBs. More on our voyage planning below.
Durban is amazing. The harbor itself is a large busy international seaport, like New York, Colon, or Rotterdam, with dozens of full-size ships, mostly containerships entering, leaving, docking, maneuvering, loading and unloading at all hours of the day and night. There's a handful of harbor tugs which seem to be zipping from one job to another all day long. There is a fair-sized marina in one corner of the harbor with a narrow (1/4 mile) wide entrance channel between sandbars that separate the yacht area from adjacent commercial zones. We were in the marina for a couple of days, but even though it is cheaper than most places ($16 a day) that would still consume 100% of my monthly income right now, so we anchored out--in the narrow entrance channel. This is permitted, although sometimes a little gnarly, and there are two or three other boats out here with us.
The marina faces the harbor drive which runs right along the central city, similar in some ways to the situation in Honolulu. The central city is amazingly vibrant and diverse, with black Africans, people of Indian descent, and what the South Africans call "colored people" who are mainly of Malaysian background. Lots of energy, color, fun, and just a bit of danger. Essentially every conversation we had with local people the first day--officials, marina personnel and local yachties ended with the following coda: "do not under any circumstances walk beyond the marina at night." Maybe exaggerated concern, but I wasn't about to ignore it. In Panama, at least Colon, the advice was do not walk beyond the marina at any time! so this was a little better. The first day we had lunch at a black-African owned chain that sells grilled whole chickens and various fixins. Excellent meal. Food prices here--both prepared and grocery-store--are less than US and probably half or less of NZ, Australia, and the various islands we visited. I like that! We really did not see another European-looking face during the whole outing. South Africa has done an amazing job, in my opinion, in developing and educating a black middle class, and this is entirely evident along the city streets of Durban. The next day we ate at the various stalls that line the smaller streets and found a funky harware store where I was able to get my fill of muriatic acid, so we can soon get the rest of the Rodriguez rust off the boat, and, especially, off the dinghy.
Last night we splurged and went to the symphony. A few blocks away from the marina is the domed City Hall--it would fit right in in Copenhagen. It has a grand exterior (wrapped right now in scaffolding) an elegant marble and hardwood foyer, and a good sized auditorium with an impressive stage organ (unfortunately not part of the night's program). It all reminded me of Symphony Hall in Boston--unpretentious, but entirely effective musically. They had the kind of middle-brow musical selection most concert-goers like: 2 Beethovens and a Brahms. There were three traveling European soloists (not quite famous, but really good) so the major pieces were concertos: the Brahms double (violin and cello) and the Beethoven triple (add piano). I guess the Brahms double concerto is about my number one favorite piece of music: to me the second movement's opening passage is like falling in love while eating a butterscotch sundae, or vice versa, maybe. So it was a nice evening. And, affordable: about $12 each for orchestra seats. I caught a look at myself in the men's room mirror and realized with my Einsteinian hair and yachtie finery I was the most bizarre looking guy there--oops, except for the cellist! We found out, also, where all Durban's white population were hiding that night!
We had some fun while we were at the marina. A neighboring boat was a large (80-ish feet) steel ketch hailing from Falmouth, England. The Falmouth connection, thin as it was, gave me an icebreaker, and dockside repartee led to a cocktail invitation, which turned out to be a real old fashioned "piss up" with about a case of wine among 5 or 6 of us, not to mention a magnificent feed. The owner, an amiable Australian mining mogul, was aboard and he regaled us with the history of the boat and of his mining career. He left the next day, but the crew is preparing to take the classic 60s-style megayacht (then) on to Perth, quite an undertaking in my humble opinion. She's a fine old craft, built shipstyle by a shipyard in Holland. We gathered she was the queen of the Caribbean for some time in the 60s with Frank Sinatra a frequent guest. One old friend of mine will would have liked to have seen the master bathroom--yup, full size tub and sauna. I especially liked the engine room. Isn't it noisy, I asked. You can hardly hear 'em was the reply. Yeah, but it must get awfully hot? Nope: full aircon! Wow! On the other hand it was ten steps down a vertical ladder to get there--a lot of exercise for the paid captain (no separate engineer) who looked no younger than me. He was up the mast in a bosun's chair fitting a new VHF antenna when we arrived. They got hit by lightning in the anchorage on a recent front's passage.
It blew pretty hard last night in the anchorage (sleeping with one ear open) from the northeast. Flat calm on awakening. 4o knots from the SW an hour later. Our big friend had just come out to the anchorage. They dragged and ended up on the mudbank but were pulled off by one of the smaller harbor tugs. We sat the day out with a continuous anchor watch--we are only about 75 feet upwind of the mudbank ourselves (and can't afford to hire tugs). I've got both the snubbers on (first time since Polynesia) and the lines buoyed and ready to cast off at a minute's notice. (There is a gruesome-looking wrecked and abandoned yacht about our size 75 feet beyond that. Another of our neighbors , a French single-hander, dragged on to the bank today as well. He does not seem to be trying to get off, and is refusing offers of help. [He got pulled off by a marina runabout next day]) But I had dug the anchor in pretty well when we anchored earlier in the week (also in a southwest wind, so at the optimum angle for now) and the system seems to be handling the gusts just fine. It is now toward evening and things are down to a dull roar and I think we made it.
Another neighbor is Asia, a 30-something Polish woman who is sailing her 28-footer Panama to Panama more or less non-stop. She has done the first 2/3 of her circumnav in 4-1/2 months!!! with only 2 stops, neither of which has involved getting off her boat. We had a nice chat and took her 2 tiny bags of trash ashore.
You just don't want to encounter one of these reversible gales out in the open, especially not in the Current. So the trick is to leave at the end of the SW portion, which will likely give you a 2 to 4 day window before the next low--generally enough to get to the next port, which is not close--250 miles. Unfortunately, you can't leave without checking out with customs and they are not open on the weekend. So Monday will be our first chance to leave, hopefully by noon. I hope we will not have lost a third of our window! (You have 36 hours to leave after checking out, but going ashore today (Friday) was not an option.)
Current plan is to make for Hout Bay, a suburban community just before Cape Town, with good access to services and a marina even I can afford: $100 a MONTH!!! We will get things better organized there, make a few repairs and improvements, maybe an outing to Cape Town, and generally make ready for the South Atlantic passage, starting probably in January. We also will be working the internet for expense-sharing crew. This has been working out really well for us as well as providing lots of adventure for the crew. If anyone out there is interested, let me know with a comment or an email. We'd love to have you. If we find crew, we will probably stop in Brazil and in the Caribbean. If not, the budget will be tight and we will probably go direct to Bermuda and wait there for good weather for New England. Talk to you again soon!
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This passage has been going very nicely, so far (Knock on Wood). We covered 1000 miles in the first week, a very good pace for Blue Stocking. During that period we had consistently perfect weather--enough wind to make the boat go, but not so much that there was an uncomfortable sea-state. Warm and sunny. The last two days we have left the trade wind conditions as we have moved south--we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, the southern edge of the tropics, about a week ago. The wind has been a
little more variable both in direction and speed and we have had a couple of slow days, but with a big swell from the NE so its been a little rolly, but not too bad. We are now passing "beneath" Madagascar, the really big island on the east side of Africa. We stayed over one hundred miles offshore here because of the reputation the area just south of the island has for nasty weather and occasional extra-big waves. Seems a little silly right now in nearly calm conditions, but, of course, better
safe than sorry.
We are getting good reception of the faxed weather maps from the South African Navy and, as usual, there is a steady progression of lows with trailing (they trail north here, of course) cold fronts. The last few cold fronts do not seem to have extended to our or Durban's latitude, so maybe we will remain lucky and get into Durban without weathering another gale. If we will have to pass through one, we will be sure to time it so that we won't be dealing with the post-frontal southwest breeze while
we are crossing the Gulf Stream, I mean the Agulhas Current, even to the extent of heaving to and waiting a day or two if necessary.
I'm reading a book (on tape) right now about the Exploration Expedition carried out by the US Navy in the 1830's and lead by Lieutenant Wilkes. It just never ceases to amaze me the courage and endurance it took in those days of sail and how much of those qualities were apparently available, both among officers and seamen. And here I am looking at a weather map I got with my shortwave radio and knowing my position within a few yards using a GPS which is getting signals from satellites in space.
Even so, it still seems to call for a little courage and endurance. For just two examples, we have run out of mayonnaise and my nose is peeling. But seriously, there's still a fair number of uncharted reefs out here, apparently. We heard that a brand new luxury sailing yacht on the WorldArc rally sank on just such a one this season, not far off Australia. (Crew unhurt). If you are one of the paragons who has actually paid for your computer charts, we hear that C-Map is offering a free upgrade
with this new reef properly located!
My son Fred has been keeping me posted on the baseball season back home. I sure wish I had been at the Kidd or the Landfall watching that sixth ALCS game! Got to have been the game of the century (only a 9 year century, but still..) Also, I understand this is an election year? Who's running? Clinton vs. Romney I bet. You go, girl!
In a couple weeks, God willin' and the crick don't rise, as my favorite father-in-law used to say, I'll tell you a little about Blue Stocking's adventures in Africa.
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