1 Feb 2011

Passage To Red Sea

We are bound for Egypt, 2743 nautical miles from Uligan. We expect the passage to Egypt, or whatever country is there when we arrive, to take about two weeks. Our ultimate destination on this trip is Marmaris, Turkey.

We weighed anchor 31 January at 0945 and motored out of the atoll before setting sail so we could both charge batteries and focus on navigating safely between two islands to the Indian Ocean.

Since we will be one of the first boats to cross pirate alley this year there was lots of interest from cruisers in the anchorage. Several called and wished us a fun and safe passage. We will be keeping them abreast of our progress via email.

While there have been a lot of attacks on commercial shipping in January and over the past few years, there have been none within 1,000 miles of our route on cruising boats for several years. Coalition navy ships are patrolling the area where the most attacks have happened. In addition naval ships are escorting commercial ships through part of the pirate zone. We will travel along that route called the International Recommended Travel Corridor IRTC when we get to it, about 4 days. We have followed the recommended procedures for vessels transiting the area by notifying the three international organizations that are coordinating the coalition ships (UKMTO, MSCHOA, and MARLO) of our passage plan and emailing them daily position reports.

The wind has been more or less 7 to 11 knots on the beam which moves us thru the water at a nice 8 to 9 plus knots but we have a 1 knot plus current against us so we made 183 miles from our 0800 position yesterday to today. It got light enough our first night that we ran the engine for a few hours. Tonight we have more wind and are making about 9 knots speed over ground. That's pretty fast especially since we are still sailing against a 1 knot current.

The seas are about 1 meter and sailing conditions very good with average cloud cover 30%. Sunny during the day and stars out at night. The Indian Ocean is reputed to have the best sailing conditions anywhere.

We have seen no other vessels except one on radar at 15 miles off our port beam. They were moving slowly in a southerly direction. They must have been pretty big to show up so strongly that far away.

One of our two Balmar regulators (we have a spare) failed a day ago causing over voltage and burning out the fan on the new freezer compressor. So today I switched regulators and jury rigged a spare fan and the freezer is back up. The top rudder bearing has been groaning on the passage from Phuket to Maldives so we cleaned and lubricated it at Uligan. But it has been groaning again even louder so I crawled under the aft deck and lubed it again with McLube. The groaning stopped hopefully for a while. That top rudder bearing which we replaced in Australia has worn a lot in a short time and will need to be replaced again when we get to Turkey.

As usual there are lots of things to fix aboard Convergence, and most cruising boats!

Kelly, chef Joseph and I are enjoying the beautiful sailing. That does compensate for the fix it hassles.

Randy

Photo: refueling at Uligan using Est Marine fuel filter. >