We have decided that tomorrow we will be casting off the mooring lines to start our sail down the Madagascar coast. It will be our first step toward crossing over to the African continent and heading down to South Africa.

Our first step will just be a baby one of only 14 nm. Our destination will be Russian Bay which is a bay within the headlands as you leave this bay. We wish to anchor there so we can clean the hulls which need it after sitting here in Crater Bay for the last three weeks.

I read that Russian Bay got its name when a Russian warship, the Vlotny, mutinied in 1905 on its way back from fighting in the Russo-Japanese war. The crew was mostly Uralian and after seeing how beautiful the bay and the women were, they decided to stay. They turned to piracy until their coal ran out and then over the next few years were decimated by malaria and other diseases. The last of the crew died in 1936.

We have started our weather window watch now. We need to watch the low pressure centers as they form in the South Atlantic Ocean and then move across the Cape of Good Hope. They create havoc across the Mozambique Channel, which we need to cross to reach the African coast. Once there we need to keep an extra careful eye of these lows as they bring gales up the coast and blow against the Agulhas Current. When that happens, very steep, short period waves set up and can be dangerous. We plan on sitting out these gales in different anchorages as we head down to the Cape.

Right now a doozy of a low is forming in the South Atlantic and our plan is to keep to the Madagascar coast until it blows by and then make a dash across the Channel to Africa. Depending on how far south along the Madagascar coast we get before we make our mad dash, the crossing should only be 320 nm or less which would only be about two days of sailing.

The picture attached to this blog is of the fishing village that is in front of us here in Crater Bay. I took this as I went to buy some baguettes for our passage this morning.