That passage was a breeze! Of course I'm comparing it to the passages in the angry Indian Ocean. The winds have predominately remained force 4-5 with a TWD of 110-140 degrees – downwind with small swells. We gybed regularly enroute to maximise our speed and comfort (it was already good!) and to improve our VMG. There were several days of overcast and the occasional cumulus overcoming us where winds would pick up to force 6-7 for half and hour and dump a refreshing cleansing rain. The last few days approaching Brazil were very light winds of 6-10kts TWS which slowed us down to a turtles pace. I even got a swim in! In these low winds, I reconfigured the gollywhomper (name given to the genakker from the 1870’s) by attaching the tack end to the port or stbd hull padeye while on a broad reach - this allowed us to sail along where our SOG equalled the AWS. The last few days we alternated between motoring and sailing due to lack of wind.

However, it did take a few extra days for us to settle into passaging on this leg and even I felt slightly seasick in these first few days. I chalk this up to a few things; perhaps the anxiety of the broken genoa shackle (below) but more than likely the stop/start nature of our passaging from Simons Town i.e. the short stops in between (St Helena, Luderitz) which disrupts the passaging routine. One may argue that for repeated long passages one should just hit it non-stop thus allowing the body’s system to become familiar to the boat movements, shift routines, etc. But then we’d miss out on what cruising is partially about.

First day out from St Helena on a broad reach with 15-20kts winds the shackle connecting the head of the genoa to the Facnor top cap broke (stripped the pin thread, bent shackle) resulting in the genoa falling from its feeder to the deck and a lot of the sail falling into the sea. We managed to pull the slightly damaged sail onto deck and secured it and resumed sailing with the main only. To recover the top cap requires going aloft which unlikely to happen in these ocean waves/swell. Considering our situation I elect not to return to St Helena and push on towards Brazil with the reefed main and genakker. I applied small Dacron patches to both sides of the two small holes using 3M4200 – anther reason to have cat…deck space to layout a sail and work on things like this.

Talking about furlers. Another issue took root while we were in Simons Town when I removed the genoa sail from its furler to discover that the furler drum was quite stiff to rotate. Our buddy Warren from SV NightFly and I took the Facnor LS200 furler apart and found that the upper and lower circlip’s coating had disbonded and had started rusting. These circlips rotate against a nylon ring and thus increased friction was creating the difficulty in rotating the drum. Also, circlips are made from a hardened steel rather than stainless due to its improved bending strength. Facnor coats the circlips with a plastic type coating to improve friction resistance and provide a corrosion protection however this had all but come off. I called up Facnor France and they seemed to be aware of the issue and kindly couriered a complete replacement LS200 drum, free of charge (under warranty) as they said it had been redesigned and this issue resolved. In the meantime, Warren and I cleaned up the circlips and reinstalled them into the furler with a generous amount of high quality waterproof grease and the rotation was back to normal. With improved fresh water cleaning and injections of PTFE spray I’ll continue to use the existing LS200 until this problem resurfaces and then make the change out.

Before leaving we downloaded a Portuguese audio language course so we spent an hour a day learning some basic language skills. We were advised that English is not commonly spoken in Salvador and particularly with the clearance officials and marina.

We remained uncertain about visiting Salvador. If we can get a marina berth we would remain a few weeks. Salvador de Bahia is a UNESCO World Heritage city and has some impressive sights and sounds that we’d love to explore and enjoy however its also riddled with crime so we would only stay if we could get the marina berth that offers a degree of security. Anchoring in the bay is out of the question. We had some intel that there were berths available at both Bahia Marina and CENEB marina for cats so that’s encouraging enough for us to head there. Some of our cruising buddies headed for Cabedelo/Jacare, some 425Nm up the coast from Salvador, but a few things steered us away from this location: lack of local interesting things to do, anchored in a noisy river and charging us €49/day. Apparently it’s safe, though we’ve already heard reports of petty crime.

The marinas in Salvador require yachts to tie up to their dock with a method known as ‘Mediterranean Mooring’. The Mediterranean mooring derives its name from the manner in which vessels have been tying up in harbors in that part of the world for centuries. Since quay space is limited and the number of vessels numerous, mooring perpendicularly—the Med moor—rather than alongside and without finger piers, allows more vessels to access the quay. Basically it requires us to align and lay out our anchor perpendicular to the dock, reverse in and tie two lines to the dock followed by tensioning up on the anchor to maintain a balanced spacing between our neighbors. This will be our first time attempting this so we have been studying it and working out our strategy. It shouldn’t be too much of an issue as we have a very maneuverable cat providing there aren’t any large cross-winds. However, I'm still a bit apprehensive about negotiating a tight squeeze between other yachts and possible crowd watching.

I finally mounted our Iridium GO external antenna - temporarily. Not for lack of wanting to do this before but for lack of trying to find a suitable route for the 18m of fat LMR400 coax cable. I fabricated a mount from some pvc sheets I have onboard and fastened it to the SSB antenna support frame. Using Iridium’s external antenna has improved the satellite signal strength. So I have given a shot at web browsing on the GO and our iPad – news, wikipedia. Now, Iridium advertises ‘unlimited access to the internet’ as part of this paid package. What they don’t tell you is the ‘unlimited time you’ll need to access the internet’. It’s painfully slow, intermittent with constant cutoffs. Only at sea do I have the patience to wait for a new page to materialise – my epoxy glue sets off quicker! Interestingly, when downloading email/wx forecasts from Sailmail/Airmail with the GO, its error free uptime is near 100% and 5x faster for same size emails. Could this be that the compression software that Sailmail uses is superior to that of Iridium.

We were well provisioned for the passages from South Africa onwards. We did our major provisioning in the supermarkets around Simons Town with great food at affordable prices and just topped up on fresh produce in Luderitz and St Helena. Emerald has a good size freezer, two fridges and plenty of storage so space is not a concern. Fresh produce will only last so long however Rose had picked up a few techniques from cruising friends as to how to get longevity out of these. With the freezer, besides stocking it with meat, fish and chicken, we now add frozen vegetables and tap into these when the fresh ones are finished. And ice cream. Grapefruits, oranges, apples tend to last a few weeks – we haven’t taken on any frozen fruits yet ... perhaps we need to check this out one day. We also stocked up on those South African niceties that we enjoy and are likely to be difficult to find elsewhere or at such affordable prices i.e. wines, champagnes, biltong, etc. There is a bit of a cruisers myth about stocking up which may have been the case 20 odd years ago but not today. Food is everywhere, maybe not the same selection as you’d like but you won’t be deprived. So we put a little more focus on stocking up on the local cost effective dry goods in foreign locations.

The passage took 14.5 days to complete, arriving March 22nd, logging 1870Nm. We arrived in the morning, outside of the entrance of Baia de Todos os Santos with a clear view of the San Antonio lighthouse and then made our way towards Salvador and entered Bahia Marina where we were met by a escort boat to show us to our berth (darn, we didn’t have to Med Moor!). That was our longest single passage to date and the most enjoyable!