Happy New Year All,

I can’t believe it’s 2015. We are currently tied up to a dock in Simon’s Town, South Africa, about 20 km from the Cape Of Good Hope or The Cape of Storms as it was known before it was re-branded by the Portuguese. We have spent a great Christmas and New Year here. I’ve written up a few words on our journey and our last year, so I hope you all have time to read it.

During the planning of our circumnavigation, which started over 11 years ago, the dates for departure and return were to be bound by the kids’ ages and school. The start date was driven by not leaving too early so that Liam could remember the beginning of the trip and the end date was to be bound by getting Zoe back for the first year of high school. We had read that a duration of 4-5 years was a reasonable time frame. We had heard of families taking 6-7 years, and have met people taking over 20 years. Like any plan for the future one must be ready to reset the goals. We left a year later than initially planned, spent an extra year in the Atlantic because of technical issues with the boat, had a serendipitous year on a French Polynesian island where the kids all went to local schools and then added an extra year in Asia to fit in a trip back to Canada and land travel in China and India. This Christmas was our 7th one on board. Liam remembers the beginning of the trip and the plan is to get Zoe back for her last year of high school.

This last year we visited 9 countries, sailed over 7,200 miles, starting in Malaysia and ending up in our current location at the bottom of South Africa. Like in most people’s lives there are good times and bad times. To give everyone a feel for what we have experienced, I’ve decided to try to describe my two best and two worst times of 2014.

2014 Worst Time #1: After leaving Sri Lanka our plan was to travel 600 miles south to the bottom of the Maldivian Archipelago, for a 2-3 day visit for a last provisioning prior to our Chagos visit where we would have no opportunity to resupply for 2 months. The trip should have taken us 4 days and ended up taking 11 days and we were still 100 miles short. This passage would be our 3rd equator crossing. Equator crossings seem to consistently come with nasty weather. This one did not come up short. Oceanic equatorial regions have what is called an Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) which is a weather zone typically filled with squalls, rain, heavy clouds and sometimes lightning. In our case at 70 miles from our destination we were confronted with relentless wind and current coming from the direction we needed to go. We spent the best part of 4 days trying to advance towards our destination and ended up running out of our primary fuel supply and lost our engine starter trying to re-prime the diesel engine. This was overcome by using our back-up diesel from 4 Jerry cans and installing the spare starter. The starter installation became a challenge when I found that I could not get access to the starter bolts because the engine position had changed during a transmission rebuild 3 years prior. I had to machine away the engine bed with a Sawzal to get at the bolts. I finally got the starter in and the engine started using WD40. It turns out that the starter which was brand new at the beginning of the trip had been unknowingly compromised during a previous engine re-priming and finally failed whist out at sea. We spent just over a week in a fishing port in one of the largest atolls in the area to get everything back into shape.

2014 Best Time #1: One of our top spots last year was the uninhabited Salomon Atoll, in the archipelago of Chagos, a British Indian Ocean Territory. There are a number of factors that make Chagos a highlight. Firstly being in a remote anchorage with a small group of international cruising boats, beautiful pristine nature and fantastic fishing can be hard to beat. We had many days of trolling for big fish, trying to pull them in before the reef sharks got them, cleaning them on the beach and having sashimi and barbeques back on the boat. The snorkelling was fantastic and spending time with Smoke (a New Zealand cruising family of 5) and Simanderal (British boat with 3 adults aboard) was great fun.
Secondly, there was no infrastructure, i.e. no stores, shops or external communications which eliminates the distractions of an active port. This is good for a while and great for Dad’s pocket book since we topped out with the longest ever consecutive “zero dollar day” where no one had a chance to spend any money. After being there for 5 weeks we had to get going since our supplies were running low and we still had at least 2 weeks of passage time before we could replenish.

2014 Worst Time #2: Whilst in Chagos one of the boats that we got to know quite well was the British crew aboard the Swedish built yacht Simanderal. Simanderal was built by the company Malo which has an excellent reputation for quality. We had a tour of the boat and were really impressed with its systems and its upkeep; they had an engine room that you could eat off of. Simanderal, Smoke and we had a few planning sessions on passage strategies to discuss winds, currents and routes to our next common destination of Mayotte, some 1700 miles away. Simanderal was the first to leave, followed by Smoke a week later and then us about 5 days later. About our 3rd day out we were trying to download a very long email entitled “The End” via our bandwidth impaired SSB radio system. At first I thought it was someone sending us a joke however the download had failed and we had no idea about what “The End” was about. A few days later I managed to get the full email and we were shocked. Simanderal was at the bottom of the ocean about 90 miles north of Madagascar, the crew had a dramatic night rescue by a freighter some 20 hours after the bottom of their rudder had detached from its skeg and had thrashed to the point that they could no longer keep up with the water ingress. Fortunately no one was hurt. This was a stark reminder that anything can happen regardless of the boats pedigree. This news was emotionally devastating; we were heading towards the same waters which are known for their nastiness. It’s very easy during a passage for your mind to dwell on all the possible ways that your boat can fail. After Simanderal’s sinking we decided to order an Iridium satellite phone to complement our offshore communications. We hope to never use it for a distress call.
If you care to read Simanderal’s account follow the link: http://blog.mailasail.com/simanderal/342

2014 Best Time #2: When we sail we are essentially moving our home, everything we left with from Canada and everything we’ve picked up on route goes for the ride. We roll, we pitch, we yaw and waves sometimes crash into us, it can make you anxious when the weather is unpleasant or it can be some of the best times when the weather is steady and the winds are moderate. We are also forced to travel around the clock because there is no place to stop on the open ocean. This last September we day sailed along the North Western coast of Madagascar with 2 other buddy boats as we travelled south within the Mozambique Channel. We would typically leave between 6-7 in the morning and try to anchor by 3 or 4 in the afternoon. Every day the weather would repeat with cloudless skies and the same wind conditions. We would start with a morning offshore breeze of 10-15 knots which would die around 11am and then it would slowly pick up again by noon with an onshore breeze of 12-20 knots. These day sails have been the best that we have had so far in the entire journey. We didn’t get the fatigue of running shifts, didn’t get the big waves or swell that we often get on the ocean and the whole family would get up on deck for all the sail handling and our ‘house’ just kept on getting relocated further south from one beautiful bay to the next.

The boat: I can’t write this much without mentioning something about the boat. Last year Gromit turned 40. Prior to leaving, we had replaced just about every system with new equipment. Now in our 7th year we have had to replace many things a second time. Some of the items on round 2 are: Xantrax inverter, Icom VHF (on the 3rd), Victron battery charger, Honda generator, BlueSky Solar Battery Monitor, Toshiba TV, CD Player/car stereo, Proline 120A alternator, external alternator regulator (qty 4), 4D starter battery, house battery bank (8 golf cart batteries), Trident Propane detector, Garmin GPS receiver antenna, Icom SSB microphone, Furuno Chartplotter motherboard, Comnav Autopilot Course computer, Autonav Autopilot hydraulic pump, Magma marine BBQ, mini shopvac (on the 3rd), forestay rigging toggle, Bora fan (2 out of 5), computer printers (on our 3rd), Portaboat dinghy seats, about 200 hoseclamps and a Lucas starter motor. Out of all of the above items I can blame myself for the failure of at least 3, and for the rest one of my theories is that some of these multinational companies messed up during their transition to cheaper offshore facilities. And, just about every time one of these items failed, finding a replacement was not easy since we were remote or in countries where this stuff is just not sold.

Our travels have let us meet many different people. While we were in India I met a young MBA graduate who said: “As a student in India, if you stand out as 1 in a million, there are another million just like you”. As a family, we are in a small global community of sailors moving around the world, within the confines of seasonal weather. The majority of them are retired couples who are moving along the same route as us, and within this community we have met a small subset of families travelling with kids and within this subset we have only met one other family that is working towards completing a circumnavigation by rounding the Cape of Good Hope this season. The next easiest option for a sailing route is the Red Sea via Somalia and we don’t know anyone who’s gone that way. I never thought we’d be such a minority.
The kids are now 12, 14 and 16 and its time to get us all back home. Our plan is to sail Gromit to the US (approximately 8000 miles) by July of this year and to put it up for sale. I would love to sail him all the way back to the Great Lakes but keeping Gromit at this stage is just not what we need during our restart on land life. Our plan is to have the girls write exams here and prepare for a departure from South Africa before the end of the month. Once we leave South Africa our first stop will be the island of St Helena (1650 miles), followed by Ascension (750 miles), Brazil (1350 miles), Caribbean (1900 miles), Bahamas (1300 miles) and finally the US (700 miles), but of course the plan could change!

I wish you all a great year in 2015!!
Michael

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