The South Equatorial Current splits with part running as a counter current up the east coast of Madagascar, and part joining the Agulhas current running down the east coast of Southern Africa. Get too close to the continental shelf off Madagascar and with a wind change, rogue waves up to 20 meters high (60ft) can come out of nowhere.
The last hurdle is crossing the Agulhas current. It’s a strong current and when the lows generated in the Antarctic send the wind direction working its way anti-clockwise round the compass, a typical gale out of the southwest against the current will create mountainous seas to go with it. These events are quite frequent.
There wasn’t the opportunity to get our mainsail furler repaired in Mauritius, so we resigned ourselves to having 2 heads’ls and the mizzen for the voyage. We figured there would probably be more than enough wind anyway. We also loaded up with diesel, just in case.
It was good to be on our way again after the lengthy stop in Mauritius. The last couple of days we left Port Louis and anchored up the coast in Grande Baie. Although it was touristy we enjoyed the change and clean water. The yacht club was welcoming but empty, being mid week. I took the opportunity to dive down to remove a scoop for the water maker. We fitted it in the Caribbean to try to get the water maker to work without air locks. The result was unspectacular! We’ve battled on for the last 15 months.
Between Cocos and Mauritius we were very low on water and I was spending hours every day coaxing air out of the intake line. In desperation I decided to switch the sea water intake hose with the brine outlet one, making the intake about 18 inches deeper and hopefully avoiding the turbulence bubbles near the surface. There was an immediate improvement, except now the brine outlet was via the water scoop’s efforts to get water up the line. The back pressure effected fresh water production, but we had made a marked improvement.
Back to Grande Baie. I tried to get the scoop off using a snorkel and was quickly forced to accept that I’m not as young as I used to be. Without anything to hold on to and no weight belt, I was battling buoyancy as well as pushing myself away from the hull as soon as I put pressure on the screwdriver. I could have rigged ropes under the hull to hang onto, or pay $50 for the yacht club diver to do the whole job, including filling the holes with epoxy putty. Supporting the local club won! We now make water in all but the most turbulent conditions.
We left Mauritius on Friday the 14th November and had a great send off from a pod of spinner dolphins. They really are spectacular. Some were leaping 2 m+ out of the water and hovering horizontally for a moment before plunging back into the sea.
Because it was so late in the season we decided we’d have to bypass Reunion Island which was a pity. It’s has the highest volcanic peak in the Indian Ocean at over 3000 metres and is very French. A week later we heard reports of a named storm with cyclone potential just north of the Mascarenes and tracking S.E. We were glad we’d decided to get on S.W.
The wind was light and variable, as was the sea. Some days the swells were just going up and down with no movement in any direction, as though the sea was breathing. On other days it had a lot more energy, but still the wind eluded us. We motor-sailed a lot. It takes a fair bit of puff to move 30 tons of boat through the water and the gods were not helping. We had bursts of 6-12 hours sailing but seldom above 4 knots, and then it would be back to burning diesel to assist the lazy breeze.
But it was pleasant and after all the negative build up we were happy enough to battle boredom rather than wind and sea. With just 2 of us on board we’re either on watch, catching up on sleep, fitting in all the boat stuff, reading up on all the navigational material for the voyage itself and the next destination, battling with the radio to get sailmail connections, and Sandy makes meals too. We’re right on the African coast and we still can’t get a connection on the dozen or so frequencies listed. Fortunately we’ve found a brief window in the evenings when we can sometimes still connect to Brunei, about 3000 miles away!
The nights have been beautiful, although getting cooler, with bright moonlight paths across the sea, even with only a half crescent moon. Earlier, when there was no moon at all, the stars were a magnificent display and Venus was bright enough to make a starlight path. At times the phosphorescence was so bright and ethereal it felt like we were sailing through the Milky Way. One of my earliest childhood ‘movie memories’ was seeing the pirate ship in Peter Pan sailing through a similar enchanted world.
One afternoon we were lazing in the cockpit when Sandy leaped up with a shriek. I thought she’d been stung or stabbed or at least seen a cockroach, but she’d seen a humpback whale through the cockpit window behind me. I swung ‘round in time to see a spectacular blow of mist and spray, but the whale had submerged. While I looked forward she looked aft for more whales it surfaced and blew again, aft! So I saw another spectacular plume of spray and mist. It happened one more time, so while Sandy saw a whale, I can only give a ‘blow by blow’ account. But it was exciting.
As the days rolled on I was starting to get concerned that we’d run short of diesel, so we mooched along with whatever wind we had, sometimes at below 3 knots.
But the Big Indian was not done with us yet. One afternoon we noticed the high cirrus cloud being followed by cumulus and the ‘wind’ started shifting from ESE to NE. That night it swung through N to NW gaining strength and at last we were sailing again, for little while.
The next afternoon it swung W and then SW, picking up pace as it went. We kept altering our course accordingly but eventually we were battling 25 – 30 knots on the nose and with the current against it, the seas grew to mountains. As evening approached the wind strengthened further and we decided to implement storm strategies.
The first option was to ‘heave to’ using the yankee back filled and the helm hard over. The second was to turn N and run before the storm until it blows itself out or at least moderates, and option three, heave to with the mizzen as we did in the Pacific. It didn’t achieve a complete ‘heave to’ stall then in much fairer conditions but it did allow us to get some sleep, so would be worth a try.
Option one was a dismal failure. We furled the mizzen and backed the yankee, helm hard over, but the boat wouldn’t stall and we were still doing 4 knots like some unguided missile.
By now the wind was reaching gale force. We turned north and ran with it. The seas were 5 metres and our strongest gust that we noticed was 46 knots. We rocked and rolled and surfed and plunged. It felt like Neptune and Poseidon were playing volleyball with us. Stuff got thrown about down below as we learned a bit about the changing moods of the Southern Indian.
It took 6 hours for the storm to ease and by the time we could start to claw our way back south we had 60 nautical miles to recover. As the wind eased the seas moderated and by the following afternoon Sandy was putting out her fishing lines again and I was making sure the dinghy was still secure.
That’s when we discovered we hadn’t escaped the storm unscathed. The pounding, lurching action had been so severe it had damaged the davits again. An old weld had failed and there were new splits in the stainless steel that gaped or closed as the boat moved. The mizzen sheets to the davits and had we used it to heave to in the storm, we would have lost the davits, along with the dinghy and our biggest solar panel. I can’t even imagine trying to recover any of it in that storm.
We only had 40% of the mizzen out but we furled it immediately and I set about bracing, ‘splinting’ and strapping the davits. It worked, but we were effectively down to one sail, the yankee, for the rest of the trip. The stays’l is useless without the mizzen because it robs the yankee of wind and overpowers the front end of the boat. The mizzen lets us fine tune the overall rig.
We had one more southerly buster come through but it wasn’t as bad as the first, although it again had us wondering why on earth we thought this life would be fun. We’re a ‘walk in the woods on a sunny afternoon’ type, not a ‘climb mount Everest because it’s there’ type. The boat was pounding, the sea was rough, and we felt as though the Big Indian was determined never to be forgotten. No fear of that!
Well, we’ve made it into South African waters. This morning we passed Richards Bay, crossed the Agulhas Current while it wasn’t looking and where it’s narrowest, and as I’m writing we’re about 60 miles from Durban. We’re doing a few doglegs to slow us down so we can enter in daylight tomorrow.
It’s been a hard crossing from Australia, but it’s amazing how we already feel our spirits lifting with the sight of land, along with a strange sense of resentment that the outside world is about to invade our lives again. People really are strange creatures.
Until next time...