Africa!

Richards Bay, 26 November 2015

Crossing a large chunk of ocean is never a piece of cake. You start of in St Pierre with absolutely no idea what more you could do to improve the preparedness of Stamper. Ten days later you arrive in Richards bay with a list of 30 items that require urgent attention, in your mind. And this time we had selected a near perfect weather window with no gales and even three days of motoring for a lack of wind (but some progress needed to avoid some nasty storms!).

But this is the Indian ocean, her character for us personalised as an Indian Princess with a temper. Lashing out when you don't expect it: erratic currents, freak waves (in our case limited due to a rare lack of gales) and strange incidents. For many sailors this leg is the worst of a circumnavigation and we expected nothing less while treating our Princess with the utmost respect. We were lucky, but more about the incident.....

Have you ever wondered what on earth is happening to you, racing in your mind to find possible explanations and coming to more and more bizarre theories? Add to that the four kilometer deep water that mankind has less knowledge about than faraway stars, a pitch black night and a place that you could call the Indian Ocean Bermuda triangle! After 50.000 nautical miles sailing with Stamper and 12 hours of intense puzzling we were lost to find any reasonable explanation for the experiment that our Indian Princess was submitting us to, never having been in a comparable state!

Boats on oceans tend to go with the wind and currents. It makes life a lot easier on board to select a route that follows that natural tendency of Stamper. We found this truth turned upside down when our familiar home was dragged against the wind and, we believe the current, at a speed of at least one knot through the water! The prelude to this mystery was a gradual slowing down from 6-7 knots easy sailing in an easterly wind and heavily reefed sails to something less then 1.9 knots while the wind still blew a healthy 20 knots from the east. This did not go unnoticed so we postulated dragging a fishing line or net envisioning hundreds of 80kg yellow fin tuna hooked on one of these 10 km long nylon fishing lines. I would at least have taken one of these fishes on board for a good sushi!

Two places exist where something may hook up on Stamper: the gap between the rudder and the skeg, or the propellor. The keel is constructed so that only if you sail backwards something might hook on the back of the keel. As the drag was considerable I was worried that the force of whatever combined with chaving would cut our rudder in half or damage the propellor. Checking both revealed that nothing big was hanging on there. Our next check was to make a complete circle and reduce the sail to see how our floating home would behave. That is when Stamper ignored physics and moved against wind and current without a sail. I envisioned a giant whale pulling us, or a buoy caught somewhere on Stamper dragging an anchor line and weight that had lifted off the seabed and was now pulling us back once we stopped Stamper going forward.

It was a pitch black night, so I started planning going in the water with a waterproofed flashlight to check what whatever was while Julie would be on the lookout for great white sharks armed with a boathook and our biggest knife taped to it. She assured me she would go for the eyes (of the shark) and give me a miss. In the end my trusted crew convinced me to at least wait until daytime and hopefully less wind and waves.

Lucky me, after 6 hours more struggle-sailing, with limited steering ability (the rudder becomes less effective at low speeds) our speed gradually increased, no idea why. With some combined brainwaves we had developed an alternative for checking underwater. The waves were still impressive and Julie was not sure if she could hit the eye the first time. We would haul a line, weighted with 3kg of lead underneath the full length of Stamper while holding both ends on deck. Dropping it at the bow and letting the drift of Stamper take it to the stern, we would lift the line and catch anything that would be dragging us. So done, nothing???!!!

By now we had only two bizarre explanations left. One: a giant octopus had fallen in love with Stampers beautiful underwater shape, clinged itself to her and 'pulled the break'. Two: our guardian angel had decided that Stamper was in danger of arriving to early in the Aghulas current and divine intervention was needed to slow us down enough to avoid getting hit by the famous southerly busters (that can lead to waves that can sink big ships).

I am very curious to inspect Stampers underwaterline and see if we find traces of the giant octopus. Luckily after 12 hours Stamper found back her old speed without our intervention.

If we go on the hard here we will also give her a new antifouling paint, replace the leaking rubber seal of the propellor axis, check our new speed log sensor that has failed to work so far. Other items on our todo list here are replacing about 240 m of 25 year old lines still from Stampers virgin days, greasing some blocks forgotten in St Pierre but underway made a terrible noise while we set reefs. Some minor items like replacing broken cleats, a broken blade on the windgenerator, improve battens that still want to pop out of their pockets in the mainsail, checking stay tensions, repair the GPS and AIS connection to our navigation software on my MAC (a software update to MAC had deleted the old, working connection. Thank you Apple), and some less important items.

Have a good day reader!