Day 7 – Saturday 11 January.

By Grant Chapman.

We had become used to the serenading sound of Rotary Scout contentedly purring away to us in the early hours of the morning as she accelerated while surfing down the face of the waves created by the following swell, however this morning was different as she was eerily quiet. The purring we knew came from the prop auto rotating with the increase in boat speed and all we could hear on waking was the familiar repeated slapping of the waves on the bow and the irregular thud of the genoa refilling after going off the wind as the boat corkscrewed gently coming down a wave and wallowing out in the trough. A glance over the stern of the boat revealed a barnacle-encrusted trailing piece of heavy duty warp that had obviously come adrift from a commercial vessel and had now obviously become entangled on our prop. We dropped the spinnaker that Peter and Lorraine had hoisted in the early hours of the morning on their watch and put the boat about into the wind to kill the speed so that the rope could be manually removed as it was no doubt acting as a handbrake on our progress. Grant donned the diving goggles and went under the stern to free the rope which turned out to be about 25m long of 50mm synthetic material – probably polypropylene as it floated so well. We stowed the rope in the sugar scoop on the stern to dump when we got to dry land to save the ocean of any more unnecessary pollution.

A Shearwater accompanied us for a few miles as it criss-crossed astern of us, possibly eyeing our Rapala lures dangling in the breeze off our rods as we hadn’t deployed them yet. The peace was broken when there was a yell from the cockpit for action stations as the spinnaker halyard had snapped and dropped the spinnaker in the sea alongside of us. Fortunatley we managed to get the big bag on board in time before we ran over it and things became very messy and complicated. Losing the spinnaker halyard up the mast presented a challenge as the end was now sitting on top of the mast and only by going to the top of the mast would we be able to retrieve it. Marcus rose to the challenge and secured in the bosun’s chair we hoisted him to the top of the mast on the winch, the poor chap clinging to the mast like a monkey as the pendulum effect at the top of the mast created by the boat rocking in the swell was amplified the higher he went. In went without saying that our man in the “crow’s nest” returned to deck a lot quicker than he went up, jittering diplomatically about how it was an interesting new experience when he had both feet safely back on deck. The stitching on the halyard connection to the snap shackle had torn and was re-stitched more carefully this time, the bag was reattached and we hoisted it again.

We spotted sails on the horizon and called up on the VHF radio which we could use for line of sight communications like this. Our AIS (Automatic Identification System) also identified a vessel off our stern but didn’t say which one. Jean-Marie on Hot Ice responded saying that they had also seen us ahead of us and that they had gone north from Cape Town to avoid the bad weather and that we had been brave to take the routing that we had. Hot Ice had also suffered some damage though, having blown their only spinnaker in 30knot+ winds and were having to sail angles on their white sails to achieve their desired course. This made them a lot slower than us with our spinnaker hauling us along on a run. Jean-Marie also said that they had only caught a small 2kg Yellowtail off the Cape coast thus far and were envious of our successes in the fishing department. It was great chatting with Jean-Marie, especially as he was involved with 2nd Fishhoek Scouts, and as he said, although they were land scouts, all scouts were scouts first and foremost wherever they were. The last time we saw Hot Ice was when we were neck and neck rounding the number 3 bouy leaving Cape Town and it was terrific both seeing one of the fleet again for the first time in the race since the first night out and experiencing the camaraderie that goes hand-in-hand with sailing, especially on an ocean crossing. Hot Ice gradually disappeared over the horizon behind us as we stole a good lead on her with more canvas up than she could manage under the circumstances.

The VHF radio burst to life again with a request from Mike Bowker on Jacaranda who had picked us up on his AIS. We had known that Jacaranda was in our vicinity from the position reports we were getting from Race Control, placing Jacaranda just behind us on handicap. Mike was sailing double-handed around the world with his wife Sally on a 2-year circumnavigation and had joined the Cape to Rio race. When he said that they had run out of fresh food and was hoping to catch some fish we took great delight in advising him that we were having fresh sushi this evening for starters followed by Cajun-style pan-seared tuna steaks. The tuna we ate later didn’t disappoint, with everyone getting their tuna steak cooked individually to exactly how well they wanted it done, ranging from 20 seconds a side in the pan to 2 minutes for those that liked to see their fish cooked through. And the best part was that we still had plenty of fish left for char-grilled steaks on the braai mounted on the stern of the boat tomorrow evening.

We decided that we would change the watches to mix things up a bit so that everyone had different partners for a change and watch times were different so that the same people weren’t always on helming duty at a meal time. The new watches were Peter and Kathleen, Grant and Virgil, Chris and Ashwyn and Marcus and Lorraine. In the late afternoon we downloaded the latest GRIB weather files and ran the weather routing programme which indicated that we should alter our course for 2800 True. Given that the variation in this part of the Atlantic was now 200 (as opposed to the 250 of the Cape) this gave us a course to steer of 3000 Magnetic. As we were needing to bear up to the wind we dropped the spinnaker and set the genoa out again with our white sails on a broad reach ready for the night sailing.

Grant off stern of boat freeing the entangled warp

The warp that became entangled round our prop

Marcus up the mast retrieving the spinnaker halyard