Friday 20th January 2017
After a reasonable start to the day with a fresh breeze the wind started to fade come lunchtime and by the evening we had a meagre 8 knots. Earlier in the day we had discovered that we had in fact managed to get ourselves into 3rd place in our fleet, both for potential line honours and on our IRC handicap. This would be short lived though if we continued to experience light winds as Rotary Scout doesn’t do well under such conditions. Considering we were supposed to have several boats following close behind us we were surprised not to see any of them, but then we had a secret weapon that was possibly keeping them off our tail. We had put our rubbish bags in the sugar scoop on the stern of the boat and they were beginning to reek something horrid. We had transferred them form the lazarette to the sugar scoop after we needed to access the engine to sort out the prop shaft coupling which necessitated removing all the rubbish first. However, in the sugar scoop they started floating around on water that had managed to get inside and the tin cans had filled with water and with their jagged edges were shredding the bags, emptying all their contents into the sugar scoop. This included all the carefully bagged used loo paper and wet wipes from the heads. The sugar scoop was oozing a putrid black liquid that was basically a concoction of everything we had thrown out in the last 24 days and which had been putrefying in the tropical heat. Even sailing downwind became unpleasant as the smell wafted over the boat. Eish, we had a seriously stinky problem on our hands that needed dealing with urgently as we couldn’t imagine the folk at the prestigious ICRJ yacht club welcoming us with open arms once they smelt us coming and they certainly wouldn’t allow us to deal with the problem while moored in front of their fancy clubhouse. Taking advantage of the quieter sea and gentle wind Grant and Rory set about emptying the sugar scoop by collecting all the floating rubbish, squeezing it dry and double-bagging it to go back in the lazarette. Emptying all the water from the sugar scoop with a bucket we left a slick of filthy black water behind us but eventually managed to rinse it all out and restore the boat to something a bit more presentable for our arrival in Rio. We resolved that flushing a huge amount of collected grime down the scuppers in future all food waste needed to go overboard and everything containing food needed to be thoroughly rinsed first with cans crushed to take up less space. In cleaning mode, Rory then washed down the cockpit area flushing a huge amount of collected grime down the scuppers while Grant trailed off the stern trying to rid himself of all the traces of the stinky debris he had encountered.
In the early evening we entered Brazil’s 200-mile economic exclusion zone and started to spot the lights of the oil rigs on the horizon and within a few hours we could then clearly see them, lit up like Christmas trees against the night sky, many with service vessels in close attendance and some burning off waste gas like huge big flame throwers. We must have passed over 20 of them, some as far out as 50 miles from the shore. The wind remained a disrepectable 8 to 10 knots throughout the night and then in the morning it dropped to less than 5 knots for what we thought would be a very brief period as some sort of strange anomaly. After all, the weather GRIB files showed favourable 10 to 15 knot winds in a nice band in the area we had specifically chosen to sail into for this reason. How wrong we were. We spent a very frustrating day in 3 to 5 knot winds, the sails flogging as we alternated between the spinnaker and gennaker as well as numerous headings to try and make some headway. The only constant other than the absence of any reasonable wind was a decent current that we had also intentionally aimed to take advantage of and which the difference between our ship’s log and the GPS showed was about 1.5 knots. Basically this was our boat speed. Only a couple of days ago we were calculating that we could make Rio by Saturday morning if we maintained our historical 140 miles a day average.
In the early hours of the morning we managed to hook another really big Wahoo but somewhat strangely the crew on watch at the time decided that we didn’t need this fish and instead of gaffing it to bring it on board they lifted it up out of the water by the fishing line and given its weight it promptly broke off the line to swim away. We were out of all our fresh food and faced having to eat the dreaded bully beef for the next day or so that it would take us to get to Rio. Perhaps these folk had finally lost their marbles after 25 days at sea.
In the late morning on Saturday we spotted the coast of Brazil in the distance and come 2:00pm we still had over 100 miles to go and at 1.5 knots it was going to take us a mighty long time. To make matters worse we saw two yachts overtake us off our port beam, one definitely a catamaran, presumably Leia B and the other perhaps Bolero as we continued to flounder in windless conditions, at one stage doing a full 360 degree turn while changing the gennaker for the spinnaker as the boat lost all steerage with no forward motion. As a result of this the fishing lines all became entangled around the rudder which Nick dived under the boat to free. It was at times like this in what was effectively the doldrums compared to what we had experienced up to now that one tended to have somewhat of a sense of humour failure and found other people really irritating, especially in the sweltering tropical heat with no breeze to cool us off. We chatted about this so that it was something we were aware of to understand that it was quite normal but also something that we had to try and manage individually in the interests of keeping a happy boat. The wind would no doubt pick up again and everyone’s spirits would inevitably lift.