Monday 26th December 2016
After several months of frenetic activity preparing the boat for the race and discussing what to expect among the crew we all finally gathered mid-morning on the start day at the RCYC to participate in the blessing of the fleet and clear customs and immigration for our trip. Our perishable provisions were brought on board, sponsor decals applied to the hull with the help of family and friends and we slipped our mooring at 13:00 Bravo to the cheers of the crowd of well-wishers who had come to bid us bon voyage. Motoring out to the start line we quickly noticed that the wind was pumping out of Woodstock corner and all the race participants had reefed their sails in anticipation of crossing the line on a broad reach with the wind off the stern quarter.
Several families of the crew were in close attendance to come and see us start from the big wooden ketch the Howard Davis which had kindly been organized by one of our major sponsors – the Jewish Maritime League (JML) after whom the boat is named together with the Rotary club who organized that Tosca Marine donate the hull to Scouts SA in 1982.
When the start gun went at 14:00 Bravo a very strange thing happened that hasn’t apparently ever been witnessed before – JML Rotary Scout was the first to cross the start line! Having taken her off her moorings, Nick was still at the helm while the rest of the crew managed the sails for this remarkable achievement. The Howard Davis and another very smart and big motor launch that had come to wish Jarrod farewell followed us out to the first race bouy off Milnerton where the much faster yachts Sophie B and Avanti managed to pip us round the mark. We raced up to the second Mark off Blouberg and after rounding it headed in a more North Westerly direction out to sea to try and take advantage of the prevailing wind direction while it was still blowing a hard South Easter. The wind eventually veered into a more westerly direction, gusting at 25knots after dropping briefly to only 2 knots just abeam of Robben Island. As we progressed up the west coast the sea became very confused with win d-generated waves from the westerly meeting the swell that was travelling in a northerly direction. Needless to say this made for some very uncomfortable sailing with each crew member taking it in turns to succumb to motion sickness and feed the Atlantic fish over the side of the boat. The upside of this was that there was some beautiful phosphorescence in the wake left by the boat that one got a close up view of. At the skippers and navigators meeting a couple of days before, we had been warned of this type of wave action which was apparently going to be worse closer to the coast so we needed to sail north west as much as possible to avoid it and catch the edge of the south Atlantic High. We all did very short stints on the helm, sometimes for as little as 15 minutes at a time as it was very tiring both physically and mentally holding the boat on course with the westerly waves lurching the bow around and trying to focus on the chart plotter compass to keep the boat on its intended he ading.
The evening brought stronger gusts of winds but as they stayed mostly westerly it was reasonably manageable. A fisherman called Steve called us up on the VHF radio to say that he was crossing our bows and were we going to keep on our course. He must have picked us up on the AIS as he knew our boat name, what speed were doing and our heading. It’s also possible to get this information from the Findship Android app on your phone if you have access to the Internet. With all of snatching what little sleep we could get in very bumpy conditions we were very relieved to see daybreak and the horizon we could focus on to help relieve the seasickness. Mathew shared some of his granny’s caramelized fudge with us all to also help alleviate the motion sickness which was delicious at first bite but had quite a sting in its tail. No-one had managed to eat anything since the start of the race other than a cheese roll in the early afternoon the day before. We all changed our watches from South Afric an (Bravo) time to Universal Time Coordinataire (UTC)and at 08:00 UTC we connected to our Fleet Broadband Satellite connection that had so generously been sponsored by Globecomm and set up by Cape Maritime Electronics to report our position to Race Control. We had done 160 miles since the start 24 hours earlier which we were very pleased with and looked forward to getting into the trade winds where the sea state would be a lot kinder to us with mostly following waves.
