Tuesday 27th to Wednesday 28th December 2016
In the late afternoon we spotted a big Yellowtail following very closely behind the boat and then a couple of minutes later both bungee lines with skirt lures were taken by a Yellowtail, one quite a bit bigger than the other. Pulling in the smaller one by hand it dropped off the lure as we tried to get it on board so we gaffed the big one to ensure that we had it for supper, which we did braaing it after cooking lamb chops first to ensure that we made optima use of the charcoal we had brought with. Also, not everyone ate fish so we had two menu options for supper. We used Cajun spice on the Yellowtail which was delicious, but so were the lamb chops with their herby Willy special sauce we got from the Pick n Pay family store in Gabriel Road, together with all our other provisions. The management at this Pick n Pay which is renowned for being customer friendly really went out of their way to assist us, which we were very grateful for considering the limited time we had to pack 5 shopping trolleys with our victuals.
Just after dark we had to get all hands on deck as the spinnaker had suddenly become overpowered and we needed to get it down urgently. We managed to do this with a fair amount of effort as the wind was gusting at 25 knots and even with the genoa unfurled to blind the spinnaker from the wind it was still billowing out behind it. After seeing a couple of really big tankers pass us on the horizon followed by a passenger liner that changed course slightly after realizing that they were steaming right up our stern we felt that we had entered the trade winds as were getting a following sea and more consistent wind with squalls passing over us from time to time, bringing with them a light spattering of rain. After each squall the sky cleared to revel a magnificent display of stars, galaxies and nebulae that one doesn’t get to see living in the city with its light polluted skies and shooting stars darted across the sky with regularity. We also saw the odd satellite traversing the night sky, some really bright and others flashing which seemed intriguing. Early the next morning we were tripping along at a respectable 7 knots with the big purple spinnaker up when we suddenly heard it flapping and noticed a giant tear in it down the port side shoulder almost from the head to the clew parallel to the luff tape. We quickly started to bring it in only to have it tear a 3m length along the foot as well in a similar fashion. Fortunately we had a spare spinnaker although it is a lot heavier than the big purple one and has narrower shoulders, making it less effective in lighter wind conditions. Big Purple tearing like this for no apparent reason was very disappointing and frustrating as we had sent all our sails into the sail loft to get repaired before the trip and if our big spinnaker was perished we wished we had been told. It took several of us 5 hours later that day and the next to first tape the tears together with masking tape, clean the torn sections with acetone and then place stickyback sail tape along both sides of all the torn parts which we measured to be a total of 9m in length, meaning that we had patched with 18m of tape. We resolved that we could only use the big spinnaker again in very light winds as otherwise it would likely tear again and we may not have enough sticky back tape for another extensive tear.
Early in the afternoon we put up the bimini, a canvas-type awning that stretches over the cockpit to keep the sun off everyone. It provided immediate relief from the scorching heat and we were very grateful to Quiver Outdoor Gear for supplying this important component of the boat, to us together with the lee cloths to keep us in our bunks, a the 11th hour when we realized that ours were in a pretty sorry condition. The more serious racing boats don’t use biminis or even spray dodgers as they consider them a hindrance to their performance. We of course considered creature comforts important to the enjoyment of our adventure.
In the later afternoon on Wednesday we spotted a huge Sunfish swimming past on the surface, seemingly a sitting target for predators like sharks and perhaps they are poisonous, although our resident ichthyologist on board, Ash, said he hadn’t heard anything about this being the case. Several White-chinned petrels, a few Grey- headed albatrosses and Wilson’s Storm petrels followed our path and we no longer saw any Cape gannets that were more common further back and closer to shore. Mathew banged the bucket to scare the albatrosses off our surface fishing lures after he heard about us inadvertently snagging a gannet on our trip down the coast from Durban earlier in the year – we had managed to free it at the time and it had eventually flown off. Just after chasing the birds away we got a strike on one of the big game fishing rods and its reel which whirred furiously as what must have been a sizeable fish took over 100m of 60lb line off the reel in about 30 seconds. Tightening up the drag to avoid losing all the line off the reel the fish simply snapped the lure off and was gone. It’s very challenging landing a big fish off the stern of a moving yacht, especially when we are moving at close to 7 knots as we can’t really stop the boat since our first priority was racing the boat.
While connecting to Globecomms’ broadband satellite router to send our new position report and get weather and GRIB (Gridded Binary Files) of the wind speeds and pressures we discovered that the Windows 8 firewall kept on blocking the connection after re-enabling itself, even though we had disabled it. This resulted in our mail messages not being delivered for the first day and we needed to manually disable the firewall each time. A quick call on our satellite phone to Mike from Cape Maritime Electronics resolved the problem and we apologized to race control for this hiccup as they had insisted that we needed to communicate with them every day for safety reasons and they confirmed that they had now started receiving them. We downloaded the SA weather synoptic chart each day – a copy of the last two days of which are with this blog, to monitor the position of the South Atlantic High Pressure as we needed to skirt around it to Brazil so as not to get caught in the middle of it where there was very little wind and basically what amounted to the doldrums. As we had predicted, the High Pressure drifted lower and split into two with one chunk of it slipping around Cape Point to the east coast of Africa. We had two separate systems on board to fetch and analyse GRIB files so that we had redundancy in case one got damaged or malfunctioned. One was Predictwind on a Windows 8 laptop that connected via the Sailor broadband router to the Inmarsat satellites and the other was SailGrib WR on a Sony Android tablet that connected via an Iridium Axcess Point router to an Iridium 9555 satellite phone that we had secured above the chart table and using an external antenna on top of the solar panels frame on the stern of the boat. Being broadband the Sailor downloaded files in a jiffy compared to the narrowband connection of the Iridium phone. The Sailor device also had a satellite phone handset permanently attached to with it so that we had two separate ways to make a call, with the Iridium phone mobile so we could take it off the boat in a waterproof pouch if need be. Both satellite service providers were very similar in that they charge for time and data used with Iridium’s claim to fame being that their coverage was globular, extending to the north and south poles, two regions we didn’t plan on visiting on this particular trip. Also in this blog are a screenshot of our Predictwind app with the GRIB files displayed for the region we were passing through. The GRIB files could be animated to advance through a 3 hour period at a time for up to a week ahead to see what conditions we were likely to expect. Transferring the GRIB file we had downloaded to the tablet via Bluetooth we could then open this file in our weather routing app SailGrib WR and get it to calculate a best possible route for us for the prevailing conditions ahead. It does this using the weather information in conjunction with the polars for our particular yacht – these are the boat speeds the yacht can achieve under differing wind speeds, wind angles and points of sail of the boat. The weather routing calculated that we should be on a heading of about 300 degrees True to a waypoint we had selected as being at the top of the high pressure and which we were likely to reach in about 4 more days at the speed we were going at. A screenshot of this routing is also included here. While writing this blog Albert, as the blogger’s watch partner, has had to helm the yacht for the full watch time of 2 hours in brisk wind conditions which he has been doing really well, having eventually found his sealegs and bouncing back from a bout of seasickness that had him lying low for the first couple of days.
