Wednesday 4th January 2017
One of the requirements for qualifying for the race was the ability to do celestial navigation, should our electronics suffer damage and we could no longer rely on our GPS or chart plotter. Our cell phones also had GP devices of course but in theory the GPS signal, a manmade invention, could also possibly be turned off- although highly unlikely- and sunspots can also cause signal loss. So we set about taking a noonday sun sight as we approached the Greenwich meridian. Shooting the sun at its zenith at mid-day with the Carl Plath German sextant we had on board and extracting the sun’s declination together with the various corrections from the Nautical Almanac and then adjusting for our estimated position east of Greenwich based on the time at which the noon occurred we came up with a latitude and longitude. These calculations put us only 4.5 minutes south and 5.3 minutes east of our current position – i.e. in a circle of about 5 miles radius from where we actually were according to the GPS, given that one minute of angle was equivalent to 1 nautical mile. It was at about this time that a soccer ball drifted passed us, perhaps also indicating that we were on the right track to Rio.
At twilight we tried to shoot some stars to get a fix but with the bouncing around of the boat that made keeping a star in one’s sight very difficult together with clouds that suddenly obscured the star you had selected we had to abandon the exercise and wait for calmer weather. The moon was very bright briefly but it too then quickly disappeared behind clouds and ruled itself out as well for getting a position fix.
We heard via Race Control that one of the bigger boats in the second start of racing boats, Trekker II, had suffered extensive damage and after her crew had been rescued by a passing cargo ship she had needed to be scuttled to prevent her being a danger to other shipping. We also heard via e-mail from one of the crew’s family members who had been on the Royal Cape Yacht Club’s website earlier that three other yachts in that start had subsequently had to abandon the race and we eagerly awaited more news on what had actually transpired. The first-start cruising division daily position report had us having slipped from 2nd place to 4th in our group which didn’t bother us overly as we were going at what we though was quite a cracking pace and perhaps erring on the side of safety before speed. We slipped up on this later in the evening when we identified that we were probably getting unstable having the genoa goose-winged on the spinnaker pole and the main sail fully out on a gybe preventer in some very roly-poly waves that could at any time force an uncontrolled gybe as the boat was forced sideways when just that happened before we could attend to the matter. The main sail whipped around, snapping the gybe preventer line and in the process wrenching the main sheet block off the traveler on the stern cabin coach roof. Very luckily all that had happened was the shackle pin had bent so badly as to have the circlip snap and the shackle cheeks bend open. Hammering the shackle closed and finding a replacement pin solved the problem and we were on our way again, this time without the spinnaker pole holding the genoa out and the genoa furled to the first reef. We noticed that the bent shackle pin was in fact only about half what its thickness should have been as it had no doubt suffered a great deal of wear and tear over a long period and it was only a matter of time before it failed.
The conversation on the boat turned to things to do in Rio and pulling out the lonely Planet guide to the city we were going to be visiting we all found it fascinating that bikinis in local slang were referred to as fio dental, or dental floss. We had heard that bikinis in Rio were skimpy but this did sound somewhat of an exaggeration. There was also mention of the sunga, a teeny weeny pair of close fitting shorts that the male cariocas (what Rio inhabitants are referred to) like to wear on the beach and we all resolved that we would stick to our tried-and-trusted board shorts rather.
The young guns (i.e. the 3 eighteen year-olds Nick, Albert and Mathew) hoisted the spinnaker the next morning on their own and trimmed it perfectly for what would be a good length of time flying this big sail. Every now and then a school of Flying fish took to the air as they were disturbed in our wake and after gliding for up to 30m using the surface effect of the sea they ploughed into the waves. On occasion one of them would take to the air and almost comically get wiped out by a wave that rose in its path and which it then hit unexpectedly. We weren’t sure whether these fish were still technically in a school as they soared over the waves or if they had now become a flock. In the late afternoon we hooked a reasonable-sized Dorado and managed to land it off the stern after slowing the boat down briefly to avoid losing it. Our resident Ichthyologist Ash who has a Masters in the subject advised us that fish of this size would shoal with others until they reached sexual maturity when they would pair off, the bull having a very pronounced bulge on its forehead, and when catching one of them its mate would often be caught too if there was another line in the water at the time. Certainly, the beautiful rainbow colours off these fish always turned to a dull grey within a couple of minutes of taking them out of the water. We looked forward to braaing what is arguably one of the tastiest fish you can get when freshly caught.
