I was too early for penguins in Argentina, I only saw Peruvian penguins from a boat, but South Africa’s penguins at Bolder Beach gave me my penguin fix and then some.

Sure, these weren’t the nicest penguins.  There were warning signs everywhere about them biting, and in case you got too close they actually glared at you.  Still, seeing the tuxedoed animals in formal wear was enough to make anyone smile.

 

 

The waiting could stretch the patience of a saint.  The worst part is that you are tied to the boat.  Taking a road-trip or going exploring is out of the question.  After all, if the wind suddenly changes then you have to leave.  But when you finally do leave, when at last you head out onto the open water the wind whipping past your face feels like freedom.

 

We had a window.  We finally had a window and the last two WARC boats left in Durban, Matilda and Southern Cross were taking it.  It was a big enough window we might not even have to stop in East London, a town that every WARC boat had advised that we give a miss if possible.

 

For weeks we had heard stories about the horrors of Cape Horn.  Treacherous rocks, capricious winds, the “Wild Coast” where boats couldn’t find a port in the storm for hundreds of miles and worst of all the Agulhas  current .  But we had also been hearing another tale entirely from other WARC boats.

 

We set sail on a clear morning.  Taking the other yachts advice we sailed out, and out further, and further looking for the elusive Agulhas current.  Now the current can be disastrous for boats if it is going against the wind and it is all-but impossible for small yachts to sail against it.  However, when the current is in your favor then watch out.  We had heard tales of 4-7 knots of favorable current, the ocean giving the yachts after-burners and whipping them down the coast.

 

We didn’t find the famed 7-knot favorable current, but we did make excellent time down the infamous “Wild Coast” shooting past East London and Port Elizabeth.  Would we really make it to Cape Town in one shot!?

 

We were balanced on the edge for a day, maybe even two, but the answer was no.  If the current had been a smidge more favorable we might have made it but no dice.

 

We sailed through the razor-sharp cliffs guarding the entrance to Knysna’s marina 4 days after leaving Durban.  Clean, orderly, Knysna  (nice-na), a charming cross between a tourist haven and retirement community, was vastly different from the jumble of cultures, communities and ways of life thrown into a bag and shaken that made up  the vibrant city of Durban.

 

As much as I wanted to leave that city, I did miss Victoria Market, the bunny chow, not to mention our new friends at Bluff Yacht Club.  But that is travel.  You always miss something of the places you leave and hopefully love something of the new places you discover.   Whether you’re traveling in space or mentally, the important thing is not to stagnate, right?

What to buy when provisioning for a long passage?

Every captain and crew has his or her preferences so provisioning always varies but  a few staples are:

-          Spices: variety is the spice of life and nothing like herbs and spices to add a little diversity to your cooking

-          Canned goods: vegetables, soups, fruits, coconut milk… etc.

-          Dried foods:  rice, beans, I love dried mushrooms, some swear by dried peas and other vegetables

-          Starches: pasta, cous cous, instant noodles, tortillas

-          Snacks:  It’s important to keep something in your stomach to avoid seasickness.  Chocolate can be a great morale booster on long passages

-          Cereal bars: an easy meal at sea

-          Tortillas:  last for ages and can be used in a diverse array of wraps from savory to sweet

-          Eggs, egg replacer is also great if you’re doing baking or anything like that.

-          Boxed long-life milk (some prefer powdered milk but I am a traditionalist in that respect)

-          Potatoes, squash, sweet potatoes, and other long-lasting root vegetables.

-          Meat (though I don’t eat it but I’ve seen sailors go a little crazy when deprived of meat on long passages.  I figure why buy a lot of meat when you can get the freshest seafood in the world from the water around you!?

Just before setting off is the time to buy the fresh fruits and vegetables.   You want to make them last as long as possible.  But how do you make them last as long as humanly possible?

I found this excellent article online: Cool Ways to Keep Food Without Refrigeration by Beth A. Leonard, a woman who had sailed on a refrigerator-less boat.  In it she outlines tips and tricks to keep fruits and vegetables fresh for longer at sea.

I would add that in addition to buying unrefrigerated eggs and turning them every several days coating eggs with Vaseline adds to their shelf-life.   That said, keep a close eye on the eggs.  I have seen too many incidents of eggs going bad or buggy and no one wants a boat smelling sulfurous.

One fun trick is that if you’re sailing in the tropics then you can grow yourself sprouts at sea using just a glass jar and a little water.  They probably do work better if you have a water purifier because rinsing them can take quite a bit of water.

Keep lettuce and spinach fresh longer if you can buy them with roots and put them in water.  This is a lot easier if you’re on a catamaran.  Truth be told, I wouldn’t even attempt it on a monohull.

When you’re on a long passage good meals and variety in them is one of the main things to look forward to.  Mix it up and have fun with your cooking.  You and your crewmates will be happier for it.

Fair winds and happy sailing!

I love catamarans.  They are comfortable, spacious, as many cat owners say; you don’t have to “live on the walls (referring to monohulls nearly constant listing to one side or the other)

Unfortunately catamarans are not built for the Cape of Good Hope.  They are made for the champagne sailing of the Atlantic Ocean.  Big waves and choppy seas

The hop from Richards Bay to Durban wasn’t even a 24 hour slow sail.  But after that was the Wild Coast.  Long stretches without any marinas for boats to duck in and take cover.  The stretch from Durban to East London is the longest and most treacherous.

The Cape of Good Hope is one of the two most dangerous passages in the world.  It isn’t always nasty like Cape Horn, what makes it more dangerous is its capricious nature.  With the right wind and the Agulhas current buoying them along boats can speed down around the cape without incident.  The problem is that (depending on the season) the weather rarely holds for more than a few days at a time and if the wind is against the strong current then watch out.  Even the largest tanker can be flipped into the air by enormous waves and a private yacht fighting the clash of the wind and current titans.

Southern Cross moored in the Bluff Yacht club, a little outside of Durban and we quickly made friends with many of the members.  The ebullient Zelda, with as much energy and drive as 20 regular people, Graham, a sailor’s sailor, and many more, almost every one of them told us tales of sails they had made it within 20 nautical miles of East London when the wind changed and they had needed to turn their boat around and head back hundreds of miles to the safety of Durban.   You couldn’t fight the weather.  If the wind wasn’t perfect you shouldn’t bother setting sail.

The bottom line was you needed at least a 5-day window.

The weather reports kept promising fair winds and tantalizing us with large windows, but as they each one came up the windows would slam shut.  WARC boat after boat left throwing caution to the wind, but Steve was adamant.  A conservative sailor, he was not going to leave until there was  a real window long enough for us to get down to East London, or maybe even as far as Port Elizabeth. After all, the WARC boats had all told us that East London was even sketchier than its disreputable namesake.

One night 40 knots of wind howled around the boat.  Even moored safe in a marina the weather was intimidating.  The day had been a little grey but calm and just as suddenly the deceitful South African weather had changed.  This weather was not normal for December.

Week after week passed and as every new group of WARC boats left I grew more stir crazy.  Peter, a retired physicist and involved member who always had a kind word, gave my crewmate Tom and I rides into town and let us use his apartment for internet.  The legendary Zelda showed us some amazing coffee shops, the bustling Victoria Market, and some delicious Indian restaurants.  The warm welcoming people were lovely but staying at the isolated Bluff Yacht Club for weeks on end without a car was frustrating at best.

Once again, stuck waiting for the right winds.  Still, waiting was better than getting caught out on the ocean in a catamaran with 50 knots of wind against the current

Zelda, Tom, and I at a fantastic Indian restaurant near Victoria Market

.

Patience is a virtue from what I understand.

 

 

 

 

“Keep your eyes peeled!”

That was the last thing Steve told me before leaving me to go on watch.  A wooden skeleton of a ship had been sighted near where our course was taking us.

The ship bucked and pitched over the swells the slate-grey sky vomiting a steady drizzle down on the little catamaran.  It was a day straight off the pages of a Melville novel.

I said a silent thanks to the Lagoon designers who had had the foresight to put the helm under a waterproof biminy and Steve’s ingenuity of putting plastic “windows” around to protect from errant waves.  The blue canvas bench may still have squished when you sat on it, but at least the worst of the elements were kept at bay.

2,300 miles.  My longest passage to date.  In today’s world 2,300 miles still seems like quite a ways.  Too long to drive by car, it’s even  a fair distance by plane, but  when thinking nautically it takes on whole new meaning.  Sailing is taking it old school, back to the days where you could actually feel the distance rather than whisking to the other side of the world in a matter of hours, or on the outside a day, by plane.

But I wasn’t worried, I had been on long passages before and they weren’t terrible.  The days kind of blurred together doing shifts, cooking, catching fish.  It wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.  Besides, we had all sorts of fishing gear with us.  We might have a little excitement on the passage.

Not half a day after leaving the sun-drenched shores of Cocos (Keeling), a curtain of grey had draped its heavy folds over the world with a dreadful finality.  First a drizzle, then a heavier rain fell, damping our spirits and permeating every cranny and crevice of the boat.   The first day was uncomfortable, but we still clung to some shred of hope that it would end.  Until we looked at the GRIB files to see what the weather forecast looked like.

The GRIB files didn’t offer even the smallest sliver of hope.  For days the rain fell.  Slate-grey sky stretched on endlessly.  ARC boats far ahead of us, and to either sides reported rain, rain and more rain.  Everything was damp, clammy, and cold.  And it only got worse from there.

A week into the passage one ARC boat, J’Sea’s, autopilot broke  The autopilot is often referred to as the silent member of the crew.  It plays an integral and often underappreciated part of a boat on any long passage.  Hand steering through rough seas is all but unheard of.

To make things worse, J’Sea only had 2 people on board.  For over a week the captain John and Linda, his crewmate had to hand steer in 2-hour shifts.  By the time they made it to Mauritius they were on the verge of collapse, their hands covered in blisters.

That was a passage of grave Many serious sailors will have elective appendectomies before long passages.  What are you going to do if you’re in the middle of the ocean and your appendix bursts?

Brigit, one of the German boat Juba’s owners, had severe stomach pains and they were all-but certain it was appendicitis.  Another good reason for sailing with the ARC is the support.  Thankfully Juba had heavy duty antibiotics on board and another ARC boat had two doctors on board to talk them through the crisis.  Brigit made it to Mauritius where they immediately took her to the hospital.

The Indian Ocean showed its true colors on passage from Cocos to Mauritius.

In the Western world we take unlimited electricity for granted, but on a boat it is a very different thing.  Unless you are moored on “shore power” getting enough power to run the boat can be a delicate issue.

Some captains are traditionalists and want to use as little power as possible.  Nemo, Mareva’s captain had prided himself on sailing solely on solar power for years.  Until three years ago when he got a laptop.  After that it was all downhill from there and at last he broke down and bought a generator.

Generators are not always reliable though.  Several of the boats I’ve been on have had generator issues.  Something goes wrong, it won’t work, and power becomes a commodity on the boat.  Sure, solar panels generate enough to keep the autopilot, refrigeration, GPS, radio, and the basics going, but you really have to run the engine to watch TV, or charge a laptop, ipod, or anything like that.

Now when I joined Southern Cross I knew the generator was in pieces.  Even with the power and technology-addict that I, as a Westerner, am, it wasn’t too much of an issue.  We did run the engine a good deal of the time.

The trouble started in the desert paradise of Cocos (Keeling).  We had a minor hiccup anchoring.  Southern Cross was a bit of a push-button boat and the anchor could be dropped via remote control.  Most of the time.  When Steve pressed the remote button nothing happened.  We jiggled the wires and tried to trouble shoot to no avail.  In the end Steve had to manually drop the anchor.  Not with a winch handle.  Hand over hand; he had to let the chain out.

Push-button sailing is fine, as long as there is a backup.  Unfortunately there wasn’t a winch handle on Southern Cross to manually drop the anchor so when the remote didn’t work; the crew had to drop the anchor by hand.

Now running the windlass to drop the anchor does take quite a bit of power, but we were pretty convinced that it was something wrong with the windlass.  Cocos was beautiful, but it was also remote, so remote there wasn’t anyone to work on the yacht.  Steve worked on it himself and thought he’d fixed it.  Until nothing happened when we went to pick up anchor for Mauritius.

Even running the engine the starboard battery wasn’t charging.  This was worse than the generator being dead.  This was serious.  If one battery was dead it could drag the other one down.  And they were both almost new batteries.  No one knew what could be the matter.

We hauled the anchor up by hand and set sail with trepidation.  We would have to go back to basics on this leg.  It was going to be a leg relying chiefly on solar.

A good idea, provided the sun makes an appearance.  Unfortunately solar power is contingent on sunny days and naturally that leg was the rainiest one yet.

Problems with generators

Problems with batteries

No sun to charge the solar panels

At least we still had our motor, which is more than all the yachts on the WARC could say.

The more high-tech and fancy a boat is the more things that can go wrong.  I am all for the comforts of push-button sailing, but experience shows that it’s always good to have redundancies  a few back-up plans, and be able to do things the old-fashioned way.

After all, the more you know about boats the more things you know that can go wrong…

What is a boat?

A hole in the water that you throw money into.

Watching a yacht have its mast removed is like seeing a butterfly’s wings

plucked off.  The majestic , powerful,  emblem of freedom  is immediately

transformed into an impotent floating box.  Unfortunately yachts are a work-in-progress.  Even yachts that go out for day sails need repairs, and a lot of wear and tear is put on boats sailing around the world.
According to other  Lagoon 38 owners, this problem wasn’t unique to Southern Cross.  According to Lagoon, it couldn’t be a design flaw.  They didn’t know anything about it.  So once again, the skipper had to suck it up and pay.Southern Cross, a 38’ Lagoon had been having serious problems with the mast track, the lynch pin in the main sail’s rigging.   Steve, the skipper had replaced it 3 times but it kept warping.  When we reached South Africa we couldn’t put the main sail all the way up and it was just getting worse.

Southern Cross moored in Bluff Yacht Club, a little outside of Durban, to have the work done.  Bluff Yacht Club was a charming place with a 50s feels, in fact it probably hadn’t been remodeled since the 50s, but there were big plans for renovation.  All of the members were welcoming and beyond friendly offering camaraderie, rides into town, helpful suggestions, and advice about South Africa.

I knew we were having the mast off in South Africa and was more than a little nervous.  That had to be a huge deal, right?  After all, the mast, the sails… that was the very heart and soul of the boat – the mast put the sail in sailboat.  Fixing the mast?  That was huge.

We motored Southern Cross over to a wall opposite the Marina and the riggers helped us tie her up.  I watched incredulous as two men adeptly unbolted rigging and hooked it onto the crane.  In 15 minutes we had the rigging unbolted and one man guided the mast off of the boat onto land.

With the mast off it was as if I were standing on a different boat.   A hollow shell of the proud sailboat she had once been.  How long would she be like this?

To my surprise and delight the South African riggers worked miracles.  What would have taken at least a week in the States or Europe was done in just a few hours.  A fraction of the time, but still an obscene amount of money.  I don’t even want to know how much.  I love sailing, crewing is great, but owning a boat?  Well like they say, boat stands for “Break Out Another Thousand.”

Where will a vegetarian order themselves a bunny for lunch?

In Durban, South Africa of course.

Bunny Chow, Durban’s signature dish, is cheap, fast, and absolutely delicious.  You can order a half bunny or a quarter bunny.  But unless you are a professional eater I’d stick with the quarter bunny.  I can usually make two meals out of that.

The dish, Durban fast food,  is a half (or quarter) loaf of bread hollowed out and filled to overflowing with delectable spicy curry.  The hollowed out portion of the bread is put on top of the bunny or to the side.  The most common curries are bean, mutton, or chicken (though I recommend the veggie one if you can find it).

When I first heard of bunny chow I was skeptical.  Curry in Africa?  What was that going to be like?  I soon learned that Durban boasts the largest Indian population outside of India.  Gandhi  himself spent 20 years in South Africa, and many of his ideas got their start there.  And at least in part because of the large Indian population the food in Durban is delectable.

But why “bunny chow”?  It isn’t (always) vegetarian or anything like bunny food.  It isn’t made out  of bunnies.  Interestingly enough, few people knew the answer.  Finally a native Durbanite satisfied my curiosity.

When Indian workers ,called Banias, were imported to work in the sugarcane fields they brought their cuisine with them.  Heavily spiced curries are an Indian staple.  They couldn’t always find the traditional Indian bread; rotis, naan, or chapatti, but they could always find a loaf of bread at the store.  Bunny was a mispronunciation of “Bania,” and so the hollowed out bread filled with curry became known as bunny chow.

I adore animals.  Having grown up watching nature shows, I, like many people

first thought of safaris when I thought of Africa.  I envisioned lions in the Savannah, Leopards lolling in trees, herds of starkly striped zebras blending into shadowed grass.

Now I was actually in South Africa, but how could I afford a safari?  A number of the ARC owners had saved tens of thousands of dollars to go on posh safaris.

Looking on the internet even the less expensive ones seemed to cost thousands.  Though I longed to see animals in the wild that was too rich for my blood.

Then I heard.  The WARC South Africa tour was a day-long safari!

The buses left the marina a little after 7:00 am.  By 8:00, the WARC group was at the park.  The signs up around the park were fantastic.  An elephant pictured pushing over a truck, warnings not to get out of the jeeps… we were really going on a safari!

We piled into 4 black and white camouflaged open-sided safari jeeps at the park gate.  The only African game park I had even heard of was Kruger, but that was a little too far.  Instead we were going to the nearby Imfolozi.

George, the ranger driving our jeep, introduced himself.  He had been a ranger at Imfolozi for 15 years and loved it.  Not 20 meters past the gate he stopped the jeep beside a herd of impala.  Soaking up the thrill of seeing zoo animals in the wild we all snapped photos like mad.  These were Africa’s version of fast food.  Not only are they everywhere, he joked, but they’re fast.

We only had to pull a few meters further before a massive giraffe appeared just to the left of the road.  The graceful brown and tan giant stopped munching the treetop and gazed at us through long lashes.  Giraffes were George’s favorite animal.  Not only were they beautiful but they were also the most docile, peaceful animals in the park.  These gentle giants weren’t afraid of people and posed for pictures like the models of the Savannah, never causing trouble.

The morning was incredible.  Animal were everywhere and so many seemed to stay close to the road. A wildebeest rubbed elbows with a small group of zebras.  George explained that these animals often grouped together.  It was a symbiotic relationship:  one had a good sense of smell and the other had excellent eyesight.  Together they were unstoppable.  We slowed as a Warthog scurried across the road, strained our eyes to glimpse a distant water buffalo, oooed and awwed over a small herd of young bull elephants, and marveled at the landscape.

When I think safari, I think of the animals, but the surroundings were as beautiful as they were foreign.  Verdant hills rolled away into the distance dotted with copses of trees and bushes offered cover.  Tender new shoots of grass crowned and expansive grasslands.  Even a silver ribbon of river, complete with crocodiles, snaked its way between several of the hills.   This was Africa.  It didn’t let you forget it for a second.

Late in the morning George stopped the car to point out a white rhino; her calf nestled in the grass next to her grey tree trunk legs.  The guide explained to us that the difference between white and black rhino was not the color, but the shape of their mouths.  The “white” rhinos were grazers with wide shovel-like mouths meant for eating as much grass as possible.  They were called wide rhinos because their mouths were wider than the browsing black rhinos that preferred a steady diet of shrubbery.

Our guide’s commentary was excellent and much appreciated and it was wonderful to see the animals in the wild but I wished we hadn’t been rushing through the park so quickly.  Stop for a minute, take some pictures, and then on to the next animal.  Unfortunately we only had a day to see everything and staying in one place to watch the animals’ be animals wasn’t on the agenda.

What was the big 5? I asked.  Being on a safari and not knowing I was almost embarrassed to ask.

Water buffalo, rhino, elephant, lion, and leopard.  George explained that these were the five most dangerous animals if you don’t take them down with one shot.  Leopards are normally quite mild-mannered, but when they are injured… watch out.

By the end of the day we had seen 3 of the “Big 5.”  We hadn’t seen any big cats or predators of any kind.

The safari was amazing, but just enough to whet the appetite.  I  wanted more.

How could I do it on a budget?  How do you take a safari on a shoestring?

Now everyone has done things they wouldn’t dream of doing sober under the influence of a drink or 10.  Sailors are a notoriously drunken lot and the WARC crew take that notoriety to a whole new level.  The WARC parties were a force to be reckoned with.

Umineko’s,  or “sea cat” in Japanese, motto was: have Karaoke Machine, will travel.”  Sato San, the cat’s ebullient skipper was a born showman.  The svelte man was a dyed-in-the-wool extrovert.  He had lived in Detroit for 20 years and easily made friends with all nationalities on the ARC.  It was impossible not to like the man who always had a joke ready and a story to share.   When he joined WARC in Australia he told everyone that Umineko had a karaoke machine on board and invited everyone to karaoke and “Hiroshima Pizza.”

Thus many a WARC party made fellow mariners wish there were some actual sea cats in heat around to drown out the drunken ARC members serenading the marinas.  After all, it is the universal rule that whatever pitch a singer may have at the start of the evening drains away as more pitchers are downed.   But drunken karaoke caterwauls were barely the tip of the iceberg.

Teeth were knocked out, trampolines, or netting stretched across the foredeck of most catamarans, were ripped, drunken gymnastics ensued, party-goers accidently fell in marinas… More hilarious anecdotes were forgotten at one WARC party than 100 landlubbers parties could begin to boast.  WARC parties were legendary.

They say WARC is a drinking club with a sailing problem for a reason.

Unlike some of the seasoned rum-soaked veterans, (the heiress to a Scotch maker who kept a library of whiskies and scotches on her boat was among this colorful cast of characters) I don’t tend to drink a lot.  I never have.  A glass or two of wine I nice and when I feel too tipsy I generally head for to bed.

The WARC upped my alcohol consumption.  Dramatically.  But still, I was quite a tame drunk, boring even.  Until South Africa, that is.

Zululand Yacht Club in Richards Bay, South Africa welcomed WARC with open arms.  Doing it right they presented every yacht with a bottle of sparkling wine when they arrived… a present for crossing the Indian Ocean.

Two days after Southern Cross and the last boats had docked Zululand combined a traditional Braai, or South African barbecue with the WARC awards ceremony.   Almost no one really took the “race” aspect of the WARC seriously, but that’s what each leg technically was a race.

This last lengthy leg of the Indian Ocean had been rough on everyone though, and Rally Control, the WARC staff, gave out all sorts of prize other than for just fastest boats.  Everyone was happy to be on land and celebrating together.  Alcohol flowed like water, the banquet tables (over-glorified picnic tables) were piled with South African fare.  An incredible dance troupe of high school kids.  With a now fluid, now jerky style of modern dance that was mesmerizing, the guys in NerdzZ Fam had some of the most impressive dance choreography I had seen in a long time.  It was even more impressive when I found out the guys were still in High School.

https://www.facebook.com/NerdsFam

There was the awards ceremony, traditional Zulu dancers, and the rest of the evening was erased from my memory.  Whether that was from alcohol or PTSD, no one can be really sure.

As Zululand promised, they were hosting a traditional braai.  Complete with traditional food, dances, and games, or rather game.  The “game” in question was called bokdrol spoek, in other words s**t spitting.

Kudu buck

Nope, this is not merely a sport to get back at white colonists.  This isn’t something to make fun of tourists.  Spitting dried kudu droppings is actually a Zulu sport.  Kudus are massive antelope, almost twice the size of a deer with satellite-dish ears and the males boast beautiful spiral horns.  One buck is enough to feed a whole tribe, unfortunately they are elusive.

The sport developed from tribesman spitting the dried dung to curse the animals.  Still, when I heard about a kudu poo spitting contest I was appalled.  It sounded absolutely dreadful!  And it is.  Not a sport for a sober person.  But by the end of the night I was pretty far from sober and somehow something you wouldn’t dream of doing sober can sound like a good idea drunk.

According to witnesses it wasn’t quite as dreadful as it might have been.  The dried pellets were preceded by a shot of tequila.  Then the dung is held between the player’s teeth and spat as far as possible.  After spitting, the player is offered another shot of tequila to sterilize their mouth.  I suppose with enough alcohol even kudu poo can be hygienic.

I did not win.  The up side to this is that I wasn’t the only competitor.   The down side of this is that it is possible that there are pictures of me spitting poo somewhere in the world.

How drunk were you?

I was so drunk I was spitting s**t.

Damn.  That’s wasted.

We may have a new measure for intoxication here.