I thought I’d start this entry off with a short explanation as to our route plan and why we decided to skip Ascension and Bermuda, putting the length of this leg up from around 3700 nm to over 5300nm.
The number one factor is money. After 9 months of cruising the coffers are running critically low.
Ascension alone would have cost us around $200 just in entry and landing fees, and rumour has it that Bermuda is even more expensive. So after an hour of indecision with our fingers poised over the submit button on our filled out ascension entry permits, we decided to forgo ascension and spend an extra week in St. Helena instead. This also allowed us to spend more time exploring the island and meeting people rather than racing through.
As for our route, we lost all of our pilot charts (along with many other things) in the storm off of South Africa where they turned into a soggy mess and proceeded to clog our bilge pump…
This means that we are mostly relying on memory and conversations with other cruisers for our route planning.
Our plan s to head more or less north from St. Helena and pass to the east of Ascension. We will then take advantage of the counter clockwise winds and currents in the south Atlantic and turn WNW to cross the equator somewhere between 25° and 30° west where the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (the area of no wind along the equator) is quite narrow. Once into the north Atlantic our plan is to follow the clockwise rotating current and cut in towards the Caribbean. Here we’re hoping to pick up the gulf stream which will take us north east, passing close by Bermuda and almost right up to Nova Scotia. Such is the plan, food, water and wind permitting.
On our final day on St. Helena, another cruiser from Namibia dropped off some tuna for us. He also gave us a recipe to dry and season it to make a fish biltong of sorts.
And so, at 9am on the 12th of May we sailed out of St. Helena with our backstays adorned with strips of drying fish.
The wind was fickle up to 3 miles out of the island, but with a little diesel powered wind we soon were in the clear and picked up a steady 12 knot southerly breeze.
The next day we set up our offshore fishing line which consisted of an old elastic resistance band tied to a length of 130kg test monofilament, a steel leader and a squid lure. We had learned about this setup from a South African we met in Fiji. After looking over our thin braided line, and inshore rod with some contempt, he had told us that the fish will strike at up to 90 km/hour. With his setup the bungee would take up the initial shock, preventing the hook from bending or ripping out of the mouth, and then you bring the fish in hand over hand.
We were quite excited to have more tuna, but unfortunately there were no bites that day.
On the 14th our tuna biltong was completely dry. While not as good as fresh tuna, it was still very good and would keep indefinitely.
That afternoon we decided to shave our heads as it would make keeping clean much easier and it would be grown back before anyone saw us anyway. Callum left two long tails of hair on the back of my head which I didn’t discover till much later.
On the 16th, our 5th day at sea, we crossed through 10°S and things were beginning to get properly hot. The ocean had turned an even brighter blue and the sun baked deck would burn our bare feet.
On the 6th day we had covered 500 miles since St Helena and we had a bag of cookies to celebrate. In St. Helena we had purchased 6 canned chicken pies to be eaten at every 1000 nm interval from St. Helena. We also bought a tube of double stuffed Oreos for every other 500nm.
Day 7 we tried our hand at making some bread. Every time I took my eyes off the dough it would start edging towards the side of the counter. One time making it right to the edge where it pressed itself in a gooey lump against the fiddles before being recalled to the center of the cutting board. Eventually we had it in the oven where it filled the cabin with mouth watering odours, along with sweltering heat. After 40 minutes in the oven our beautiful loaf resembled a brown, somewhat misshapen rock. It was so solid I’m pretty sure it would have sank if we tossed it overboard. Too much effort and flour had gone into it for that though, so we slathered it with margarine and chewed it down. It sure was filling, though it sat in the stomach like a rock.
We blamed our 2 year old and slightly soggy yeast for the mishap. Our peanut butter cookies were a much bigger success.
Day 8. We passed Ascension 70nm to the west of us.
Our jib had been chafing badly and now had a 12″ by 15″ hole in one of the panels. So we took it down for repair, and noticed that the forestay had worn almost right through another two of the bronze hanks. We had used up all our spare dacron on previous repairs, so we patched it up with insignia and replaced the hanks with shiny new ones from our rapidly dwindling supply of spares. Hopefully once we’re into the NE trades of the north Atlantic we will have a better wind angle and less wear on the sails and running rigging.
Day 9: A flying fish came down the companionway landing on the cabin floor, not to be discovered until much later when I stepped on it in the dark. It was a very unpleasant sensation and i spent the next 20 minutes scrubbing the contents of its stomach cavity off my foot and the floor and searching for it’s mortal remains which had slid under the fire extinguisher
Day 10: at 4°s 18°w we had covered 1000 nm since leaving St. Helena. And so, with all due ceremony we dug the first of our canned chicken pies out of its locker. Opening the lid revealed a pale gooey crust submerged in a clear slimy fluid. Unsure of proper procedure at this point we elected to drain off the clear slime before baking. This didn’t appear to do any harm and the pie came out of the oven with a golden brown crust. It was pretty good albeit a little slimy in the middle and definitely a treat to look forward to when the next 1000 nm rolls around.
We still had our jib stowed on deck to avoid excess wear. With the wind directly behind us it would not help push us along much anyway without a pole to hold it out on the windward side or ‘wing on wing’, which we do not have. We were still averaging 5 knots and well over 100 nm per day despite our jibless state.
Day 11: 3:50am we saw our first ship. It was a little one at only 750 feet and was heading south.
So far the south Atlantic has been a remarkably clean ocean, with almost no visible garbage on the beaches in and St Helena or at sea. In fact we haven’t seen a single piece of floating garbage since leaving Capetown.
With the exception of the African coast it has also been almost entirely devoid of life. I can count the number of sea birds we’ve seen since leaving St Helena on my hands alone. The exception to this is flying fish. They come aboard in droves all night. Morning brings a grizzly scene. The decks are littered with dead fish, which are usually dry and crispy within an hour. There are so many of them it is difficult to move about without grinding fish paste into our non skid.decking.
As we close in on the equator their numbers only increase. One day we counted 140 of them blown in drifts around the bases of the shrouds and stanchions.
Most of them are only a couple inches long, but we have had a couple 8-12 inchers as well.
Day 12: The very limited number of ingredients we have at sea leads to some unique creations. Today we found an old pack of tiramisu powder from South Africa. We didn’t have most of the ingredients, but tried making it anyway, which resulted in an extraordinarily sweet syrupy substance. This was not very palatable so we added some flour and other ingredients and fried it up as pancakes. Perhaps not our most successful creation, but easier to get down than in it’s original form.
Another source of our culinary mishaps is the labeling on our cans. We removed all the labels to avoid them clogging the bilge pump if the boat gets swamped and the labels came off (this did save us from a good deal of trouble in the Indian ocean). We then marked the contents of each can with a marker. Unfortunately in our haste to be heading out of Richards Bay a number of the new labels got mixed up, resulting in cans of fruit getting opened for chilies, beans for custard etc.
Day 14: we passed 1500 nm since leaving St Helena during my 2am to 6am watch at around 2°S 24°W. This meant that today would be a cookie day, always cause for excitement. We were just 120 miles south of the equator and had now covered 2/7ths of the distance to Nova Scotia from St. Helena in 2 weeks.
If we can maintain this pace we have 5 weeks more at sea before arriving back in Canada.
We have had more or less ideal sailing conditions for the past two weeks though and the ITCZ (doldrums) still lies between us and the north Atlantic, so likely it will take a little longer than 5 weeks.
Around 1pm we saw our second ship. It was the Southport Eagle bound for Lagos Nigeria where they expected to arrive in the next 6 days. That is a distance of almost 2000nm. We eyed them with some envy as we did the math and realized that meant they would be doing over 300 nm/day compared to our meagre 110 nm/day. At such a pace we could be in Nova Scotia in just 12 days!
We reminded ourselves that you get better value out of a slow boat as you spend more time using it for every trip and continued our slow plodding course northwards.