It actually worked out even better than that. When we first left, the wind was enough from the side that we were able to almost head directly at our waypoint at 12 degrees south, 62 degrees east. It is here that there is a gap in the Mascarene Bank, which runs north to south for hundreds of miles. Imagine the Great Barrier Reef with no Australia behind it. Our only other option would be to cross way up at 8 degrees south, but the trade winds aren’t nearly as reliable there.
Dolphins join us as we depart Salomon Island
Our luck held out until late afternoon, when the wind swung dead ahead. We had plenty of tacking room between Peros Bahnos atoll and the Great Chagos Bank, so we really only had to perform the maneuver about once or twice per watch. As the sun set, we were still close enough to Salomon to see five of the islands there plus four more to the north at Peros Bahnos. By morning, they were gone, over the horizon, and it was just us and the sea.
After another day, the wind started slowly swinging from southwest to south. We tacked one last time, which started heading us just a little north of west, but gradually we curved back towards the waypoint again. We decided to overshoot as a hedge against a forecast wind shift forward later.
The first of these days was a really slow one. Maryanne got the record for slowest hour on her watch with a run of 0.17NM – about thirty boat lengths. Luckily, we had almost a two-knot current in our favor. Later on, she started making a habit of circling the fastest hour on the day’s log. It became a thing for her to check first thing to see if I had made any circles to supersede her circles. She’s so competitive.
We thought we would have a pretty good chance of spotting some illegal fishing boats, but we never saw anyone. It wasn’t until we were more than two hundred miles from the nearest island that I started to notice a change in behavior in the occasional boobies we have been seeing. Instead of ignoring us as the end of the day approached, they would make a close pass, casing the joint, and then make a point of keeping us in sight until it was getting dark. Oh, no! Here we go again.
Since we were heading upwind, and since they like to be on that side for an easier takeoff, they all headed for the very tip of our port bow, just about as far as you can get from our wind turbine. The only incident came when one late arrival got a little below the glide path and clipped a wingtip feather on a blade. That spot could really use a VASI (a system of lights pilots use to tell if they are approaching a runway at the correct descent angle). We ended up with five of them all clustered together, with three more circling in hopes of getting a standby spot. It seemed like the most miserable place on the boat to be if their goal was to try to get some rest. The two forward birds were constantly getting doused by spray and waves. Occasionally, they would get knocked off, making room for standbys. I’m sure they must have had some measure of relief at the sight of the approaching morning twilight, when they could trade their sleepless night of getting dunked for going out to look for some breakfast.
As each day passed and each line of latitude was crossed, the trade winds slowly filled in and became more reliable. As we approached the 12-degree gap, our previous hedge to the south allowed us to curve around as the wind shifted forward, leaving us on a relatively comfortable reach instead of beating into increasing seas. By the time we crossed 12 degrees, we were finally headed downwind enough to drop our working sails and replace them with the spinnaker.
When Maryanne handed the boat over to me for my next afternoon watch, we were already halfway across the gap in the Mascarene Bank. We were hoping to get across it entirely in daylight because it is a favorite spot for fishermen and we had heard there may be lots of unlit gear floating about. She told me that she hadn’t seen any gear, but there was a Sri Lankan fishing vessel on AIS at the limit of our range that was showing up intermittently on the display.
I saw nothing on my watch, not even birds, until about an hour before it was time to go wake Maryanne again. Then a slow-moving fishing vessel appeared ahead that looked like it may end up being close to our course. Like most fishing vessels, it was erratic in both speed and direction, so it was difficult to tell for sure. As they came over the horizon, they were heading right at us and appeared to be trailing gear. Damn! That made us the give-way vessel. I didn’t want to turn downwind to pass behind them because I didn’t know how long their gear was, but I could only turn another fifteen degrees upwind before the spinnaker would collapse. I decided to ride that edge and hope the wind speed would hold enough to let us cut in front of them.
Then they turned towards us, which killed that plan. I turned sixty degrees downwind and then they turned that way, too. Oh, for… We did this dance a couple more times until they were close enough that I could see the guy at the helm. His plan seemed to be to pass behind us, but close enough to get a good look. Well, I guess there’s not much to see out here; any diversion must be a welcome one.
As they got nearer, they waved and I waved back. Then they waved some more in what was clearly a bid to get my attention. The guy at the helm turned to give chase. When they got within earshot, they started asking for soda and cigarettes. I tried saying sorry, we don’t drink soda, which they clearly didn’t believe. What kind of American boat doesn’t have gallons of Coca-Cola aboard?
After about the third try, they changed their request to water and started gesturing for me to slow down because they were struggling to keep up with us. When I tried explaining that yes, we had water, but it was in the tanks and we have no ready containers to give them, this was met with the same disbelief as before. Mistrust in tap water is so well marketed that even many first-worlders get all the water they drink from plastic bottles. We’ve seen other boaters provisioning for long passages by loading flats and flats of one-liter plastic bottles (which are then further wrapped in another layer of plastic to hold the flats together). We refuse to do it. We’ve been on too many beaches to know that plastic water bottles are a scourge the world over. Plus, where are we going to store all of that trash until we get to port? I was not effectively conveying this over both the language and distance barrier between the boats, so they continued gesturing me to slow down.
Ships and other floating passers by
My mood was starting to morph from friendly and helpful to frustrated and annoyed. I tried my best to keep it to myself, but I knew I was close to failing at that. They were all very friendly and smiley.
When the weather is not scary and the navigation is easy, my primary concern during my watches is to try to protect Maryanne’s sleeping environment. I’m careful to tiptoe around when performing my duties and will almost always go the long way around the deck to avoid walking on ‘her’ side of the boat. I am also aware that people tend to sleep more deeply at the beginning of a sleep cycle, so if I know I need to make noise, I try to do it early in the watch. It was getting to be the time of day where a carelessly dropped pen could wake her up and these guys were wanting me to slow down. The spinnaker doesn’t reef, so the only way to slow the boat with it up is to go through the whole kerfuffle of taking it down. Maryanne and I can do it quickly together, but by myself, there’s really no way to do the job without a lot of shaking and noise.
No sooner had I secured the sock (a kind of containment sleeve) than Maryanne appeared, asking what was going on. She might have ignored the spinnaker noise, but she had also heard the voices, so she knew something more involved was up.
With the spinnaker furled, our boat speed dropped from eight to two knots. The Sri Lankans were able to pull alongside and their engine went from a roar to a low hum, which made it a little easier to converse. They tossed over a long fishing line with a big clip on the end, which we were able to use to transfer some of their containers over to us. Maryanne filled them from our tanks. While we were all waiting, I was able to piece together that they had been at sea for two weeks and had only caught four fish. They are shark finners, so it was hard to root for them. We are squarely on Team Shark when it comes to that.
When Maryanne finished filling their bottles, she passed them back over the line suspended between our two vessels (the skipper did an amazing job staying in close formation with us) along with some fruit and cookies as a consolation for not having any Coca-Cola. They thanked us with big smiles, retrieved their line and peeled away. I rehoisted the spinnaker and within twenty minutes we were both over the horizon from each other again. Well, Maryanne, since your up, how about some dinner?
After that, we had five days of chugging along at 12 degrees south with the spinnaker flying and the current in our favor. The only drama we had was one day where the wind was right below the limits for both angle and speed for that sail. Every time the wind would pick up a couple of knots or shift ten degrees forward, I’d find myself involuntarily cringing as I tried through force of will alone to get the wind back into the comfortably safe zone.
As we approached Cap d’Ambre, at the northern tip of Madagascar, both wind and current started to speed up as it neared the squash zone at the top. The weather was still presently perfect for the spinnaker, but we switched down to the jib out of caution. It was tough for the first couple of hours to readjust to our new lower speed, but when the gusts finally arrived on Maryanne’s night watch, she was glad to be able to reduce sail further by rolling in the sail as needed.
We got pretty lucky with our passage over the top of Madagascar. The wind usually blows there in the high twenties, with gusts into the high thirties with four-to-five-meter waves not being uncommon. I tried to time our arrival for the biggest lull, which got us there in eighteen knots of wind with gusts to twenty-five. This was reduced by our speed as we surfed gently down two-meter waves, so it was really quite comfortable for us. We even got a glimpse of the Madagascar coast before the sun went down.
When the ‘lull’ ended, we were well past and the land had long receded over the horizon. Our new problem, now that we had left Cap d”Ambre behind, was timing our arrival into Mayotte. Each day, we had a ten-hour window for arrival at the pass between sunrise and enough time to get us to the anchorage by sunset. To get there before the next day’s window closed in the afternoon, we would have to pile on sail and push the boat hard.
A mixed bag of sailing weather
Or… we could slow way down to try to kill fourteen extra hours. Let’s do that. We’re not racers whose sponsor will buy us a new boat next season if we wear this one out. We started with no mainsail and three reefs in the jib, which is 2.7m2 (out of our 85m2 total). That turned out to still be too much, so we furled the sail entirely. Now we had no worries about crash-gybing, which was good, because the wind was blowing 25-30 from almost dead astern and the waves were slewing us to and fro as they passed under us. After days of being exhilarated by above-average speeds, we had effectively pulled the car over so we could get out and walk the rest of the way.
We reached the pass at the Mtsamboro inlet right at dawn. After a mile or so of churned-up water on the outside, we entered the flat water of Mayotte’s lagoon. From there, it was another fifteen miles upwind to the anchorage at Dzaoudzi. I was worried we wouldn’t be able to sail the whole way, but the wind stayed pretty steady. We only had to tack twice.
As we had been previously warned, the anchorage at Dzaoudzi is packed so full of moorings that the only choice for anchoring is to get way out past the far end of the mooring field. As we approached, we saw a dense cluster of boats, plus one lone monohull way off to the left. That mono was Maia. They were leaving so soon that they were already on deck getting ready to weigh anchor. We swung by to have a brief chat over the lifelines before dropping our anchor way too close to them. That’s okay, they’ll be gone soon and then it will just be us in the boonies.
