A mixed bag weatherwise, but nothing too horrid
That’s not how it worked out. When we left the anchorage at Direction Island, the wind was out of the south, probably being deflected by the land. Once we left the island’s lee in the departure channel, the wind swung all of the way to north northwest, which meant we needed to sail close-hauled to get around Horsburgh Island before we could turn downwind. This is where not readying the mainsail hurt us. Begonia can sail about thirty-five degrees off of the wind under jib alone, but only at about a third of the speed as when it is directing the airflow over the much bigger main sail. The seas were big and with less than a mile of upwind sailing to go, it seemed imprudent to run the risk of going forward and then onto the cabin top to unzip the mainsail bag. Slow was okay, as long as our angle would allow us to clear Horsburgh. With the current flowing the way it was, it didn’t seem like tacking would do anything other than take us back to Direction Island. Every time there was a lull or the wind shifted just a bit more north, it looked like we weren’t going to make it. During gusts or with a slight wind shift more to the east, we’d pick up enough speed to where we thought we might just make it. All of this drama was playing out at an average speed over the bottom of 0.7 knots – about a boat length every sixteen seconds. That made the wait for our waypoint at the northern tip of Horsburgh, where the bottom drops to deep water, a long one indeed. Jeez, with the original forecast, we should have been twenty miles away by now.
When we did finally make it, it was with great relief that we turned to go with the wind and seas instead of fighting our way against them. We were much more comfortable, although we still weren’t moving too fast. I was at least thankful that if they were going to bust the forecast wind speed by twenty knots, this was way preferable to being in an unexpected forty-five.
The one thing the forecasts did get right was the rain. We got dumped on all day long. Since it was from behind and since it was generally too hot to think about installing our greenhouse-like cockpit enclosure, it rained directly onto the cabin door, which meant any venture outside resulted in a good soaking. We’re equipped to sit watches from inside the cabin with repeaters for our chartplotter and an autopilot remote. The only thing we’re missing in there is a view of the magnetic compass and access to some sub-menus on our instruments. We don’t generally sit whole watches inside, maybe just an hour over dinner, because it feels just a little too removed from what is going on in the outside world. The muffled wind can only be heard and not felt and it’s less convenient to make small trim changes to the sails. Today, though, it seemed thoroughly preferable to sitting in wet clothes all day and night.
After another day and a half, the wind did start climbing and it was only necessary to duck outside a couple of times per watch to avoid a brief shower. Then the wind built further until we were romping right along with only ¼ of the jib out. An uncomfortable beam sea arrived from a distant storm to the south, which rolled us around just enough to have us constantly lurching into things every time we tried to move. At one point, after a night watch in which I was particularly tired, I made Maryanne a cup of coffee. Just before I could get the lid on (it’s a travel mug, of course) it fell to the floor and the hot contents exploded all over both me and the galley. This was beginning to get a little tedious. This place had better be nice!
Mealtimes are always looked forward to when on passage
On Day Six, we actually received by email our permit to visit the Chagos Archipelago from the British government, along with a snippy note saying that they had more to do than just process BIOT (British Indian Ocean Territory) permits, so of course they have a huge backlog. How could we not know that? Well, because you never told us that until now, that’s how. Anyway, we got it. We have permit #6 for 2022, and it only took us four months to get it!
Over the next few days, the wave direction slowly fell in line with the wind. Our BIOT permit has a very strict start date, which only required us to average about five knots for the rest of the passage. Since we didn’t have to push too hard, the motion became easy and comfortable. We flew the spinnaker for a day during the deepest lull, but mostly a reefed jib was more than enough to meet our target speed.
As we neared the islands of the Chagos Archipelago, we started seeing more and more seabirds. Most numerous of these were the Red-Footed Boobies. They are graceful fliers with sweet dispositions, but they do have the annoying habit of trying to land on the boat well after sunset, just when it is almost too dark to see. Most seem to head for the lifelines around the deck, where they then spend their next hours in a futile fight to stay balanced on the gyrating wire. The more fortunate ones land on the bows, wedge themselves up against one of the pulpit rails, and promptly fall asleep.
Occasionally, one parks itself on one of our many unauthorized areas and has to be shooed off or repositioned. I had one on the Cocos (Keeling) end of the passage that landed on our davit solar panel. The goose-sized bird was completely docile as I picked it up and moved it to a spot that was better for both of us.
Their single-mindedness to find a resting spot aboard can occasionally get frustrating. When we were crossing the Pacific from Mexico to the Marquesas in 2017, we encountered a population of boobies who thought that our masthead, with all of its fragile hardware was THE place to be. Every sunset was marked with stomping and shaking the shrouds to make them leave. More than once, I have had to go up there after reaching port to bend our Windex wind indicator back into alignment after some heavy-footed oaf tried to land there.
The Chagos booby population first became known to me when I heard a ‘whap, whap, whap’ coming from the cockpit on a bright, moonlit night. I emerged to find our wind turbine blades spinning back up. Oh, no! I shined my headlamp into the water receding behind Begonia and was surprised not to find a carcass, but a very confused-looking, but otherwise apparently healthy bird staring back at me. Just before it went out of the range of my light, it took off and headed toward me. I lost it in the dark background until I heard another ‘whap, whap’. I poked my head out from under the bimini and found the same bird in flight shaking off the blows from its second landing attempt. It lined up for a third try and seemed genuinely surprised when I illuminated the spinning, shiny blue blades with my lamp, making it bank away sharply.
Things were quiet for a while, and then a shadow blocked out the moon overhead. I looked up and saw the same bird (there was only one around at that time) in a steep glide making a beeline for the wind turbine body again. Again, I illuminated the spinning blades and it aborted, only to start again when I looked away. That’s it! I rushed inside to flip the turbine control switch from ‘Run’ to ‘Brake’. I heard one more ‘whap’ and returned to find the bird sitting on the deck beneath the turbine having apparently decided that was close enough and giving up on that coveted, perfect perch up there for now.
On Maryanne’s last night watch, we needed to slow down even more, so she spent the last four hours going three knots under bare poles. She stopped Begonia by turning broadside to the wind and seas when we were about twelve miles out and then prepared to wake me for my watch. Just then, another booby hit the wind turbine blades and fell into the cockpit. This one seemed very hurt, but still alive. She was setting up a crate as a nest for it to convalesce when a second bird hit the blades and fell to the deck, stumbling and dazed. She could see even more heading for the same fate, so she put the turbine switch into brake mode again. That slowed the blades enough that they were easier to see and most of the birds headed elsewhere after that.
We have had the same brand of wind turbine for years and have never had a problem with birds approaching the blades. The Chagos Boobies seem to think the turbine is the best spot on the boat. It’s raised up high away from everything else and allows for an easy, upwind, diving getaway if they want to leave in a hurry. I was hoping that once we were anchored, the favored part of Begonia would be the forward beam. We were supposed to have lots of wind and cloud cover for our first few days there and we knew we would be hurting for electrical power if we had to stop the turbine, even if it was just during the night.
{Update: We’ve been anchored in the Chagos for a week now and exactly zero birds have tried to land on Begonia. That makes sense because we are a mere few seconds’ flight from eleven different tree-covered islets. The closest we came was when a lone booby hovered just above the dinghy’s masthead as we were sailing back to Begonia in it one late afternoon.}
For the moment, now that Begonia was stopped and beam to the wind, all of the boobies seemed to be happy anywhere on the windward rail. Several headed for the turbine again. Even though the blades spin slowly in ‘brake’ mode, they still spin fast enough to hurt, I bruised my hand with one while trying to stop the blades and lash them down. They were too hard to reach in those seas to tie a proper knot, so I just threw the line at them until it entangled and stopped them. I eventually ended up with Maryanne’s two victims, plus four more on the starboard bow, all squabbling over the best spot before falling asleep en masse.
A couple of hours later, I was surprised to find the most seriously injured bird looking around and trying to climb out of its crate. We were concerned it had broken its neck because the only motion we could see was its breathing while its head lay limp and upside down next to the rest of its body. I moved it to the opposite stern from the other injured bird, where it promptly fell asleep.
After a few hours, it stretched its wings for a couple of test flaps before gliding into the water a couple of meters away. We drifted together for half an hour or so, getting very slowly farther apart. The bird never attempted to swim the short distance back or to flex its wings again.
The other injured bird slept until sunrise, after all of the others had left. When it tried to take off, it also didn’t get far before landing on the water. It was holding its left wing not so much like it was broken, but at least very sore. I was hoping it just needed a little more rest before trying again.
A rainbow on our arrival at Chagos/BIOT
It was such a shame. With daylight approaching, I had unrolled some jib to get Begonia moving again. We were now within sight of the eastern islands of the Salomon Atoll, approaching the pass. I had secretly been hoping the bird would hold out until we set anchor just a short, easy swim from the beach on the calm side of the lagoon.
Arrived and safely at anchor!
Well, now here we are, anchored in the Chagos Archipelago. I know that Begonia has been pointing right at it for the last two weeks, but the part of me that hasn’t been navigating can hardly believe it.
I first became aware of the Chagos Archipelago around the time that my thinking about sailing in the world’s far-flung places started to shift from ‘wouldn’t that be nice’ to ‘maybe we could figure out how to get these places ourselves’. I particularly remember one of Cap’n Fatty’s articles in Cruising World magazine where, to paraphrase him, he said, “Of all of the places we have been,” (with Carolyn, his wife) “the Chagos is the first place we have truly found paradise”. That stuck in my mind as I was tracing potential routes from one exotic spot to another, figuring out how to use the seasons and the trade winds to push us along. In the Indian Ocean, it was the only place out of many options that we just had to find a way to see. (Many years later, as Cap’n Fatty and Carolyn were having lunch with us aboard Begonia, I finally got a chance to ask them directly about the Chagos. “It’s very nice.” they said, “Don’t miss it. You’ll love it.”)
Maryanne and I had just arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, at the southern end of Chesapeake Bay on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. The Chagos Archipelago is at about the opposite longitude of the Rocky Mountains, where I grew up (specifically, it is directly opposite the Pacific Ocean 800NM southwest of Acapulco, Mexico). It was a very long way away. As the BIOT Administration is quick to point out, the Chagos is not a tourist destination, it is a strictly controlled Nature Reserve. There are no flights there. Apart from joining the British or American militaries and being awarded a fantastically rare posting at Diego Garcia, the only practical way to get there was to sail a long way from a different speck of land aboard your own boat. Bunching up my days off wouldn’t get me enough time to do it. Even taking a long vacation and combining it with a three-month unpaid leave of absence wouldn’t do it (like we did for Panama-Hawaii-California). The Chagos Archipelago would have to wait until we had both retired. We were broke. The Chagos seemed like an impossibly distant goal.
We made a plan, cut out any unnecessary expenses and poured most of our paychecks into paying off our debts and then into savings. It took us thirteen years after that to save enough to think we might just be able to get away with retiring now. We took the leap. From there, it took us another six years to get here. Nineteen years…
As we entered the pass into the Salomon Atoll, I was acutely aware that I have been wishing for this very moment for nineteen years. I was a much younger man back then. I was in shape and I only had three easily hidden gray hairs. It took me less time to go from never having touched the controls of an airplane to being the Captain of passenger jet, fully qualified to fly planeloads of people in everything from sunny days to ferocious winter blizzards. In fact, my whole tenure at that airline from probationary new hire First Officer to retired Captain was just under nineteen years. Nineteen years is a long time. Now we were here. We were really here!
In the intervening years, Maryanne and I have been lucky enough to go to lots of beautiful, remote places. We’ve spent enough time in turquoise tropical waters that diving in for a swim feels as familiar as being in our back yard pool. We’ve had islands to ourselves. We’ve even had whole atolls to ourselves, where we spent days lounging in the shade or going for the occasional dip to beat the heat of the midday sun. Having had the bar raised so far, I was being cautious about letting the long wait for the Chagos to cause my expectations to run too high.
This place is beautiful. It is the place that lives in each of us as the primeval dream of a tropical paradise, fueled by a glimpse of a postcard or maybe a travel poster from too long ago to remember. We crossed the deep blue lagoon to a shining turquoise patch the size of a parking lot and dropped Begonia’s anchor onto the pure white sand below. Wow! We really need to think up a better word, but all we could keep saying to each other was, “Wow!”
It was worth the wait. Begonia was the only boat in a ring of eleven palm tree-covered islets, each bordered with a beach of blinding-white sand. Because the boundaries of the Nature Reserve are so far away, the place is teeming with life. Boobies, Terns, Frigate Birds and Tropic Birds ride the thermals overhead, while schools of fish can be seen meandering over the sand, along with rays and the occasional shark. Dolphins regularly patrol the lagoon, favoring the drop-off between our patch of anchor sand and the deep water behind us. We are surrounded with beauty. We don’t know where to look for fear of missing something incredible behind us.
I was so very grateful to Maryanne especially, not just for her part in tracing the long line that led us here, but more specifically for her persistence in getting us our coveted Visitor Permit. She started early with the process, as she always does. When our lengthy application, along with all of the required supporting documentation and several of her follow-up emails disappeared into the black hole at the BIOT Administration, she would do all the work over and send it again and again. Then she sent it all to several different places until she finally got a response from one of them. This rankled the person actually charged with distributing permits, but she finally got the long-awaited message asking us to organize payment for our stay. Woe to the poor person who ignores one of Maryanne’s emails. She will find you.
We heard that several boats had to give up on the Chagos and go elsewhere because they couldn’t get a response in time and the seasonal weather window was closing. I really didn’t want to have to skip it after taking so long to get to our jumping-off point at Cocos (Keeling) and now we wouldn’t have to. As I said before, we got permit number six for the year. There’s technically no limit, but we were later told that ours was probably one of, if not the last one issued for the season. Well, this place is very special, indeed. We are lucky to be here.
[Maryanne]Thinking of visiting Chagos with your own boat? – Check out our Visiting Chagos/BIOT Tips
1 comment:
Love hearing about your travels.
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