Hout Bay

Hello Everyone.

NATURE IN ALL HER RAW MAJESTY!

Well, we thought that sitting in harbour would be nice and peaceful with no autopilot sighing and groaning, no sails flapping, no creaks and groans as the boat rides up and down the waves and that, at last, I would catch up on sleep.  This was not to be.....

For three days the famous Cape southeaster has been blowing.  The wind is howling in the rigging, occasionally rising to such a level that we can hardly hear each other talk, even inside the boat!  Outside, the wind just rips the sound away from one’s mouth.  Artemis V is bucking and straining at her mooring lines and it feels as if we are once more out at sea.   The wind is  being funnelled down a gap  between two mountains and we are also getting katabatic winds from the mountain adjacent to us.  This evokes memories of our trip back from New Caledonia.  The wind is consistently blowing at 45-48kn, occasionally reaching 50kn.  (bit  scary Pa!-last night I climbed into bed, put earplugs in and put my head under my pillow to block out the sound).   I can only imagine what it would be like rounding the Cape in this!  No wonder there are so many shipwrecks along this coast. 

Yesterday I went into Cape Town and as we drove along the ocean road, I could see driven spray blowing across the ocean surface.  It is quite beautiful.

We are told that winter storms are much worse than this and, as a result, the marina does not put boats on the outer jetty where we are, during winter.   This is the worst marina we have ever been in. The sea wall is just across the water from us and there are waves breaking right over it.  As a result, the water around us is bubbling.  There are no piles down to the seabed and all the floating docks are anchored by chain to blocks in the mud.  This means that there is a lot of movement, with the docks not only moving up and down but also side to side. The whole dock is buckled, as in some places  boats  are pulling and in others, there are empty berths. It seems imminent that they will break away from each other, taking the boats with them.  In fact, last winter a whole section of dock did just that (the outer section we are on) and took a whole lot of boats with it.  Seven were destroyed.  It has now become too dangerous to get off the boat and onto the narrow, bucking dock next to us, so we are remaining on the boat unless absolutely necessary.  Dimitri will be able to get a job as a trapeze artist after this! 

John has been helping me get on and off the dock as there is no way I can do so on my own but yesterday afternoon he left to begin his travels through Africa.  He should have a wonderful time and will meet up with us again in February, to continue on to Europe with us.  The big surprise is my friend Lea who, after being seasick all the way from Mossel Bay, has asked us if she can join us on our next leg, to either the Azores or Cape Verdes.  The sailing bug has bitten her!   It will be good to have her along, so if she does join us, I will have some female company.

We plan to leave here next week (depending on the wind) to make our way a bit further up the coast where it will be safe to leave the boat.

Lots of love and hugs.

Arti and Dimitri.

At Sea - On route to Hout Bay

It is 11pm here and we have Cape Agulhas lighthouse on our right side (starboard) as we round the cape.  It is a beautiful moonlit night with calm seas and no wind.....we are motoring once again as there is yet another weather front coming through tomorrow night and we have to round Cape Point and get into Hout Bay before it gets here. 

 

Cheers and love you all.

 

Arti and Dimitri

Mossel Bay

Hi Guys,

We hope you are all well. The last leg of our trip was pretty uneventful and we are now in Mossel Bay, in the Cape. Yesterday we saw two seals out at sea and this morning we saw pilot whales in the bay we are moored in. We sail for Cape Town on Thursday.


Love and kisses
Arti and Dimitri.

At Sea - On route to Mossel Bay

Hello Everyone, from the bottom of Africa!

 

We are once again on the move, having left East London last night.  This time, we should make it to Mossel Bay, on the coast along the bottom of Africa, before the next SW front comes through.  There is a pretty big swell out here today and we are being tossed around like a cork in a bathtub!  We have lashed our sails down as best we can but everything is still banging around.

We had an interesting time in East London yesterday.  We went to the port police station to hand in our voyage forms which have to be sent to Port Control before we can leave harbour.  We found two elderly white policemen there (few and far between now) and we asked them if we could  get out of the port to go for a walk.  They said it was far too dangerous and they would give us a lift to the beachfront for our walk.  They told us to hop into the back of their bakkie (a ute or pickup for our Ozzie and USA people) and they would give us a lift.  I asked if it was legal to ride in the back of a bakkie in South Africa and they said “No but it is OK if you are being given a lift by the police!”  Off we went, they dropped us at the beach and said they would be back in an hour to pick us up.  They duly arrived one hour later, we hopped in the back and then they asked us if we would like to see how the city centre has changed since we were last in Port Elizabeth.  They then proceeded to take us on their rounds to all the seedy parts of town.  It was quite an eye opener – street vendors everywhere, selling fruit & veg., sunglasses, doing shoe repairs on the pavement... and mountains of garbage on the street corners.  It looks as if the garbage has not been collected for a month but apparently the sidewalk is now regularly used as a dumping ground. The garbage flows into the gutters and onto the streets. 

We are now making our way along the bottom of South Africa and after our next stop we round Cape Agulhas.  I am quite excited about that – our first southern cape!

Love and hugs

Arti and Dimitri.

At Sea - On route to Mossel Bay

Hello Everyone,

 

Despite the fact that it was difficult sailing today with the wind directly behind us, we had a great day.  There was lots of sunshine, although it is now quite nippy, lots of lots of birds flying around us and diving for fish and the company of two other yachts that left East London with us.  Bellatrix is a large aluminium Dutch yacht and is currently overtaking us.  The crew consists of four older men and the daughter of one, a very pretty young financier.  We suspect they have royalty on board as they fly the Royal Dutch ensign.  They are very keen Springbok supporters and we watched the rugby with them last night when the Boks beat Scotland.  We are also in the company of Leto, a gaff-rigged ketch with an Irish couple with whom we have become friendly.  Leto was the mother of the Greek god twins Artemis and Apollo and they have named their two little dinghies Apollo and Arti.  They are smaller than us and it is only fitting that Artemis V should be faster than her mother, as she is somewhat younger!  We speak on the radio and will meet again when we get to Mossel Bay tomorrow night.

Fair winds to all.

Dimitri & Arti

At Sea - On route to East London

Hi Everyone,

Well here we are back at sea after a very pleasant six day stop in Durban.  This section of coast, between Durban and Port Elizabeth is not named the “Wild Coast” for nothing.  We have a 3kn. current pushing us along and are doing 7.5kn through the water, so effectively we are travelling at around 10.5kn.  over the ground.  At one stage we touched 13kn.!  There is quite a large, mixed swell out here and when a wave from the north meets one from the south, it becomes quite a large hill for us to climb.  I can only imagine what it would be like out here with the wind against the current.  We have heard lots of horror stories and have been given lots of tips by the local sailors as to when is the right window (wind-wise) to undertake it.  We have a south-westerly coming up the coast (what we do not want) and it will reach us tomorrow evening so we will take shelter and wait in East London, before we continue down the coast.  There is absolutely nowhere we can pull in between East London and Port Elizabeth. The south westerly blows for about three days continuously so we will take off again on Sunday to round the Cape.

Durban was a mixed bag.  We saw many good things.  The blacks appear to be much better off, on the whole, than when we left South Africa. There is definitely an emerging black middle class, the people are self-assured and many small businesses are now run by blacks.  We felt very safe walking around and everyone was very helpful and pleasant to us.  However, there is a very large police presence and there does appear to be reversed apartheid now, e.g. in the newspapers were two articles – one about empty shops on the beachfront which were only allowed to be rented to blacks (not whites, Indians or Coloureds) and as the rental is understandably high, they remain empty.  A second article about charity donations: if charity is given to a black charity, it is tax free.  If any other group benefits from it (even one person), tax has to be paid on it.  All staff in Customs, Immigration and Quarantine were black, as were all the police we saw except for one elderly policeman. It seems as though it is very difficult (impossible?) to get a job in a government department if one is not black.  We did see kids (black and white) sleeping rough and a white tramp searching garbage cans.  The city centre has become “third world” with sidewalks in disrepair and  shops very much in need of a clean and repair, but on the other hand they have a wonderful tourist complex on the beachfront built in African kraal style, full of lovely shops, restaurants, a seaworld and public swimming pools. We had a pleasant bike ride along the beachfront to the new soccer stadium which is as high as a ten storey building and as wide as six.  It dominates the Durban skyline from out at sea and I am sure our Greenies would have something to say about it.

We had a few dolphins escort us out of Durban at 2a.m. this morning.  They are always a very welcome sight when they come to play around the boat.

That’s all for now folks.  I need to check what is going on upstairs.

Lots of love

Arti and Dimitri

At Sea - On route to Durban

Hi Everyone,

150nm to go.  Perfect sailing conditions – we are recaing along at 8 kn. in 20kn wind,  (fairly strong),white caps, sunshine (mostly), little swell and sea, our downward rail dipped in at 45 deg. and making a dash for Durban before the low hits us later tomorrow.  We should arrive around 6am tomorrow morning and our weather routers tell us that we should wait there till Monday afternoon 12th for the low to pass.  We will therefore arrive East London Wednesday 14th morning.

 

I will attempt to bake a birthday cake for Dimitri even though we are at 45 deg.

Love you all.

Arti

At Sea - On route to Durban

Hi Everyone,

We are now on the edge of the Mozambique plateau as we head towards the coast.  Names on the chart bring forth memories of happy times of our youth.  Along the Mozambique coast, Xia Xia, where we camped and caught crabs with our cooking pot (we only had one pot and two forks with us!), San Martino, where we skimmed the surface of the lagoon in our little dinghy, watching stingrays below us, where there was but one general store with a blind Portuguese man and a starving dog to whom we gave my poor attempt at a shark fin soup (I see there is now an airport there), further north is the mighty Limpopo River flowing into the sea,  and  a place in South Africa called “Jock of the Bushveld”, named after a dog (we have a wonderful book about him).

 

Timing is “perfect” – the wind is going to strengthen, from the wrong direction, just as we get ready to enter Durban Harbour. 

Although we have been in there before (always a good thing to know the harbour), forty years ago, it is still a difficult entrance as it is very narrow and things may have changed since then.  Will let you know how it goes.

 

Dimitri says, for the sake of all the “X” South Africans out there (& if you aren’t one, find one to translate)—Juslike, man I am sooo looking forward to a braai, boerewors, biltong, briani(mind you we got great briani in Mauritius) the gamats in Cape Town & Cape Malay cooking, dogs that understand “Voetsak”, so you don’t have to throw them with a stone, naatjies, skit & donner movies, ja/nee,hey, shame, hai suga wena.I do think. the national anthem has improved as who can disagree with Nkosi sikeleli Afrika(God bless Africa) , but the flag is impossible to make & we need to buy(ag, sommer koop dit) a curtesy flag. Sala kashle

 

Love and hugs

 Arti and Dimitri.

At Sea - On route to Durban

Hi Everyone,

 

I hope all is well. This evening I have been treated to a spectacular light show – lightening on both sides, on my left,  snaking from cloud to cloud and on my right, great big tentacles snaking into the water.  This is one of the nightmares for a sailor, with nothing else around and a great big metal mast acting as a lightening conductor!  If lightening does strike the boat, it generally “fries” all the electronics on board!  I switched off all equipment except for the autopilot (nothing like sailing blind) and then all I could do was sit back and watch the show.  Fortunately we seemed to have picked a path between the two storms and they are now behind us, so we should be safe.  Other than this, all is quiet.  We have a flat sea, little wind and are motoring along to help the sails.  We are now in the middle of the Mozambique channel, over the Natal basin.  Just  526 nm to go to Durban...  We are seeing much more shipping now, with a lot of very big tankers, over 900 ft. long either going towards the Atlantic or going towards Asia.  These are ships which are too big to go through Suez and have to go around the Cape of Good Hope.  When we feel they are going to come too close to us, we call them on the radio and they are all very polite and will alter course to give us a wide berth. It is reassuring to know that they can see us both on  AIS (automatic ship identification) and radar as usually fibreglass vessels are invisible on radar.

That’s all from me folks.

Hugs and kisses

Arti and Dimitri

At Sea - On route to Durban

Hello Everyone,

 

We hope you are all well.

 

Well, yesterday was quite an eventful day.  We did not have much wind and, what breeze we did have was coming from almost behind us.  We decided that, rather than motor, we would fly our large gennaker (big red and white sail, like a spinnaker billowing out in front).  We were going along nicely when, all of a sudden, the sail ripped.  As it did so, it took our new running lights (red and green) with it that Dimitri had taken a whole day to fit while in Mauritius!  So, once again we need new lights!  Dimitri was not too happy so he went off to have a shower and change  after all the dramas of getting the sail back down and the zip on his shorts broke.  I offered him the little dodo key ring that I had bought in Mauritius, to attach to his zip but he declined.  I wonder why? ....

 

It is nearly midnight here, the sea is calm, there is a 10 kn. breeze and we are sailing along at around 6-7 kn.  The stars are absolutely wonderful.  When one sees all of them out there, without the city lights to interfere, it makes one feel very insignificant.

 

Do you know that I am still finding bits of ash on the boat?  All the way up the Queensland coast from Bundaberg onwards, in Darwin and even in Mauritius, black ash rained down on the boat. The farmers were burning the remains of the sugar cane, after the harvest.  There was often poor visibility because of all the smoke.  It is a shame that they cannot find some other way to dispose of this.  If they stopped burning all of this (and setting fire to the outback to maintain the desert environment)  and releasing all this carbon into the atmosphere, we would more than meet our carbon reduction quota.  It is a pity that it cannot be used to make biofuels, so that we could reduce our fossil fuel use as well!

 

We are no longer seeing flying fish.  I guess the water is cooler here and they don’t like it.  Did I tell you about the pod of about 20 spinner dolphins that played around the boat for about half an hour the other evening, just at sunset?  They performed for us, came up close and rolled on their sides to look at us and were jumping right out of the water. Here we are, lumbering along at 6 knots, needing so much gear to do so and they whiz by with nothing but their wits to keep them alive!  On the same evening we had a rain squall and thereafter two beautiful full rainbows.

 

We have now gone over the Madagascar plateau, the area which is reputed to have so many of those scary freak waves.  This is because the water around the tip of Madagascar goes from 4000m up to around 60m and as it shelves, it creates very large waves.  We stayed well of the shelf and had not too much wind, so all good.  The other place one finds freak waves is along the South African coast that we go down next.  This is because the Agulhas current runs down this coast at around 6 kn. and there are very frequent south westerly busters.  Wind against current creates big waves.....  We need to watch our barometer very carefully and take the advice of our weather routers to avoid the South Westerlies so we will do short hops down the coast.  Hopefully we will avoid them, or at least, as many of them as we can.  We have approx. 900 nm to go down the coast and the south westerlies occur every three days!...

 

Enough from me. Keep well and happy.

 

Hugs and kisses to all.

 Arti and Dimitri

At Sea - On route to Durban

Hi Everyone,

 

Well things are good here.  Both boys are slightly better sea-sickwise today.  Today was a beautiful day.  At last the wind has moved off our nose and we can sail again.  We had a brisk breeze, with fluffy white cumulus cloud, white caps and a fairly large swell.  We have pretty much had a roller coaster day, riding over the swell and with the brisk breeze, we are on a 45 degree tilt once again.  We have had quite a bit of water over the deck and hitting the windscreen (or shall I call it a waterscreen!)  We have been visited by quite a few shearwaters (mutton birds) today.  It is lovely to watch them skimming over the waves, just a few centimetres off the water.  They look so graceful. They generally make a sweep past us to have a look at us then hive off and go on their way.  It is incredible to think they can survive in this vast, lonely place.

 

We are now crossing the bottom end of Madagascar and are over the Madagascar plateau, part of the ancient land bridge to Asia. After this, we cross the Mozambique channel then we see the African coast.  Only 900nm to go!

 

Thanks for all the lovely notes we are getting from friends and family.  It is lovely to keep in contact and get news from home.

 

Dimitri says- Well, it’s great to be sailing again, making good speed, 7+ knots, with current of 1 knot against us. Life on a lean , pounding into a sea of 3 meters is interesting- when you open a door, you have to support all it’s weight, when you open a downhill cupboard everything falls out and needs to be repacked, pulling your pants up has that one instant when you can’t brace yourself and need two hands. It’s interesting to hear the comments if the boat lurches just then! Sleeping is like getting a massage, but as the boat falls off a wave (yes, all 20 tons drop of wave and make an almighty splash), your bed drops away, and you land on the (fortunately very soft) mattress! How often? Every 10 to 15 seconds in a bad sea, usually less often! Arti recons it will get us fit for bushwalking as we are always walking uphill or downhill.

 

Cheers for now.

 Arti and Dimitri.

At Sea - On route to Durban

Hi There,

 

We are approaching the bottom end of Madagascar and, as warned, we are in for some heavy weather.  The barometer is dropping, the waves are getting bigger and the swell is getting larger and coming from several directions.  We are not yet into the frontal system proper so I guess tomorrow we will not be eating any hot food!  It was very difficult cooking today, both boys area bit seasick and I have a migraine!

 

Our news:  At the moment we are trying to raise a ship on the radio as he is heading directly for us and we have to warn him that we are in his path.  He is approx 5 miles away now.

John caught another 1.2m Mahi Mahi so we ate some of it for dinner and put the rest in the freezer.  They are really beautiful fish and it seems so  sad to kill them.

Dimitri was bum up in one of the lockers this morning and did some cleaning of electrical points and now the radar seems to be working.  

We have just managed to raise the ship so hopefully he will pass us safely.

We had a scare the night before last as our mainsail jammed in the furler and we could neither take it out or put it away.  We were looking at the prospect of having to go up the mast and cut it away before the bad weather as we cannot have too much sail up in the blow to come, but thankfully Dimitri managed to gradually work it loose and now it is working  A. Ok.

The ship is passing us now, pretty close but safe!

Yesterday we had a pod of about 20 dolphins around us.  They were quite show-offs, jumping right out of the water.  They stayed with us for about 1/2 hour.  That was just after a squall had come through, leaving us with two beautiful rainbows – quite a day!

Anyway, that is all our news for now.  Keep safe and happy.

Dimitri and Arti.