Pacific NW

Expeditions

The past 4 days have been pretty slow going and much alike one another. A slight sea, winds less than 10 knots, and the sails barely filled with enough wind. When we were bashing around in the Indian Ocean I was dreaming of these calm waters, and now that I’m here I am wishing for those windy high-mileage days! The sea is always bluer on the other side of the ocean…

We’re taking advantage of the calm weather to do all the odds and ends on the boat. Yesterday (or was it day before yesterday?) Nep whipped every line-end on the boat that needed it. In the process, he stuck himself in the finger with the sailmaker’s needle–ouch!

Our daily mileages have been 121, 125, 105… hopefully things will pick up soon. We just got a few more knots this evening and our boat speed is back up in the 5-knot range again. Our plan is to cross the equator at longitude 30W where the ITCZ (doldrums) should be narrower, and then pick up the NE tradewinds for the last 2,000 NM to the Caribbean. Staying a bit further to the East before crossing the equator should hopefully give us a better sailing angle in the NE trades, hopefully with the winds aft of the beam.

The moon is waxing and each night our night watch gets a little bit brighter. Always nice to have a full moon on the graveyard watch! As this passage is likely to take us over a month of sailing, we will experience a complete lunar phase cycle at sea. Our arrival to BVI should see us with a returning moon and going into the neap tide, all good things.

Nep and I took a driving tour of the island with a local guide. It was 12 Pounds well spent! We walked around the grounds where Napoleon was exhiled, and Nep found an old Chinese mural of a dragon in one of the garden buildings. We drove all around the island, to the governor’s mansion at “Plantation House” and saw Jonathan the giant tortoise on the lawn, said to be over 200 years old. Behind the plantation down in the woods among giant bamboo and cypress trees were the “Butcher’s Graves”, real tombstones straight out of a Hollywood pirate movie, of a slave (who was the butcher) and his wife, whom he supposedly murdered. We visited another graveyard that would be the classic Munster Family creep-out yard–tilted headstones, old wooden crosses, mounds of earth and cracking-apart mausoleums. The inscriptions are fascinating, dating back to the 1600s, and one of the graves was marked with the names of the children of the Zulu Chief’s son, who was also exiled to St. Helena back in the day.

Driving over to the other side of the island, our guide took us out to look at the new airport. The airport is a divisive issue for the islanders. Built “in order to keep with the times,” and “to make the island economically viable,” the airport will eventually be the death of the ship RMS St. Helena, and a way of life for the islanders. St. Helena is currently a sailor’s island–it is one of the few inhabited islands left in the world only accessible by ship. Many islanders and sailors alike are heartbroken that this unique place will become just a bit more common once the planes start flying.

The airport was scheduled to open in 2016, but when they tried landing their maiden voyage, the plane encountered severe “wind sheer” and bounced all over the runway, terrifying the passengers and pilot. The future of the airport is unknown, and currently no aviation company will sign on to land their planes on St. Helena. They can land smaller planes for medevacs–formerly you just had to take the ship back to Cape Town & hope you could survive the week before getting to a hospital. But to charter a small plane to the island is in the order of $4,500 round-trip to London, much more expensive than taking the ship. So, the politicians and engineers spent 4-5 years carving an airstrip into a volcanic valley known for its violent williwaws (look at any gnarled tree there), set at a right angle to the valley winds and in the face of the SE trades, spending untold millions of dollars to make the island “economically viable”, and now they have an empty airstrip. Most of the contractors have gone home and everyone’s just shrugging their shoulders in an “oops…” Perhaps if they’d read Charles Darwin’s account of the wind sheer in this particular area when he visited the island, they’d have taken this into account…

I say it’s the island gods getting their revenge! There’s talk of blowing the top off of King and Queen peak to reduce the wind sheer–that would be another pretty bad omen if you ask me. It will be interesting to follow the fiasco over the coming years. For now, St. Helena is still in its pristine, pre-touristed state, and the plans for filling the fields with 5-star hotels and 50-unit condo complexes are all on hold. Hopefully forever! St. Helena belongs to those who have crossed great waters, as every single person has done since the island was first discovered by seafarers.

We twisted back across the island on the narrow roads, up to another high fort built in the 1700s, way up on a pinnacle, looking like something right out of the Lord of the Rings. The center of the fort is hollow and could hold 5,000 people–the whole island population–in the event of an attack. Inside one of the inner chambers we found a 5-sided flagstone with a pentagram inscribed on it, with eerie candles and skeleton masks set in the stone walls. I’m sure many a doobie and plenty of virginity has been lost up here over the years. The view from the fort commands the whole island, and you can see the curve of the earth across the broad sweep of the South Atlantic. We are standing on a tiny little speck of history in the middle of the vast ocean.

Back in Jamestown, we did our best to provision for the next leg of the voyage. What fresh food there might have been was snapped up by the islanders the minute the RMS St. Helena arrived from Cape Town. The only veggies were a crate of sprouting and rotted garlic, and fruit was non-existent. St. Helena is also currently in a drought, so there was no local produce to be had. Good thing Kelsey isn’t here for this shopping! I was having flashbacks to Christmas Island and Cocos Keeling. We’ll just have to make do with the last of our limes and lemons on board Privateer, to fight back the scurvy.

The most important task we accomplished on St. Helena was fixing our cracked Monitor hinge. We easily found a good welder and within an hour, we had a solid weld and a thick plate added to the back of the hinge, and two new tubes crafted from the broken spares. I can rest a bit easier now, knowing we have an emergency backup for the rudder tubes after using our second and last full spare. Fingers crossed she’ll hold for the next 5,000 NM!

Nep and I huffed up the stairs of Jacob’s Ladder one last time before leaving St. Helena. We are about to make sail for the Caribbean, over 4,040 NM distant. This will be the longest-proposed sea voyage in my career, and for Privateer too! St. Helena has been an awesome stepping-stone in the South Atlantic, the perfect place to rest up in between passages. On our way back to the boat, we passed by a plaque, reading “Joshua Slocum lectured in this building on his circumnavigation…” We are truly sailing in the wake of our heroes. Thank you Saints for sharing your amazing island!

All day today we reduced sail and tried to slow the boat down as much as possible, so that we don’t make landfall during the middle of the night. Even with heavily reefed sails and a light breeze, Privateer still wants to zoom through the waves at 6-7 knots, as if on an invisible conveyor belt. She’s excited to see St. Helena! We’ve made excellent passage time. If we didn’t have to slow down, we’d have made Cape town to St. Helena in 11 days, 12 hours. It looks like we’ll still landfall before day 12, for an average overall speed above 6 knots.

We finally got our blue sky back again today, giving the batteries a much-needed boost. The puffy trade-wind clouds returned and the sea turned that electric glowing blue again, bluer than blue, like a 4th dimension. Making the rounds on deck this afternoon I scooped up the usual clutter of squid and flying fish, as I checked the trim of the sails.

Landfall is always an exciting and apprehensive time. There’s much to do, much to think about. At sunset, “Land-ho!” we made out the faint outline of St. Helena among the clouds on the horizon. We will stand off until daylight, for a safe approach to the “harbor”, which is nothing more than an area in the sea at the base of towering rocky cliffs.

We made our final approach to St. Helena in the dark of night. In order to slow down as much as possible for a daylight arrival to the mooring field, we struck the Mainsail and Yankee, and flew under Staysail only making about 3.5 knots. The dark loom of the island rose up out of the depths of the Atlantic. It’s very strange to suddenly have something on the horizon after so many days at sea. Various peaks were lit up with red lights, making the island appear to be a vast fortress. The red lights looked modern-day torches, which is the effect they had in the night. We were to find out later that the island is indeed one vast fortress.

As we rounded the NE side of the island a pod of dolphins joined the boat, creating phosphorescent tubes in DNA helix-patterns off the bow. Inside each tube could be seen the dark outline of each dolphin. Many offshore sailors know of this phenomenon–it must be seen to be believed!

Daybreak revealed the craggy cliffs of St. Helena, fading in and out of the mists and rains of the morning. We called St. Helena Radio for our instructions and made our way carefully to the mooring field. A huge triple-masted tall ship from Norway was anchored in the road, the crew unfurling the sails 3,4,5,&6 yards up! I had to laugh–our St. Helena flag shows a picture of a tall ship in front of a brown cliff, and this is exactly the scene we arrived to. Amazing.

We tied on to one of the fantastic mooring buoys in crystal clear water and could see the bottom 65 feet down. Privateer arrived in fine shape and after an hour or two we had a relaxing breakfast, disassembled the Monitor rudder, and were ready to explore the island! St. Helena has a fantastic ferry service, where the launch comes to your boat and takes you to shore. This worked out great for us, as our dinghy outboard motor stopped working in South Africa.

The launch picked us up and we wove through the maze of local boats and floating lines that litter the main anchorage. It’s always quite surprising taking that first boat-ride away from the boat after a sea voyage. After being on Privateer for so long, suddenly we were looking at her from afar, with the towering cliffs of St. Helena behind her. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a giant fin as it splashed above the water. A Whale Shark! Our ferry driver drove right up to the massive animal (the world’s largest fish) which was bigger than the boat we were in. It was swimming right along the surface and we got a crystal clear view of the behemoth from our vantage in the boat. How lucky is that? Within our first hour in St. Helena we’d already seen a Whale Shark, one for the bucket list for sure.

The launch dropped us off at “The Steps”, a concrete landing affixed with rails and vertical ropes to assist disembarkment onto the island when the swell is running high. Suddenly, it was as if we went back in time 250 years… A line of ancient concrete bunkers and shacks was strung out along the cliff, leading to a moat and the castle wall. That’s right, St. Helena has a real moat, a real castle wall, real everything left over from the 1600s. It’s a living museum, stuck in time.

The RMS St Helena arrived right after Privateer, and the port offices were busy. Luckily we were able to clear in very easily amid the chaos, as it was Sunday and normally the offices in town would all be closed. Instead, all the officials were down on the wharf and we were quickly done with formalities and welcomed onto the island. We passed through the giant wooden castle door and into the town of St. James.

Nep and I got a good stretch of the legs walking all through town and up the valley on the lazy Sunday afternoon. The buildings are right out of Charles Dickens and you can sense the weight of history that settles on the place. Fortress walls and bunkers from the 1600s perch high on the cliffs in every direction. 17th & 18th century cannons from various ships & wrecks are scattered all over town. It felt as if Napoleon himself could have stepped out of one of the doorways, and it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising. “This is a top-stop” I said to Nep. Definitely one of the most fascinating places we’ve ever seen.

The “Saints” as the St. Helenians call themselves are very friendly, and knowledgeable in the way of ships and sailing. In fact, every single person on the island has arrived there by way of a long voyage at sea. It’s currently the only way on and off the island. They are a fascinating mix of European, African, Indian, and just about everything in between. They know exactly how you got there (by sea), because you are the only person they’ve never seen before–there are no tourists coming to the island in hordes (yet…) and they will go out of their way to help you with anything pertaining to the boat. It’s a perfect place for a sailor.

Nep and I rounded out our first day on St. Helena by climbing the 700 steep stairs of the Jacob’s Ladder, a massive “inclined plane” that was carved straight up the lava-cliffs above town in the 1800s to transport “soils” up (Jamestown’s first attempt at sanitation) and vegetables down. The stairs are so steep that you have the effect of being at the top of a roller coaster, and you hold on tight to the rails as the wind vibrates the iron and tries to blow your hat away. At the top of the stairs, sweating, we entered into another fortress built in god only knows when–OLD!–and had a commanding view of Jamestown, a narrow strip of a town, the stark and severe landscape, and the anchorage and Privateer below. Several gigantic shipwrecks litter the bottom of the bay just below the crystal clear waters of the anchorage. It’s an awesome scene. What a day, what a place! We are sailing in the wake of history, where so many of the great circumnavigators have sailed before. It is a privilege to be here on this St. Helena, one of the world’s most unique remote islands.

We found another dried-up squid baked to a leather in the lifeline netting this morning. If we could only discover them right when they leap onto the boat, they’d make good calamari… Later in the afternoon we hooked a good size Mahimahi on our fishing line but it shook itself off as we were pulling it in. It struck the line while the boat speed was up to about 7.5 knots. We trail a fishing line astern, fixed to a strong cleat every day during daylight hours. Hopefully we’ll get another strike soon so that we can come into St. Helena with a well-stocked freezer…

Another cloudy day today with several patches of drizzle, but the breeze held fair and we are really putting the miles behind us. We’ll have to slow down tomorrow so that we don’t arrive in the middle of the night–we may have to heave-to if the breeze holds up. I’m amazed at how steady and even it is, even through the squalls.

Looking out at all the waves today I had plenty of time to ponder the future and think about life after the world voyage. People always ask isn’t it scary and stressful out there on the ocean? Actually, being a shore-side wage earner is the thing that terrifies me the most! Being that this trip has pretty much ruined me for living any kind of mundane life on land, I’m sure my family will figure out ways of keeping that sea-spark alive, carrying it with us wherever we roam. I’ve seen it in the eyes of other sailors we’ve met in the mountains, the desert, etc. It’s a defiance of the norm, and a peace that comes from knowing wild places.

It’s the big count-down now that we are within 200 NM of St. Helena. These last few days are always the longest miles, filled with anticipation of landfall. We were visited by a few birds today–the tell-tale of land nearby. It looks as if we’ll get in on a Sunday morning, which means the government offices will be closed. No matter when you set off on a sea voyage, it seems like there’s an abnormally high probability that you’ll arrive on a Sunday! Hopefully we can get cleared in and make a trip to shore, otherwise we’ll just have to wait another day on the boat.

Last night at the change of the watch, Privateer crossed the Prime Meridian and sailed back into the Western Hemisphere. We are now 1/2 way around the world from Fiji, where we crossed the international dateline back in 2014. Another 1/4 turn around the globe will bring us to the shores of North America.

I was sure glad we double-reefed before dark yesterday–the winds piped up throughout the evening and Privateer surged onward into the night. It’s coming on a new moon now, so our night watches are dark, especially with the cloud cover we have now. In the morning it squalled up a bit and winds peaked in the 25-30 knot range for awhile. It raised an uncomfortable cross-chop that kept us in a constant state of aerobic exercise all day. A large pod of big gray dolphins leapt from the waves during the higher winds. Finally things mellowed out in the evening and our winds are back down to steady 16-20, SE.

We’re having hit or miss on the SSB propagation, some days we can download GRIBs and send journals, other days we cannot. Another cloudy overcast day today, which may have something to do with it. Hopefully it will clear soon, our battery bank could use a solar top-up ASAP. Though we have good winds, the wind generator doesn’t pump out many amps on a downwind sail. During these times, we cut our electronic usage to a minimum in order to avoid running the engine to charge batteries.

Our fair and steady winds continue day-in and day-out. It truly is like coasting a bike down a huge, 7,000 NM mountain road. Today we tweaked the course a time or two, and we reefed the sails at sunset. Other than that, the day and night is ours to live as we please. The deck work is absolutely minimal and we’ve hardly even shipped a drop of seawater on board since leaving Cape Town 1,250 NM ago. My only complaint today was that there were a few clouds this afternoon reducing our solar charge on the batteries.

It looks like we will have good wind for the next 48-72 hours, and then generally dying down to light on our approach to St. Helena. If we do have to motor at all, we will use the engine time to run our semi-broken watermaker (for showers & dishes only now) and to top up batteries if the overcast continues. Our priority in St. Helena is to find a stainless steel welder to fix our Monitor hinge part (a weary theme this year) and fashion 2 shorter new rudder tubes from the broken ones we have on board. We’ll have over 5,000 NM of open ocean sailing ahead of us after leaving St. Helena and our self-steering is of critical importance!

Nep & I really like the way the days are passing–the watch schedule is very pleasant. Here is a 24-hr rundown:

0800-1400 Peter 1400-2000 Neptune 2000-0000 Peter 0000-0400 Neptune 0400-0800 Peter

(repeat above with Nep starting at 0800 the next day)

Overcast skies greeted us this morning and later on we went through a few light rain “squalls”, though you could hardly call them that because the winds stayed below 20 knots through them. Mainly, the weather shift brought a change to the steady SE winds, bringing them more Easterly, and we had to make more frequent adjustments to the wind vane as we got pushed more to the West. Around noon we jibed the Mainsail, dipped the pole, and ran the Yankee off to starboard. Dipping the pole at sea is always a delicate process in the high seas swell. Fortunately conditions were pretty mellow today and soon we were off on our new tack, heading on a more direct course for St. Helena.

Nep and I sorted through our food bins today, which were very disorganized from when we’d hurriedly stuffed everything away before leaving Cape Town. We had made multiple trips to the grocery store and judged we had enough food for the Atlantic crossing when we could no longer stuff anything more into the available lockers.

Tonight we listened to the BBC news and how Idiot Donald has “issued an executive order” to complete both the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines. He’s claiming that the pipelines will be built out of “American steel only, just like in the old days”, using the well-worn tactic of pitting the under-employed rust belt workers against the possibility of innovative reform, in order to line the pockets of the likes of Rex Tillerson. Just like an abusive dog owner throwing his beaten hound a rind of fat. Thanks, Master! Woof! The roughnecks and prostitutes of the boom & bust cycle will once again descend to devour another piece of innocent America, skulls will be cracked, morals corrupted, and treaties broken. Yadda yadda yadda…the contracts were signed behind closed-doors a long time ago.

As a Privateer, I reject the fake TV/Twittersphere leadership of our hijacked country. I denounce the propaganda that the mainstream media plays to the rest of the world. I’ve sailed around most of the world now and am getting weary of answering the question “Are Americans really that stupid?” in every country. I don’t know, maybe we are? How was it again that the Nazis persuaded the innocent Germans to look the other way? Some sort of group psychology trick? Storm clouds are gathering and we are reefing our sails. Literally 😉

In the early morning hours we passed our 1/2 way mile to St. Helena. All day today the sailing conditions were better than ideal. Perfect temperature day and night (72 F), perfect breeze (13-14 knots), perfect sea state (gentle & low), and a nice blue sky with little puffy trade wind “popcorn” clouds. The boat scooted along at 6-7 knots, perfectly balanced, and we didn’t have to touch a thing with the sails or monitor all day. It was enough for me to just watch the boat cut through the electric-blue waters all day long, and the hours passed by in the blink of an eye.

Nep and I each got a nice long nap today, and we squeezed fresh glasses of OJ with our remaining oranges. I battled the cockroaches in the galley, who have set up a headquarters in the refrigerator compressor. They seem to like the heat that it generates. We did a bit more polishing and tidying up the boat, and had an extremely pleasant day. This is what sailing is all about!!

In the evening the winds freshened up a bit so we put a double-reef in the Mainsail and the Yankee for a comfortable ride through the night. The winds are coming 150 degrees over the port quarter, and the boat is nicely balanced & riding on an even keel. Forecast is for slightly stronger breeze for the next day or two as a few highs and lows dance it out with each other further to the south, which should give us a great push to the NW.

At sunrise the breeze died down and I was awoken by the gentle slapping of windless sails. We had little choice but to fire up the engine, and were soon motoring along at 6-7 knots with our Benguela current assist. The day turned fine and we motored until mid-afternoon when just enough wind (7-8 knots) sprang up again to get going under sail again, wing-on-wing. It built to a gentle 10-12 knot breeze with low seas and hardly a whitecap on the ocean. We’re making 7 knots yet it feels like we’re tied to a dock, hardly any motion. Easy miles!

Nep and I spent a relaxing day reading and polishing the reading lamps with Brasso, which took me back to my days on the Brigantine. Only on the Brigantine, they made us use our bare fingers to polish the brass, and didn’t give us any rags. Today we buffed off a thick layer of tarnish to reveal shiny gold lamps underneath–satisfying work when you’ve got an empty horizon and a sunny day. At one point suddenly a line of thousands of tuna exploded out of the waves in a long line across the horizon. It was a shocking site at first, seeing all that white water in front of the boat! They must have been hunting in a pack, driving their prey with their unbroken chain formation.

The weather looks really good for the next few days–a bit more wind tomorrow and maybe building to 17-19 knots the day after, all from the SE (behind us). I feel the same way a cyclist must feel when they reach the top of a mountain pass–all that hard pedaling to get to the summit, rewarded by the long effortless descent down the other side. The Indian Ocean from Madagascar to Cape Agulhas was our mountain. Now Privateer can enjoy the 7,000 miles of downwind running! We passed mile 700 today, already 1/10th of the way to North America.