New port...different day

30th April


Okay…decision made, we head for East London as soon as we have repaired the motor, the reefing mechanism, the autopilot and the power problems.

We have removed the impellor unit and stripped it as we found the raw water leak in this unit. Being a series of public holidays this week we have not yet been able to arrange the spares but are working on it.

We have a navigation system technician seeing us tomorrow, even though it is a public holiday, to give us some advice and information so we can improve the systems on board and possibly add an AIS system.

In the meantime my sister Kim has been to visit and will pop past again tomorrow…it has been wonderful seeing her since it has been a long time, not to mention the fuel, cold drinks and bread rolls she brought us to tide us over . We had a great braai and took them out to the boat to see the new look Yrumoar.

Ryun will be leaving us in the next few days so we are taking it slow at the moment and spending some relaxing time with friends but come Thursday we will be in full action mode getting through our “at this port” list so we can move on.

As a whole Durban is similar to Richards Bay apart from the visiting pelicans. We sit on the yacht and watch in awe as these huge birds glide up and down and swim by ducking under the water and catching large fish only to swallow them whole. We have spent many lazy hours in the last two days just watching these fascinating birds.

Bluff Yacht club from the water

Hitting the ocean

27th April


Well…because I’m typing this we obviously arrived at the Bluff yacht club safely. But the real question is how did the trip go?

Well, we dropped the mooring lines at 12H40 and headed out into the harbour. I took the helm while Barry and Ryun tried to hoist the main sail in a reefed position so that we could keep it that way for the duration of the trip…this however, turned out to be our first obstacle. We discovered that the new stack pack did not have the reefing holes in the correct place and therefore did not work. We ended up making a jury rig…not a promising start but we stuck to our guns and after an hour we succeeded in getting the system working and headed out the harbour mouth.

The sea conditions were good even though there was a large swell running at 3.1m. The swell was stable but there were few eddies which made for a relatively comfortable ride. The wind was still blowing SE but was reducing and expected to swing before nightfall. We all sat comfortably in the cockpit until the sun set…Ryun and I were slowly becoming more and more queasy so I took a motion sickness tablet but it helped very little. Ryun took one later and had a similar experience…we should probably be taking these before we leave port next time.

Leo seeing us off in his Dinghy

At about 20H00 the wind swung around to the North and we had to change the genoa and drop the main as it was masking the wind to the genoa…this is normally a relatively simple task but while we were working with the sails we heard a beeping sound coming from the auto pilot.

Barry headed back to the helm and reset it a few times without success…we would have to hand steer the rest of the way. Kyle decided to go to sleep and headed to his room, luckily Rauen had had a nap already and was awake and ready to take shifts with the steering. Ryun slotted in occasionally when he felt up to it and I kept a look out for ships and plotted fixes on the paper charts we had laid out on the saloon table, taking naps on the saloon bench in between.

Last of the ships achored off Richards Bay

The weather stayed stable and we had a comfortable motor sail…we learned a few important things, the first being that we need to keep record of the bearing we are on as when the autopilot went down we did not know this bearing and it took almost an hour to get us back on course and heading the right direction. During this hour we only managed to make 2 miles headway which was highly frustrating.

We discovered that we should hoist more sail rather than less and cut the motors but being our first passage I was nervous and I guess we kept them on the whole way just for my sake.

Kyle on route before sunset

We discovered that we can motor at the same speed using 1 motor only and do not need to run both which would make fuel efficiency much better but we had had trouble with this in the harbour…in the ocean the swell sends you off course with every wave so the difference is negligible and we will in future only use 1 motor at the time whilst in the ocean.

This last discovery was made when about an hour out of Durban, our starboard motor warned us it was overheating and we had to shut it down…our speed was maintained even using only the port motor…lesson learned.

Rauen early morning after helming all night

Today we plan to replace the impellor on the starboard motor as we believe this is the problem, we are presently sitting in the yacht club typing and doing school work but have a few small boat projects to do…the autohelm will definitely need to be sorted out before we can head off again, if we want to head off again…I think our general consensus is that the passages are long and boring…do we want to spend all that time bored? If we changed our minds about the trip we would have to think of another mode of transport, none of us were afraid or feel we can’t do the trip the question is more if we want to do the trip? This is a discussion we will be having before spending any money but in the mean time we have a few things to do while we mull over the idea of heading to East London.