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.