The last few days went something like this. On Friday morning at 4am we left the dock in Richards Bay headed for Durban. We watched a beautiful sunrise at sea and were motorsailing in the calm conditions. At this point I want to put it out there that we had an idea the wind would fill in but expected no more 25 knot gusting at the peak of day.
We were given the most spectacular whale show, yip, whales were everywhere Rauen said: It feels like we are in National Geographic. We watched some rolling over and slapping those huge flipper arms of theirs in the water, I took out the camera to try and catch the giant leaps and ended up switching to video. Keep in mind the camera makes everything seem far away when you watch this video. We were actually steering to avoid these giant creatures.
By 11am the wind was filling in and we started flying towards Durban under sail alone. By midday we decided to start dropping sail, the seas were getting rather rough and the wind had picked up substantially. We were already under reef on the main so dropped that completely and rolled up the fuller to just a handkerchief.
We had begun handsteering at 11am already as the autopilot could not handle the conditions which were to become progressively worse as the day wore on.
By 2pm Barry was the only one who could steer the boat down the giant steep breaking waves and we had a few crash over into the cockpit. The wind was howling and we spent the rest of the afternoon whispering silent prayers that we would get into the harbour safely.
At 5pm the cloud cover turned grey and it started to rain. The lightning lit up the sky but the thunder could not be heard over the howl of the wind and the breaking waves. Each wave broke and came at us as a rushing foam high above our cockpit roof, the sea lift us and we ended with the foam over the steps, the dive platform and occasionally into the cockpit and over us.
No-one panicked luckily, Kyle wedged himself in the saloon between the saloon table and the benches where he would not roll around and Rauen turned up some loud music in an attempt to calm himself, yes, even the eternally calm Rauen was frightened, Barry steered and I navigated.
At 6pm the electronic compass decided it would no longer show us our heading and the wave action did not allow us to use the manual compass, so I stood half in the saloon half in the cockpit and used our chartplotter to keep Barry on a course for the harbour mouth while avoiding all the monster cargo ships outside and outmanoeuvring the tumbling waves. It felt as though we had changed channels from “National Geographic” to “The Deadliest Catch”, the only problem was that I had lost the remote and could not change back to the better channel.
We entered the harbour just after eight and rather than finding the anchorage in the dark took the channel down to the bluff and tied up to their wall. We felt complete relief when it was open and we could go straight onto the dockside, as what we all needed was a good night’s sleep, not the next 12 hours of anchor watches. Once in the harbour we all looked at each other and said: ‘Never again”…
Yesterday morning dawned my birthday, I was first up and as I walked up the stairs I took a look around at the chaos that was the boat. There were wet towels strewn over the floors, rain suits and wet clothing on the kitchen counters, navigation charts and equipment over both the nav station and the saloon table, I open the sliding door and faced pools of salt water, soaked through cushions, untidy ropes everywhere…to put it mildly general pandemonium. So I quickly got to work, and within half an hour it seemed a whole lot better, the wooden floors were drying out and the washlines were full. The ropes were tidy and back where they belonged and the mess was all but gone…sadly not along with the horror memory.
At half past ten we unhook the mooring lines again and headed to PYC to drop anchor. We first dropped anchor exactly where they had demarcated on the satellite image they had sent but Barry and I were not comfortable being in everyone’s way and ended up having a bicker, we decided to head a little out and anchor in water that was just deep enough for the cat so we upped anchor and started heading out when suddenly the chain just jumped off the dolly and ran…all of it. This was followed by Rauen and I taking shifts to lift it and get it out of the water rapidly.
It slowly came up covered in clay which left a rather enormous mess on the foredeck. Once up again we headed and dropped anchor for the 3rd time that day…boy I really wanted some exercise…an electric windlass is definitely on my wish list.
Slightly further out of the way we felt a lot more comfortable and spent the next few hours cleaning the clay from the decks, getting the dinghy motor out and filling it with petrol and packing up the last remnants of the previous days rough sail.
At about 4:30pm my Aunt and Uncle arrive for a few sundowners and we headed to the yacht club to pick them up, we spent the next few enjoyable hours chatting and took them back by dinghy so they could head home.
Last night we got very little sleep, the boat was being thrown around by the tug boat wakes and the numerous fishing boats passing nearby at full speed…not sure how long we intend on staying in this particular spot and we may decide to head back down to the bluff in a couple of days and pick up a mooring buoy where it is much calmer and we can get a few things done on the boat.
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