Tin Tin's Sailing Calendar

Wednesday 28 March 2018

Off to Ascension Island

Mark's birthday was celebrated in style, before we left St. Helena, as we invited all the other yacht crews aboard for drinks. I bought slices of cake at the Centennial Hotel and the owner, Hazel, very kindly lent me a plastic cake box to get them safely out to Tin Tin. She was amazing, casually lending us her car to drive our load of shopping down to the quayside. She had come from Botswana ten years before hoping to buy a home but, finding nothing on the market, bought the hotel. It has a wonderful atmosphere with its main room cool and dark after the bright sun outside, and hung with masses of old paintings of Napoleon, ships and scenes of St Helena. The long counter presents a row of glass covered cake stands, from which I made my selection for the party. Hazel also gave me party hats and blowers to add to the occasion. Unfortunately the promised flood of 30,000 tourists a year has not been realised because of the shortcomings of the new airport, and The Centennial has strong competition from the Government subsidised Hotel across the street. But, thanks to her farming friend Peter, Hazel's hotel is the only place that one can get eggs and fresh lettuce, some of which she kindly gave us.


The elegant lounge of the Centennial Hotel

The crew of Saba II outside the Centennial Hotel, Jamestown

We must have had 20 people on board to celebrate Mark's birthday, new friends and old, Claudia and Juergen from "La Belle Epoque" brought a cake she had baked, Matthieu, Anne-Laure and three children from "Saba Deux" presented a T-shirt which we all signed and Mark got a couple more hats for his collection. I produced chilli con carne with rice and then Emma, fresh in from her single handed voyage from Tristan da Cunha in "Caprice", played my ukulele and we sang French drinking songs. It was a rare occasion!

White signpost on an enticing lane through hillside meadows, St. Helena
The following morning the anchorage seemed quiet as we set off, but the crew of "Saba Deux" came out to wave goodbye. The wind was good and we set our twin headsails and set off on the 700 miles to Ascension Island. Later that day "Saba Deux" could be seen far behind, her white sails against the dark slab of St Helena as she set sail for Brazil.


A day later and the wind died, and the forecasts show a big wind hole to get through. Now at midnight on the 27th of March we have been motoring steadily for 2 days and hope to arrive on Saturday 30th.

The sea is an unbroken circle of blue, reflecting the endless blue of the sky punctuated by little white clouds at regular spaces. We trail two fishing lines, but every bite seems to result in the wire being snapped and we lose the lure. There must be some monsters out here!

South Atlantic sunset
Inevitably there's a lot of reading, and I have resumed Jack London, discovering that he was an ardent socialist, writing novels about the overthrow of capitalism in America. Surprisingly he also went to London and disguised himself as a poor American sailor to live in poverty in the East End. His account of life in London in 1902 is absolutely shocking, and he denounces the Government and wealthy aristocrats of Britain for mismanaging the economy so badly. The awful thing is that I suspect that his description of the poverty of that time now applies to the poverty of the majority in South Africa, from the little that I heard from my talks with Sibusiso in Cape Town.



Friday 23 March 2018

The Delights of St. Helena

We timed our arrival at dawn, and found the forbidding cliffs of a barren volcano rising steeply from the sea under dark clouds and rain.
St Helena at dawn
As we rounded the island towards the sheltered side we saw no vegetation whatsoever but then Jamestown came into view in a narrow cleft In the rocks where a stream had carved out a valley. There were suddenly green trees, a gleaming copper church spire, and a shaft of sunlight picked out the Union Jack on a white flagpole.
Jamestown

TinTin moored in St Helena
The moorings in St Helena
 A mess of boats surged to and fro on a tangle of moorings, but Port Control directed us to the mooring field of neatly laid out lines of 22 substantial yellow and red mooring buoys where about a dozen boats were at rest.

James, from Yacht Services, came over to greet us from his boat "Carpe Diem", registered in Gosport. James is a "Saint", in other words a resident of St Helena.  When working with Oyster in Southampton, he bought "Carpe Diem" in Mylor and sailed her home to St. Helena before circumnavigating the world with his young family, finally getting back in December 2017. He then decided to set up his yacht support service and is amazing at arranging anything one needs, whilst continuing to live on board.

The ferry collecting crew from the anchorage
Getting ashore is a challenge in the swell, so we use the ferry service which comes round the yachts. At £4 return it's not cheap, but it's very congenial to meet other people. We found friends Matthieu, Anne Laure and children and Aude from "Saba Deux", Dirk and Gretchen on "Peregrine" (who ran the radio net across the Pacific) and new acquaintances of Wavy on "Hayward Davies" (550,000 miles and 39 Atlantic crossings!), Whistler, and Emma, a new arrival single handing up from Tristan da Cunha, in her 32 foot "Caprice" (towed in with engine failure).

Ashore we arrived on a dock stacked with containers, and a line of white sheds with blue doors built under the overhang of the cliff. Two big cranes on caterpillar tracks are regularly lifting fishing boats out for repair. Further along there are black cannon poking out of the sea defence wall, but a cheerful blue swimming pool has been located in the moat.

 Across the drawbridge and through the town gates we found a charming little town, with church, castle, and a main street reminiscent of the West Country in style of buildings with a couple of old hotels. On the left there is a green and shady public garden by the long white-painted building that houses the Police Station, Courthouse and Library. Here we found a plaque commemorating the 1895 visit of Joshua Slocum, on the first solo circumnavigation. Overlooking the garden there is a long verandah overhung with flowering creepers, which is Anne's Place. Here we were able to get lunch, beer and an advance of £60 in cash on tick until the banks opened the next day. Everyone here is so welcoming and relaxed!

Jacob's Ladder climbs 700 steps straight up the cliffs at about 45degrees or more to reach the garrison at the top. We climbed it, of course, discovering that it was wise to stop to look at the view every 50 steps! It feels very vertiginous. However the two handrails help one up. School boys used to slide down at great speed to get home from school, or to retrieve a football kicked over from the playing field above. When there was a garrison here the soldiers would pay a boy to run up to get their lunch. The boy would be back in about 8 minutes sliding down with the soup tureen balanced on his tummy, shoulders and arms on one rail and feet on the other! I don't know how long it took me to climb up, but it took me at least 8 minutes to come down the 700 steps as fast as I dared.
The awesome descent to Jamestown down Jacob's Ladder

Whilst here we have taken our ailing batteries out and had them recharged ashore. Two turn out to be effectively dead, which is shocking after only a month of service. However the remaining ones seem to behave better now so, if they hold out, I trust we will be able to function for the rest of the trip.

We hired a car through the tourist office from Brendan Motors at £15/day and enjoyed exploring for two days. Once up the narrow single track road hugging the rocky volcanic cliffs, one emerges on top to find residential areas and vegetation which gets much greener in the rainforest interior. It felt so surprising to drive along little winding tarmac lanes often sunken in the West Country style, with road signs and white finger-signposts, and other hints of Britishness. Great trees, dense stands of ginger plants, or sisal leaves lap the banks. Often there are steep green meadows grazed by red and brown cattle.

View across the silver sea to a distant curved horizon from St Helena
Reaching the windward side, the trees are all windswept into an aerodynamic shield up the cliff face, and it's here that most of the rain falls as the air is forced upwards and cools. The temperature is delightfully warm, with cool breezes, and not much humidity.
We visited the places that Napoleon was incarcerated, first at the charming Briars, where he stayed with a family for 7 weeks before moving to Longwood House

Longwood House - Napoleon's last home
Contemplating exile
Napoleon's bed and death mask
Both properties are now owned by France.

We had excellent tours of both with Trevor Magellan as our personal guide at the Briars, and very good audio guides at Longwood.

Napoleon did his best to maintain his Imperial standards here, despite his isolation.

On his death he left a considerable fortune (£50million in 2016 value!) to his faithful retainers and generals who had stayed with him.


Later we strolled down the leafy green lane to Napoleons's Tomb, in a wonderfully peaceful spot by a spring surrounded by flowering plants.
The grassy lane to the tomb
Napoleon's Tomb - now empty

The other exciting thing we did was to go on a whale shark watching trip. The sharks, up to 60 feet long, come to circle a reef that rises steeply from the depths and brings nutrients and krill to the surface. Our skipper, Johnny, found the sharks circling a fishing boat and we had to stand off until they came over to us. Then we were all allowed to jump in and swim with these placid giant fish. I found one circling up towards me from the deep and flippered hard to get out of its way, only to find another one right behind me so that I was in a whale shark sandwich!

Whale Shark coming in close!



We hunted for the elusive Wirebirds - saw one, but too elusive to photograph!

Dramatic volcanic landscapes

Jonathan mowing the lawn at Government House
 Yesterday we drove out to see the Governors residence at Plantation House, which is a delightful mansion painted pale blue with white trimmings, set on grand lawns in a wooded valley looking down to the sea far below. The grass is kept cropped by Jonathan the 200 year old tortoise and his friend. Beyond the green railings is the Tortoise Viewing Corridor, which we were allowed through, and below that were laid out impeccable vegetable gardens. We went on into the woods beyond, which immediately felt tropical with giant trees and massive stands of bamboo. Here lie the Butcher's Graves, headstones from 1777 for two slaves, one still legible to the wife of the butcher.

Fairy Tern
Beyond that the path rose steadily to Big Rock, with a great view over the valley, where the fluttering white Fairy Terns came and hovered round Mark as he stood near the edge.

We could easily have stayed longer here as it is a great island for walking, with the Post Box trails which take one through spectacular scenery with the objective of getting a stamp on one's card at each Post Box.  We also visited the excellent Museum where James has a big exhibition about their family circumnavigation.   (I later raised £70 for Church funds by asking people to pay a £1 to guess where the ducks were left on my round the world trip.  The prize was won by a Saint living in Portsmouth!)

Two yellow plastic Trotton ducks got left there by mistake, after a photo shoot to promote the Trotton Fete Duck Race.

Tomorrow it is Mark's birthday and we will set sail for the 700 miles to Ascension Island, where we will be over Easter.

I have re-planned our next legs with provisional dates as follows, deciding to miss out Recife and Natal.

29 March-1 April.   Ascension
11-13 April .            Fernando Do Noronha, Brazil. Steve arrives?
17-20 April.             Fortaleza, Brazil. Justin flies home. Meet Marli and Hur Ben!
27 April - 1 May.     Belem, Amazonia, Brazil. Richard et al arrive.
8 - 14 May               Cayenne, French Guyana. Anne arrives. Richard et al depart.
16-19 May               Paramirabo, Surinam
24-28 May               Trinidad and Tobago
2-14 June                  Option to head to ABC islands to lay up in Aruba.
14- 21 June               Aruba - laying up Tin Tin until December?











Friday 16 March 2018

Electrical Meltdown!

The idyllic trade wind weather has us bowling steadily along at 6 knots under blue skies and little white puffy clouds with only the genoa and poled-out staysail. Just 180 miles to go to St. Helena this evening. The calms, and then stronger winds are behind us, and life revolves round our watch keeping, and meals.

Fishing is a constant yet, so far, futile activity. We caught one very small dorado, which managed to spit out the hook, so I put him back. However we go through patches of dense flying fish which erupt from the sea like silver swallows. We also saw a shark fin passing, which was a rare moment, as it's only the second one we have seen in the whole trip!

Yet the calm rhythms of long distance passage making are being disrupted by a never ending battery management problem. We had new batteries when we left Portsmouth and yet I had replace them in Panama because they no longer held enough charge. Six months later we had the same problem by the time we got to Darwin. There were two completely dead batteries out of the five. I compromised and bought a single one to replace them with the expectation that they would all have to be renewed in Cape Town.

This we did and yet, just three weeks later, we now have two dead batteries again, and hardly any capacity in the remaining three. I've turned off the freezer, as we did in the Indian Ocean, to try to conserve power, but even so I now have to run the generator for one hour in every three. What on earth is going on? These things should last 5 years with appropriate management. I originally worked on the recommended basis of discharging to 50% of capacity and recharging to at last 80%, with regular full charging to 100%.

But then I found that, on Tin Tin, the batteries don't behave as detailed in the text books. We never managed to use 50% of the capacity before the voltage fell to dangerously low levels. Then, after seeking advice, we resorted to charging once the voltage reached 12.2volts but, in our case, this only equates to about using 20% of capacity rather than 50%. The only recovery comes when we have been in a marina for a week plugged in to the national grid, yet marinas are few and far between, and non existent in the wide wastes of the South Atlantic.

Despite careful management and monitoring with hourly data logging and graphs, our new batteries are now nearly useless. I don't know whether we will have any battery power by the time we reach Brazil! Something weird is going on! The process that we experienced twice before has now accelerated it feels....

Leaving this problem aside, we should reach St. Helena on Sunday morning, and I'm very much looking forward to exploring the island and meeting people there.


Tuesday 13 March 2018

At last a breeze!

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Position 20 32.76S 006 03.88E at 06:05 GMT
After 333 miles we still have 722 more to go to St. Helena, but at last we can turn the engine off as enough breeze has arrived to drive us in the right direction at 5 to 6 knots. With it has come heavy cloud, with curving rolls of low dark purple-black behind us like a series of monstrous shark's jaws reaching out to engulf us. Off to each side there are grey curtains of rain, which we have so far been spared.

I have been devouring Joshua Slocum's book, "Around the World Alone" with great pleasure, enjoying his writing style, his wry humour and above all the knowledge that he made his voyage without all the paraphernalia that we use today. No engine, no electrical systems, no satellite navigation. However, as I travel with him I realise that the main difference is that lack of engine. In those days you sailed into your anchorage, and sailed out again. Luckily I do have some experience of this from teenage years, and from sailing Widgeon on and off her buoy or anchor, so if all fails I can do it, as I did once with our Sigma 38 "Marta" when, with engine failure, I sailed into Portsmouth and onto our Gosport marina berth.

As I spend time monitoring batteries, puzzling over another elusive current leak and so on, it seems as though it would be so much less stressful to have an old fashioned boat like the "Spray"! The lure of the golden age of sail!

Sunday 11 March 2018

A mid-Atlantic dip

Sunday 11th March 2018
Dead calm again all day and we are motoring at a steady 5 knots about 20 degrees north of our direct course to St. Helena in the hope of picking up some wind earlier. The forecasts all agree that there may be a light 10 knot breeze by tomorrow evening, but whether it will enable us to stop motoring is another question. It reminds me that this is exactly what we were doing this time last year, crossing the doldrums towards Galapagos with Emily.

Nothing much happened today, except that mid-afternoon we turned off the motor, chucked a fender and a line over the stern for safety and Mark and I went for a swim. Justin, as is his wont, kept a close eye open for large shapes in the water below us, but thankfully there were no alarms. Most refreshing!

Justin produced an excellent lasagne for supper, with which we ventured a glass or two of fine South African Pinotage, as there was little likelihood of anything else requiring our urgent attention. However a ship did briefly flash into existence on the AIS screen, but its closest point of approach was forecast as 99.8 miles away as it headed south east for the Cape.

Now as I come off watch at 9pm a zéphyr of breeze has enabled us to raise all sail while we still motor on and it adds a knot to our speed which is encouraging.

Saturday 10 March 2018

Getting Warmer

Saturday 10th March 2018
We are now in a near windless ocean, with just the lightest of breezes under a clear blue sky with a few distant powder puffs off cloud to the north. It is, happily, much warmer and the thermals, fleeces, woolly hats, socks and, yes, my ski gloves have come off and we are back in shorts, T shirts and bare feet.

The ocean is now a deep blue as we have left the cold green, nutrient rich, Benguela Current behind us on the desert coast of Africa. So too have we lost the birds, the great Shy Albatrosses on wings 10 feet wide and the chunky White Chinned Petrels, all black except for the pale bill. Gone too are the regular visits from the Dusky Dolphins, leaping clear of the waves to look at us, their distinctive white lines making them easily identifiable. We are trailing two fishing lines, but the ocean seems empty of fish too.

However, this morning at sun rise I had a very stealthy visit from a few dolphins, hardly disturbing the quiet sea. But I did get a brief glimpse of one and was pleased to identify a Short Beaked Common Dolphin, with a pale patch on its fin, and a deep V shape in the black cape on its back. We are at its very southern limits here, unless it is the Long Beaked version which only inhabits the shoreline of the bordering continents.

Our water-maker is now behaving as it should, making 90 litres per hour, the freezer is at -10 degrees C, and the batteries are behaving reasonably well, but there is a worrying little red light occasionally hinting at that current leak again.

I have been reading a charming little book called "Outposts" by Simon Winchester, in which he describes his mission in 1984 to visit the surviving relics of the British Empire, some of which he does in a small yacht. Of course he covers St. Helena and Ascension Island, which lie ahead of us, so I am thoroughly enjoying his beautifully written essays about them, and wondering how much of what he describes still remains.


He covers other places, which I have been fortunate to have visited, such as Montserrat which Anne and I sailed to in "Laros"in 2006. I found his description of the island before the devastating eruption very poignant, and was interested to be reminded our Quaker cousin, Joseph Sturge, who had invested in planting lime trees and freed all the slaves on the island. Following the failure of the Sicilian lemon crop in 1853 Montserrat Lime Juice entered the British market and was apparently a great success, until a hurricane destroyed the plantations.




Friday 9 March 2018

Farewell Luderitz, Farewell Africa

8/3/2018
We finally set sail from Luderitz on Emily's Birthday, remembering that she was with us a year ago to celebrate in the islands near Panama. The wind was fresh and cold, but the sun was shining through misty skies. The pink and green 1915 German architecture of the town faded into the colour of the sand dunes behind as we sailed out past the bare rocks of Penguin Island, Seal Island and Shark Island. Dusky Dolphins came to play round us, leaping clear of the water to have a good look.

Our course took us up the misty coast all day staying about 5-10 miles off to avoid uncharted hazards, but at sunset we headed in to a mile offshore to see the great dunes that come down to the Atlantic. These were pale sand colour, unlike the bright orange-red ones we saw inland. The dark rocky headland of Dolphin Head, with its curved back and prominent fin echoed the shapes of the hordes of Dusky Dolphins cavorting round us, sometimes leaping clear of the waves to get a better look at TinTin. Behind Dolphin Head there was a little bay which tempted me for a moment, but the sun set and we turned out to sea to begin the 1,280 miles to St. Helena, which should take us about 9 days.

The night was bright with stars and phosphorescence from the waves and we made good progress in 30-40 knots of wind. Then the moon came up and illuminated everything brightly. I was on watch at 0300 when a pod of dolphins came racing to join us, leaving phosphorescent trails in the sea, and then gleaming brightly as they broke the surface close alongside.

Reflecting on our time in Namibia, I am struck by the friendliness, the efficiency and the high standards of shops, campsites and restaurants.

Now as we sail away, it's a relief to be at sea again. Justin is fishing, Mark baking banana cake, and I have just received visa approval to visit Ascension Island. Not an easy place to visit!