Voyageur - Log day 198 - Countdown to Cape Town

18 November 2010
The advice was to go for it. So said Bruce, our WARC weather forecaster in an email to Cat on Basia. 'It was a great opportunity and we had to take it'. We were not so sure but when Bill on Crazy Horse also said he was going to carry on and there was nothing more than 15 to 20knots of wind on our latest grib file we decided that we also would make the push for Cape Agulhas. We are now a group of four. Destiny had pulled into Port Elizabeth so that Wolfgang could catch a flight to Cape Town. During the night Lady Lisa were forced to put into Mossel Bay because of problems with their autopilot. It became bitterly cold. We put up our cockpit curtain again. Surely we cannot be on our way to Antarctica! All night the wind blew hard from the east gusting up to thirty knots. Luckily there was just one scary moment which brought Donald and I tumbling out of our bunks. The waves down here can be quite wicked. Fortunately there was no harm done, save a pile of charts and a few books landing on the cabin sole. Today we are sailing under cloudless skies. The current is gone and Voyageur is still surfing down huge following seas up to 11knots and even I find it exciting. We are due to reach Cape Agulhas around 6pm but with the wind due to ease overnight and turn against us we have agreed that if our speed drops below seven knots we will have to start motoring to get as far as possible along the bottom of South Africa towards Hout Bay.

Susan Mackay