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Starblazer - 05/03/2016 – Making progress towards the Caribbean



I don’t like ‘Med Mooring’ and John hates it, though we have different
reasons. This style of mooring fits more boats into any given length of
pontoon by removing the fingers between boats. In Italy and France we have
often been faced with squashing our previous boat into a space narrower than
our hull! The most basic style requires the crew to drop anchor while the
helmsman carefully backs into the allotted space, the crew then has to dash
aft to throw mooring lines ashore for someone to tie you to the pontoon. A
more common style does not require an anchor, the helm reverses into the
space and a pick-up line, often encrusted with sharp shells etc., is passed
to the crew who works their way forward and pulls the pick-up line tight
before securing it to a cleat. The third style has some buoys ‘planted’ out
from the dock, the helm reverses between them but has to slow down to enable
the crew to pass a mooring line through the eye. I am sure this is an easy
form of mooring but if there is a cross-wind it can be evil! It is possible
to go in forwards if you have a stern anchor but our bow is far too high to
allow me to reach the pontoon.

Being within reach of the pontoon is the second problem. There is a fine
line between being too close and being too far away! In areas with a large
tidal range the boat will move towards the pontoon at low water and away
from it at high water, additionally there are all sorts of things
overhanging most cruising boats transoms, wind steering to name but one. In
Fortaleza we were encouraged to maintain a reasonable distance from the
rather unfriendly dock and use a dinghy to transit from boat to dock. Exody
kindly allowed us to use theirs as, once we were squashed in, there was no
way we could get our inflated dinghy from the foredeck to the transom!
Peter then had to wait for us to leave before getting his dinghy on deck and
packing it away. Thanks Peter.

So what don’t we like about the challenges of Med Mooring? John hates
driving the boat backwards though he always does it well; Starblazer behaves
impeccably. I hate the space between boat and dock and am slightly paranoid
about falling in. We are not as young and agile as we were the first time
we had to moor like this on a flotilla holiday in Greece in 1988! I also
remember the very sad episode in Baiona in 2013 when the crew of one boat
discovered a body in the water one morning. It was a young crew member of
another boat who had returned alone the previous evening after a night out
but didn’t make it to his bunk. Did I mention in the last blog that John
managed to fall in clambering into the dinghy from the dock on Wednesday
evening? He had returned to the boat alone to collect our iPads after we had
been swimming. Fortunately he clambered out using our stern ropes as a
ladder, with no damage to himself, but he lost a bath towel and a pair of
swimming trunks.

At the end of the last blog I mentioned ‘extricating’ ourselves from the
dock. As the last boat to drop anchor in the row of 4 World ARC boats it
should have been simple because no-one could have laid their chain over
ours. A local motor boat left the pontoon on Wednesday afternoon and swung
to their anchor right in front of us, or rather right over where we thought
our anchor was. To make things more difficult they appeared to have some
form of stern line as well. It took nearly 30 minutes for the marina staff
to solve the problem and, with help from Victor, they pulled the boat around
and tied its stern to the mooring lines of a bigger motor boat, holding it
broadside to the wind but away from our chain.

Now we are sailing so we have different challenges. We sailed over the
start line on mainsail alone at 10:04:04 with the engine in tickover in case
the shallows and the wind didn’t co-operate. In fact it was going well
until there was a windshift and the boat gybed, not seriously fortunately.
John decided to drive the boat through the wind rather than attempt to gybe
back so we have 5 minutes motoring, it wasn’t in gear for that long so I
think it is a fair estimate. Since then we have been sailing fast, in part
due to the strong currents we have been chasing. Thursday was lovely, sunny
and dry with adequate wind and calm seas. Friday was a different day. The
WRI forecast got it right: winds 11-18 knots, SE to NE, chance of squalls.
The only variation from the ranges offered by WRI was the increased wind in
the squalls, which we expect, when the wind piped up to between 20 and 25
knots. The uncertain direction of the wind has meant fast sailing with main
and genoa and the wind just aft of the beam, slower sailing on mainsail
alone when the genoa was blanketed from the wind close on our stern and
variations in between. Friday was also a wet day with a series of squalls.

We calculated our ETA for the competition on an average speed of 6.4 knots,
initially we had used a higher average because of the strong currents we
expected, however that gave us an ETA the day before the Rally programme
suggested the first boats would arrive. As one of the slowest boats on
handicap that didn’t seem quite right! By some minor miracle we won the ETA
competition from Cape Town to Salvador via St Helena though John forgot
which day he had written down and thought we were a day late instead of a
few hours early!

More tomorrow.

Joyce


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