Somewhere in Seattle halfway round the world, my daughter is running a marathon. Go Rachel, go! We are here off the coast of Africa enduring a marathon of very difficult sailing. This morning we moved to the fuel dock...a very tight parallel parking job well executed by Captain. Dave came onboard and helped us get the anchor chain up as we came out of our berth. Zululand’s docks aren’t designed for 54 foot, 30 ton boats, so we had our anchor out to augment the lines holding us on the dock. And very happy we did too, especially in that 40 knot blow night before last! Lars had removed the chain to paint the inside of the locker, so pulling up the remaining 75 feet was a delicate task since the chain wasn’t feeding off the gypsy into the hawse pipe, but needing to lay flat on deck. Dave was a wonderful help, guiding the chain off the gypsy without disengaging it from the gypsy. We had a dicey moment when, despite being an hour from high tide, we ploughed up a bit of mud then finally made it to the fuel dock. After taking on a third of a tank of diesel, the guys from the boat yard showed up and removed our old chain, and loaded the new one. We had a bite of lunch, I loaded up the chain locker with all the mooring gear and lines while Captain showered and then washed the deck. At noon we were off the dock, happily munching delicious Christmas cookies gifted to us by the Nimbus crew. Right out of the harbour it was rough, really rough, bone jarring, corkscrew bronch-bucking rough. Waves coming from every direction on top of huge swell. We headed offshore. Our initial strategy was to go out about 70 miles to skirt the outer edge of a southerly buster forecasted for Saturday. By 18:00 after six miserable hours of banging around in huge sloppy seas with next to no wind, our plans had to change..why not stop in Durban for a couple days? Yeah, why not? So we altered course, heading to Durban. It’s the old saying, “sailor’s plans are written in sand at low tide” come to life.
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