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Charm - Cape Town passage



We’re on day 3 of our passage to Cape Town from Durban.

My mom and Kay left on Saturday, December 7, after three weeks of touring South Africa, with a side jaunt to Zimbabwe to see Victoria Falls. We had lots of great adventures, met many interesting people, and learned more about the world, ourselves, and each other.

My mother learned that, while she was born of Irish/Iowan parents and raised in Cuba, she is actually part African. This was no surprise to anyone that knows her. Given any opportunity, she will start dancing and singing. In any part of Africa we visited, we witnessed the same behavior.

In a beach parking lot on a weekend afternoon, standing by your car? Dance party.
Taking a jaunt on a boat around the harbor? You and fifty of your friends, on your feet, dancing.
Walking down the promenade by the shore and a catchy tune comes over the speakers? Just break into a quick shuffle dance, along with the rest of the people around you.
On your way to school and hear a tune from a car radio? Just finish your commute with a bit of a walky dance and you’ll fit right in.

My mom first discovered her African origins while hanging the laundry on Charm in Durban harbor. It’s not a delightful harbor – full of trash and quite bouncy at the very, very end of a long, long, long, long dock where we were parked. Many tourist boats leave to . . . well, I’m not sure what they do but many tourist boats go by, full of people, often in matching outfits and hats, which is another phenomenon we didn’t ever figure out. Anyway, mom was hanging laundry and a boat went by, blasting a song she liked so she looked up and noticed the dance party on the boat. She started dancing too and, en masse, they all cheered for her and she cheered for them, and they danced together, and her confirmation of her Africanness was established.

We left Durban to cover the 750+ miles to Cape Town, feeling confident that we had a rare weather window to make it all the way around the Cape of Storms (prior name before the Portuguese government allegedly renamed it Cape of Good Hope because the original name was very discouraging to sailors) to Cape Town.

The first 12 hours would be spent motoring in light winds but then we were predicted to have following winds of medium strength to take us the rest of the way. That turned out to be mostly true. The motoring lasted closer to 30 hours and was accompanied by wind on the nose and the unpleasant waves that go along with that. Normally no adults on board feel good on the first day of the passage but this was exceptionally bad.

Mostly we just waited for the time to pass and tried to stay in positions that were less uncomfortable than others, which meant we were all fighting for the prime position on the couch.

I let Joe take the whole night watch and I didn’t complain at all while I slept and he stayed awake at the wheel. I felt guilty in the morning and tried to make it up by letting him sleep a lot the next day. That only worked until I fell asleep on the couch. To make matters more unpleasant, it went from hot, sweaty weather in Durban to hotter, sweatier weather in Zimbabwe, to slightly cooler weather in Durban just before our departure to downright cold when we got out on the water. Since we are still waiting for all our cold weather apparel to be shipped to Cape Town from Indonesia where they discovered a laundry error a month after we left, Joe, Cobin and I are sharing one jacket.

Thankfully, my mom brought malaria apparel for all of us, thinking we would be covered head to toe during our time in Zimbabwe. That went quickly out the window since it was hot (Africa hot) there and we learned that malaria had been almost completely eradicated in the Victoria Falls area thanks in large part to the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. However, the long pants, shirts, and new coats for the girls and long pants for me came in handy for us on the open water. We are also sharing the girls’ stocking caps so Joe is getting in touch with his feminine side with my coat and Tully’s navy blue cap with delicate snowflakes stitched on with small pearls.

As if to emphasize the point that the only land south of us is Antarctica, today Joe spotted a seal in the water. The girls and I ran out in time to see its flippers straight up in the air as it lounged on its side. Joe said, “It’s sailing along, just like we are.” I’m not sure how much air its flippers catch but it did look like a mini seal-boat, cruising along.

So, apart from the physical discomfort of the first two days, we had some additional challenges. Joe had put up the mainsail at some blurry point in the beginning of the trip, hoping, I guess, that the power of suggestion might cause the wind to veer to any angle other than on the nose. It must have worked because the wind moved into the 20s and Joe decided we needed to put in a third reef. Unfortunately, that same issue with not being able to drop the sail recurred.

You might recall that we encountered this issue before and solved it by passing a line through the ring in the sail where the reef line goes and then ratcheting it down by cleating one end and using the winch on the other side. Basically, we used mechanical advantage to yank down on the sail. This time, Joe climbed up as far as he could, using the built-in steps and various things to stand on and then shimmied up the last 8 inches to pass the line through the third reef. Then we cleated one side and put the other on the winch and ground it down. Nothing happened.

We tried again after releasing the halyard. It didn’t work. Neither did dropping the boom to see if the topping lift was tangled in the halyard. Neither did loosening the halyard for the gennaker or cranking the sail up in an effort to get it to loosen. At this point, the sail wouldn’t go up or down so we were stuck in building winds with a big piece of cloth on our mast. Thankfully it was already at the second reef which should keep us safely to 35 knots. But there’s a difference between being “safe” and feeling in control. While we felt like Charm probably wouldn’t be overpowered, it sure would be nice to be able to get that sail down if conditions got much stronger.

Hmmm . . . so we decided to think about it for a while. Then Joe noticed that the steering wasn’t quite right. We have been trying to solve some minor steering issues for a while. After Reunion and Richards Bay and an influx of parts delivered by my mother, Joe felt like things were under control. The new auto-pilot worked beautifully on the way to Durban. But now the starboard hydraulic steering arm was slipping which meant that every 5-10 minutes, Joe had to climb down into the stern-most compartment and shove it back into place. He finally decided to turn on the bypass valve to see if we could steer with just the port rudder.

Then the auto-pilot started groaning. All of us groaned right along with it. We still had 500 miles to go with decent weather forecast all the way to Cape Town – a rarity on this coast. Stopping somewhere meant that we would be delayed 3-4 days at a minimum and the likelihood of finding decent repairs in the smaller towns was not high. But continuing without reliable steering, an auto-pilot that was dying, and a stuck mainsail didn’t seem like a good choice either.

The change in wind direction complicated our challenges because its increased speed put more pressure on the sail and steering but it also made us all feel much better. So, while there was a lot to think about, Joe and I both got enough sleep to face the problems the next day.

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