Sailing
2000 Nautical Miles - NOV 2019
(or "Why Cruising Full Time Isn't for Me")
Okay blog lovers, better put
the kettle on as this bLog entry may take a while to unpack. in our
last episode of 'the new life adventures of ddm' (going strong since 2011 with
your readership) your intrepid COTW had responded to a listing on a Facebook
page (Captains Looking for Crew) to crew on a 53' Hallberg-Rassy
sailing vessel from Brazil to Tobago/Trinidad, a 2000 nautical mile journey. out of a hundred FB responders i got the
nod so i bought my one-way ticket and waited for the end of October to fly to
Brazil. the day finally arrived and
i Ubered to Cape Town Int'l airport to check into my TAAG flight (Angola
Airlines, yes they have their own airline) to Luanda, Angola (a new country for me to visit, which speaks Portuguese like Brazil) and then to Sao Paulo, Brazil (another new
country for me), then Rio de Janeiro and finally Joao Possoa on the eastern edge of Brazil. (The Portuguese-speaking African countries, also known as Lusophone Africa, consist of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe and, since 2011, Equatorial Guinea.)
for me, Egypt in January 2019 made my countries-visited total to 61, Brazil and
Trinidad/Tobago were going to make 62 and 63. i don't count landing in-transit
at a country's airport a legitimate stop for a country-visited total, for
instance Istanbul, Turkey; Accra, Ghana; or Luanda, Angola. as for Angola Airlines, the only event on a rather
uneventful flight to Luanda and onto Sao Paulo was all 300 TV screens on this Airbus jetliner did NOT work. we flew in third world bliss with no troublesome movies to
help pass the time while we crossed the pond at 33,000 feet.
some could not believe i would fly to Brazil to spend 7
weeks with a complete stranger in tight quarters on a sailboat. they would
rather go to solitary confinement than be stuck at sea with some unknown
foreigner. i'm not wired that way. i've never met a stranger.
i talk to everybody and my Pop always modelled to take an interest in
others. i have moved to Boulder, CO, San Diego, Washington D.C., NYC, Nairobi, and Cape Town without
knowing a soul and made friends everywhere i went. it never occurred to me i
wouldn't get along with the captain. plus i was crew, essentially a body for the nightshift
to wake the captain if something bad was happening. we didn't necessarily have
to be besties. it turned out the captain was as nice as he could be.
He met me at the
smallish JPA airport and we were off in the hire-a-car to the
Jacare Village Marina. I had made
it to Brazil, i was about to go cruising when i got a crash course in
Cruising 101....boating is fixing stuff, constant repairs. we wouldn't sail for
a week. (B.O.A.T. = bring out another thousand. $$$) our boat was built in 1999, has 20 years of sailing or
sitting in the harsh UV rays of the Tropics, with nearly 100,000 miles under her
hull. read: regular maintenance and repairs required. she's a classic
Swedish-made beauty but a bit long in the tooth. imagine owning a 53' Land
Rover or Bentley that is 20 years old with high mileage and no garage to park
in, ever. you better expect some repairs.
the fix-it list for my first
week at this French speaking marina up the muddy Jacare river (jacare means crocodile) included fixing the freezer, the fridge, the teak decking was pulling up and
needed re-glueing, a window in the cockpit needed replacing, the dinghy had
several leaks, and six months of warm river
water growth on the hull needed scraping. BTW, there are lots of French mariners out there, hence a French speaking marina. joining a Danish captain who has sailed the world seemed like a great
opportunity to be mentored. after one WhatsApp video interview we
seemed to hit it off. he handles new crew all the time and i was keen for an adventure. my costs besides airfare was one half of all expenses so it ran me €500 for the month i was onboard.
with only 2000 nautical sailing miles under my belt i was a neophyte compared to his 85,000 nautical miles of circumnavigating the world. and
it showed. he was miles ahead of me when it came to trimming sails and
reading squalls. we were quite different as people. His professional life was an investment banker putting huge loans together for A-list companies, mine was a B-actor.
he's put eight figure deals together, i can't balance my checkbook. he likes Warren Buffet, i like Jimmy Buffet; he doesn't like background
music, i had brought my bluetooth speaker and playlists; he doesn't watch TV or
films, that's my livelihood; he doesn't read for fun, i had loaded up my
Kindle. he likes Sailing Delos on YouTube and i like La
Vagabonde. He knew every whim of our boat before she could
whimper, i had no clue. he was a Danish sailing champion and i was fair-weather mariner.
it was a rough learning curve and i'm fairly certain i never did get anything
right, including using the wrong burner on the cooktop for the kettle to boil
water for a coffee. there were rules, procedures and the proper way to do everything. my crash course was doing things the wrong way. he's the smartest man in the room, an expert on wine, world affairs & politics, i watch Netflix. so i adopted the
strategy "if you don't have anything intelligent
to say don't say it." i
stopped idle conversation at the risk of sounding stupid or being wrong. the boat had
been sitting in the silty river for 6 months and needed some TLC.
Luckily a local Brazilian worker, Joelson, was so handy we dubbed him "MacGyver" as
he could fix nearly everything. his moniker seemed to stick as the other
boat owners were quickly calling him MacGyver as well,
particularly fun with a thick French accent.
MacGyver was competent, cheerful, unflappable, and used his translator app on
his phone to communicate to and fro. he also spoke a little Spanish so i got to
fart around trying to speak the only other language i know, which i did badly
but had fun so who cares. as a crew member i was useless as a hole in the ground, with my first contribution
unknowingly stepping in some teak wood black tar and tracking it all over the
top deck (thank God i didn't traipse it all over the white berber carpet in the
salon.) with some acetone i tried to clean up my faux pas (false step) and sunburned
the crap out of my neck and back in the process. seemed like i did something
wrong everyday after that. but when you move in with someone whose been living
on their own boat for 16 years, you're bound to do things the wrong way. i had the
gift.
the fridge wouldn't hold the
freon gas perfectly and having a working fridge/freezer is mission
critical as we had two long passages to Tobago... the first one a 1349
nautical mile direct shot to the French Guiana prison 'Devil's Island' as
featured in the movie Papillion. (BTW: one nautical mile is
1.150 miles or 1.852 kilometers). the dinghy is your lifeline to get to shore but the Capt wasn't too concerned
with the leaky tender as we had a hand pump and it was holding air pretty well. plus MacGyver had put a couple good-sized patches on it, even if he used the wrong glue. inflating a
leaking tender is a much better option that having it stolen at night or its
outboard motor nicked. it happens.
the Marina Jacare Village was a simple, basic yacht club with showers and had a new chef, jean pierre. the crew (us) quickly developed a soft spot for his cooking as
well as the national drink of Brazil, the Caipirinha, a rum
concoction with lots of crushed ice and lime. it's a sneaky libation that
feels like a holiday on the way down and knocks you flat the next day. we tried
to limit our intake to three per evening, with varying degrees of
success. The other Jacare drama,
besides our own struggle to get shipshape
and underway, was the 35' sailing vessel Code Rouge that had
sailed down from Marseilles, France, with four millennial explorers. these
guys bought an old open cockpit day-racer for €75,000 and took 12 weeks to sail
to Brazil. that's three months to cross the Atlantic, or as they said in the
old days "head south and when the butter melts
turn right".
Code Rouge had some boat troubles of its own stopping in the
Canary Islands and Cape Verde for another 6 weeks waiting on boat parts and
repairs. to me that seemed like an ice age to cross the pond from France
but that's how it is. i was to learn "cruising" entails
prolonged stops along the way for parts and repairs. it's de rigueur. one of the french guys jumped ship to go kite surfing in Brazil while the other
I.T. explorers were headed to Cape Horn, the straights of Magellan, and up the coast of
Chile. first they had to solve an engine problem that was going to cost another
€1000. Sacre bleu. BOAT. they were young and tan and fit and had no fear, but the reality was setting
in...they had bought a terrible boat for open-ocean blue-water sailing with no shelter and not much shade (or even seat-backs) in their open cockpit. not too
mention no proper bunks below. and their budget was thinning out with
unexpected repairs. it's true..."buying the boat is the cheapest
part". luckily MacGyver was on hand for the engine fix but it was going to take
another week or two to sort it out. suddenly this "carefree cruising
lifestyle" was looking a lot less fun....and a lot more expensive.
slowly own our checklist was
getting ticked off. we cleared out with immigration in Brazil and if the fridge held the
cold we were to leave Sunday. it did and we were off. 2 hours down the Jacare
river with the tide going out and then into the Atlantic. for some reason i assumed we would jot up the coast of Brazil from one exotic
anchorage to the next snorkelling and beachcombing and drinking caipirinhas
with bikini-clad locals. 100% wrong. we were doing one long passage
to FG, 1349 NMs. it was one waypoint. a straight shot. we were hoping for 7-8 knots or 180 miles per day. the wind prediction
was one long broad reach with trailing seas off our stern. a sleigh ride.
well, not so much. instead it was soft winds and bobbing seas. if we could average 5.5 knots we'd make 134 miles per day and be there in 10 days. during a passage someone is always on watch, so we set up our watch
schedule for two people on board.
6am-noon, noon-6pm, 6-9pm, 9-12am, 12-3am,
3am-6am (or 06:00 to 12:00, 12:00 to 18:00, 18:00 to 21:00, 21:00 to 00:00,
00:00 to 03:00, 03:00 to 06:00.)
it's roughly 12 hours a day on-watch and a 1350 mile passage is sizeable. you grab as much sleep as you can when you're off. it's a grind. not much traffic out there and sunny all day and with no moon or clouds, pitch dark at night. after the first day i suggested we extend the night shifts as it was hard to
get good sleep with only three hours off. i also wanted to stagger the sunrise
and sunset shifts so we could both enjoy them. our new schedule was 06:00 to
12:00, 12:00 to 18:00, 18:00 to 22:00, 22:00 to 02:00, 02:00 to 06:00 and it
seemed to work well.
the night shifts consisted of watching the chart plotter which had a radar
scanner so we could see boats approaching from afar. it didn't pick up the
wooden fishing boats so well, so you had to keep an eye open for lights on the
horizon. the other marine thingy we used was AIS, the Automatic Identification System. if you
saw a boat icon on the chart plotter it had AIS and you could click on it to see its name, size, course, destination, and collision likelihood. very
helpful. the only problem is most fishing vessels and pirates don't have AIS,
or they elect NOT to display their location. we used ours so others could see
us, for better or for worse.
we did see a few boats pass us by, and one night we killed our running lights
when a dodgy vessel was zig-zagging ahead of us and we suspected a possible
pirate situation. there are pirates all over the world, and most of the areas
are well known. bad for us was Venezuela was en route and is in such a bad state their
pirates have been becoming more aggressive, boarding boats,
shooting the crew and tossing them overboard. that could be us. we were
intentionally unarmed, but the old cruiser's trick is to use the flare gun or a
spear gun in a pinch. if boarded, and believe me you feel like a sitting duck
out there in the dark when there's not enough wind to propel you, we were to
surrender and pray for our lives. they can have all the electronic devices and
our cash. some cruisers have a false wallet with some cash and credits cards to
hand over, but if they find the real wallet that might really piss them
off. there was no false wallet that i knew of.
(for a true pirate story, read this encounter
Hostage:
A Year at
Gunpoint with Somali Gangsters on Amazon Kindle)
(for more on passage-making watch this documentary of 4 girls rowing across the Pacific ocean from San Fran to Oz.
www.youtu.be/tJJuhYKxwhQ
how they did it is beyond me! and the night shifts must have been terrifying. plus they rowed two hours on and two hours off, 24 hours a day for 9 months! )
on another night watch i guided us through 15 fishing boats that were in a giant
U or horseshoe ahead of me. by playing with the auto-pilot plus or minus 10 degrees, i was able safely navigate through them without entangling any
nets or lines. in some places, like the Philippines, the local fisherman accuse
you of running over their nets and demand payment. in other places like the
Caribbean, you get local "boat boys" who heckle you
to hire them to bring you provisions, buy their lobsters, find a mooring, or
are hustling something else. marinas and moorings are expensive and can add up,
so most cruisers prefer to be left alone and find a nice anchorage. just never
anchor alone. you're inviting trouble. find a spot with other boats. safety in
numbers.
the
larger tanker ships and cargo vessels could see our AIS
on their radar and avoided us, as we did them. remember folks, safety is no
accident. stay clear and stay awake! some watches you got pretty groggy and
wanted to sleep. the thing is with auto-pilot you never actually steer
the boat by hand. i never turned the helm's wheel in four weeks. it's all
electronic sailing by GPS and auto-pilot where you change your heading by
hitting a touch-screen. luckily our auto-pilot didn't fail. some passages
you have to sail by hand if it fails and it's tiresome. still, it had a video game element to it instead of pure seamanship. technology.
being lazy and impatient, coupled with poor visibility at night inside the
cockpit if it was cloudy or no moon, i figured why not let the software do the
heavy work during the night shift and set the radar alarm to go off when
another ship is within 5 miles. that way one could sleep at night and glance at
an iPad with the chart plotter software in bed to see the same thing you can
see on the chart plotter in the cockpit. but hey, if this was your million
dollar sailboat, you would want a proper on-deck watch 24-7. so that's what we
did. plus you can't see fishing boat and pirates so well from below. and being on passage means no beer for the duration. got it. indeed, sailing is "interminable boredom punctuated by moments of terror," a saying adopted from WWI trench warfare.
we were
150 miles offshore in blue water 3000 feet deep. you can only see shore up to
30 miles away (as in line of sight) so you only
saw water everywhere you looked. we were in the middle of nowhere, and headed to the equator or ITCZ (The Intertropical
Convergence Zone), aka "the doldrums". surprising to me was the lack
of wildlife (sealife?) and for the most part no other boats anywhere that we
could see. we were all alone on the deep blue Atlantic. if you fell overboard
on your watch you'd be lost at sea. read: dead. i confess i
didn't wear my harness/PFD (personal floatation device) on my watch as it was
heavy and too small. i almost paid for that bad decision. and bad decisions can
add up quickly while underway.
one night i went forward to sit on the deck and lean against the life raft so i
could see better into the dark without the reflection of the chart plotter in
the glass windshield in the cockpit. i had one millisecond where i broke
Rule #1: always have one hand for the boat. i was nearly to
the rigging that holds up the mast and a wave rocked us sideways &
backwards. i teetered back on my feet, lost my balance, and for a sheer
panic-filled moment thought this could be it, i'm going over the rail and no one will
know for hours, let alone ever be able to find me. i had broken every cardinal
rule and it was all on me. bad form. my fault. but God had other plans as we
rocked forward and i leaned back in. disaster averted. i wasn't going over the low guard rail after all. i guess our peace offering to King Neptune crossing the equator paid off.
our
strong windcast of 15-20 knots was wrong. they were now mostly southerly
and barely blowing and we weighed 30 tonnes. you needserious wind to get to hull speed and we hardly had any. after 10 days we finally got
to French Guiana and their old prison where they brought prisoners from France
with a jail term of seven years of longer. none of them would return home. they died
on Devil's Island. the prison cells in the tropical heat were unbearable. no
place you would want to spend a night, let alone years. and yet the French have an old hotel there! and it was kinda cool!
our water pump went out and the capt's head (toilet) went off but
he was able to fix that. the engine's fan belt for the 24Volt battery
alternator also went out. no water pump meant hand-pumping every drop of
dishwashing water, drinking water, and showering water into a plastic bottle.
cruising is like camping on water. we even had an ant crisis on board as well
as little black mites in the flour and pasta that would all come to the surface at a certain boiling point. luckily, the water pump worked in short
bursts if we turned it on and off at the main circuit breaker.
after 5 days at FG, we weighed anchor and headed for Tobago,
another 650 nautical miles. what i learned about myself was sailing at 7 knots
(if we had decent wind) was like going 8mph or 12kph. that's like
driving from Cape Town to Joburg in 5 days instead of 10 hours. or LA to SF in
2 days instead of 6 hours. i know "cruising" is a lifestyle and you
go where the wind blows, but i'm not ready to go around the world at 8 miles
per hour. i was bored and antsy. the wind never comes in the right direction, it's too much or too little, and you better hope you're never going against the wind
and the current together. sailing (or motoring) at slow speeds in the middle of nowhere trying to get somewhere with rolly seas and hot temps wasn't doing it for me. and the nights were pretty but long. sunrise and sunset is the highlight of the day and you just hope nothing breaks or fails on the passage. i know this was only one passage and every passage is different, but i got a good taste of cruising life. my mind was wondering elsewhere.
the other thing i learned is i don't like to sweat. that's why i'm a
swimmer, not a gym rat. i don't like sweat, i don't like sweating, i don't
like being sweaty, you feeling me here? and most cruising is done in the
tropics 20 degrees above and below the equator. read: hot, humid, and
sweaty. my cabin had no ventilation and no fan. i was hot, sweaty,
and sticky for 4 weeks. i had a heat rash by the time i got off. the boat
is hot by the sun baking the wood deck all around you, and the navy blue canvas dodger in the cockpit above you.
any boat owner will tell you to be frugal with fresh
water and fuel. we had a fresh watermaker on board and 100 liters of extra diesel
on deck in addition to our full tanks. but rinsing 3-4 times a day to take the
sweat off was frowned upon as was motoring when the wind died. i'm not that frugal and i confess i didn't understand the strict rationing.
you know that guy in the sauna sitting at the end of the bench with
a bucket of water sponging himself with a chamois? i'm that guy. i'm that guy wiping the sweat away. i can't believe it. how did that
happen? a few years ago i was climbing Kilimanjaro and now i can't handle the
tropics (oh wait, Kili was 13 years ago!) well, better to find out now before i cash it all in to buy the best
boat i can find and head for the trade winds for life. the other thing about buying a
boat is that i'd be a solo skipper, or what they call singlehanded. so
i would be in need of crew for any serious passages and that's a crap shoot with who you'll get stuck with for months at a time confined on your boat.
plus i
learned that cruisers tend not to invite singlehanders on
board for a drink or a meal as they are so lonely they talk insistently, hungry for conversation, human connection, they
never take a breath. kind of a harsh indictment, but that's what i observed on
how people think. some singlehanders are considered to be on the social fringe of
society as outsiders or outcasts. it's typecasting some but largely true. we saw a few in Tobago and you study their
behaviour. you say hi and wave as you pass by on the dinghy, but you tend to
avoid personal invites into your own space. they're hard to shake.
so going slow doesn't do it for me, being sweaty doesn't work for me, being
singlehanded is tricky, and my size is too big for most boats. my frame is too large. i barely fit in the shower and had to squat, the kitchen sink was so low i
squatted washing the dishes, and i was too tall for my V-berth in the front so
i had to banana to fit when i slept. all the squatting coupled with the constant boat rocking threw my
back out. i resorted taking painkillers. really? plus a boat's hull is the same temperature as the ocean so at the equator the salon below was 85 degrees or 30 degrees
Celsius and humid. when you cooked a meal or washed the dishes in the small
galley you were soaked in sweat in no time. not so nice. (the galley is cramped
by design so with the boat rocking you can brace between the counters.)
the boat rocked just as much with no wind as with wind. strong wind was better for morale as we were making miles and
weren't bobbing like a cork. no wind with glassy seas was also less
rocky. but monohulls are always roly-poly. multihulls (like a catamaran) are
less rocky as the salon is above the water across its pontoons. some folks
prefer the larger view of the horizon from a cat and the larger salon space and
galley. not so "shut in".
the other deal breaker for me is being light skinned. after announcing professional
surfing for 10 years around the world my skin doc told me i had "enough
sun for two lifetimes." and this trip to the tropics with my Irish bloodline made my skin more freckly than olive, and my
shins tend to go bumpy scaly... not so sexy. in my mind i was still a Bronzed
Aussie but in reality my skin is more pink than Greek god. and i confess i
hate sunscreen, it always feels like glue, even the nice Neutrogena stuff. and
the spray bottle stuff...i don't know...i'm a baby. it blocks your pours and sweat glands and then heat rash breaks out. you get the picture. and when
you're on watch you're stuck in the sun. even with a bimini top or a spray
dodger the dawn arrives and your shifts starts at 06:00 and that morning sun is
baking you. i did get tan as the weeks went on but usually i was looking for
cover trying to find some shade. okay, i'm soft.
the sobering thing about all this is i fancy myself as an explorer, a Citizen
Of The World. i love The Explorer's Club, i love Thor Heyerdahl, i made an
Explorer's Club flag, i read books about explorers. i was ready to sell
everything to buy a boat and sail around the world forever and be an explorer. instead
i learned it's not my cup of tea. i'm not that guy. i have other fish i wanna fry. i'm out!
sailing the world in a slow boat in hot and humid weather, in expensive marinas
or crowded anchorages, dodging pirates, battling bad weather, high seas, gale winds or no wind, and being waylaid for weeks with pricey repairs plus the annual
anti-fouling paint jobs on the hull, isn't how i want to spend my last days. at
least not at the moment. and every passage means more repairs.
thankfully, this captain took me on board so i could cruise 2000 miles and
really see and experience first hand what it's like. it's a unique lifestyle. i had dreamt for years of leaving all my landlubber problems behind in exchange for a new set of problems on the high seas, more exotic problems. but alas, i'm
no MacGyver and i could be stuck in exotic places for months trying to fix
things. and if that self-furling mainsail motor broke or the windlass motor to pull up the anchor failed, i'd be stuffed. a good german friend told me "use other's people boats". i'm starting to appreciate that now.
"no second wives, no third homes, and no first boats."
a lot of cruisers' goal is to reach 100,000 nautical miles but with 4000 under my own, i think i'm good. i'm still keen for a daysail
or perhaps a week charter, but to sell up and shove off for the third act of my
life...not so much. by the time we got to Tobago and my watches were
over, i was ready to jump ship and go visit my sis in Texas for Thanksgiving.
innumerable lessons had been learned...truthfully, even shuttling our trash bags to shore in the dinghy and schlepping provisions back seemed a bit of a hassle. wow, have i grown old and boring?
the irony was when we finally got past our doldrums with some intermittent
motoring to Charlotteville, Tobago, the library
with air conditioning and internet was
packed with cruisers. we had sailed 2000 miles to join others seeking the
comforts of home.
the locals at Charlotteville were a colorful bunch, like the old timer who
rocked up at the ATM machine with his unkept graying fro
and a mouthful of long yellow teeth fighting for a place to stand straight. he
looked at me with bloodshot eyes and staggered towards me as he said
loudly "are you good, mon?" there i stood, almost
wetting myself, another white privileged cruiser in my Ray Ban sunnies, my
sporty aqua-striped collared shirt, Billabong board shorts, and my smart
new sling bag with my laptop over my shoulder. he looked at me like
he ate my types for lunch. "yeah, man, i'm good" i
squeaked, thinking better of giving him the universal thumbs up
all-good 100% gesture. i kept it simple, preferring not to engage further
with this Lion King Rafiki-like rasta who was drunk or high
or both. "we're good, mon."
i enjoyed a beautifully ice-cold Carib beer at the local patio bar on main
street of this palm-fringed village, and i bought my taxi ticket to Scarborough
for my flight to Trinidad. my heat rash, bad back, and general confinement led to aborting my cruise three weeks early. a few mornings later i was on the leaky dinghy with
our trash bags and my luggage, headed to the dock to catch my van taxi on
the edge of town. i were early. so was the taxi. they had space for me and my
bags. i was onto Trinidad, Houston, then Dallas. my adventure was behind me. as
crew, i did the best i could do. yes i left three
weeks early but i had completed my watch duties for the 2000 mile passage. i was
done. i was disappointed to learn i'm not a cruiser. it ticked all the boxes for me to be engaged with living with a constant adventure...but i guess i'm designed for some other secret mission.
the one thing i discovered most on this trip was about myself. i'm not cut out to be a full
time mariner. i love the ocean and the nature, but i am a cityphile at heart. i like the action. the hustle bustle. i'm not ready to ship off on the uncertain briny deep yet at 8 mph, or in 30 knot winds and 20' seas.
my friend Tzulu lives on his boat but still has his gyro-copter and BMW GS Adventure motorcycle. he has it all.
don't get me wrong, i still enjoy exploring the world.
maybe next time it'll be
on a Vespa.
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| TAAG to Angola. |
