One hundred years after Boney’s passing a boy was born to the doomed Greek Royal family who would make history as the tall handsome figure who always stood just behind England’s longest serving monarch, Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth or Lilibet as her father, King George VI would call her. Prince Philip was many things to many people but to the Queen he was her Prince.
He died at 5.00am on the 9th of April, two hundred years after Boney’s passing and in the centenary year of his own birth; the day before we left beautiful St Helena and I was inspired to write this by way of paying my respects; I hope you don’t mind my sharing it.
‘From the shore the young boy watched, while sitting cross-legged under the Gumwood tree, as the elderly couple sailed northwards in their yacht with the white hull; their only sail, a multi-blue cruising chute, swaying gently by the bow. The boy’s name was Philip.’
The Prince’s passing marks the end of the era of Lilibet and Philip.
We are on route to the Azores now, three days out and the winds are light. The Chute is pulling us along without fuss for the most part and for once we are choosing our route as we go, across the ITCZ, the Equator, towards our outgoing track; from the Cape Verdes westwards in 2016.
Zoonie left St Helena in fine style, the island’s rugged bijoux outline falling quickly behind us into a fine weather mist. Our next waypoint was a watery one on the Equator at 24’W, 1357 miles away.
We heard from home that our Christmas postcards sent from Richards Bay in November had finally arrived, I wonder where they spent the last five months, perhaps in the scruffy, gum clad post box outside the Post Office in RB?
The days have gone past with the Diva pulling us along a long gentle swaying motion conducive to sleep. How much longer can this last?
At night, under starry skies as the fingernail moon has only just started waxing it is a joy to see The Plough (part of the Ursa Major constellation) on our starboard while in the same sky the Southern Cross reminds us that we are still in the South Atlantic, just, and getting very near that imaginary Lion, as I used to picture it as a child, running around the middle earth.
Rob discovered one night that by shining a light onto the white wash at Zoonie’s midships not only was the luminescence obvious, although far from as bountiful as I have seen it in the past, but in the darkness beyond specks of brilliantly lit creatures were leaping from the sea towards our wash to avoid us. Were they krill or some other form of plankton we wondered?
Far away from the wind gusling Southern Ocean systems, we are now in the SE Trade wind proper and it is constant and trustworthy and proves to be so until we get to within 3 degrees of that puffing Lion. This is the weather we had been promised from Cape Town, but that eluded us because the summer was in its decline and La Nina was lurking around. So, enjoy it we did.
I reserve my watch period from 11.00pm to 02.00am for reading and have just finished Mark Bostridge’s great book ‘Florence Nightingale’ which is about much more than her 20-month spell as ‘The Lady of the Lamp’ at Scutari Hospital in the Crimean Campaign. She was also a brilliant statistician and hospital reformer, a woman for all ordinary people especially the poor and ordinary soldiers; she had an acute insight into the causes and relief of human suffering and plenty of contacts in the aristocracy and government of the day to facilitate her reforms. Mark writes about her with respect and affection as if she is his older sister, even standing her deceased corner when she was under attack for her radical ideas. In the 1930’s a government department was praised for its accurate financial record keeping, laid out by Miss Nightingale fifty years before.
Ben Zephaniah’s ‘Windrush Child’ is a short read intended to make a point. It has a surprising ending leading straight into information about the work of Amnesty International. Imagine going to live in a foreign country at that country’s invitation as a child, growing up there, marrying, having a child who eventually goes to University, arranging to go home to Jamaica to visit one’s mum and ending up in a detention facility classified as an illegal immigrant because 60 years before the government said you didn’t need a passport. No wonder Amnesty International is so busy.
Zoonie continues her wind surfing northwards, sometimes it is so smooth it’s like being pulled along over ice.
We spend afternoons sitting in the cockpit, looking to where we have just come from, chatting and reading until 4.00 when the kettle goes on and we have tea and a small piece of cake. Then at 5.00pm it’s Sundowners and a glass of wine, music and more chat as the sun moves across in front of Zoonie and starts it obvious descent. During one afternoon a shoal of salmon sized fish escorted us for more than an hour. A definite blueness on their back suggested they were small tuna but as they never surfaced, we couldn’t be sure, we just felt privileged that they were interested in us.
The growing moon assists with our squall watch at night and we hear terns squawking just outside the cockpit, “You in there, what you up to?”
During the day there is the occasional Mollymawk, sometimes in pairs and most likely to be the Yellow-Nosed Albatross species as they are small, or possibly the Black-Browed Albatross variety, Frigate birds pinching fish from the flock of Terns hunting their supper, Wilson’s Storm-Petrels, so easily identified with the white band across their rump; even a lone and lost Red-Billed Tropic Bird, “Thataway,” I point towards Ascension Island, the nearest of the remote mid-South Atlantic Islands behind us.
It is getting warmer of course and we close the curtains against the sun which helps keep the cabin cool and there is always a nice breeze in the cockpit from the following wind.
Rob does a daily deck check of the rigging and has replaced two shackles that were shedding filings into the scuppers.
A diurnal weather pattern is becoming obvious to us; the wind rising in the morning to around midday and then dropping by late afternoon with a possible drum roll as the sun sets. At first, we would change rig to the poled-out genoa for the windy spells but by careful experiment we found the Diva is comfortable up to 20 knots of wind and the motion she provides is so much more comfortable than the more durable but confined genoa. Where the Diva leads Zoonie willingly follows.
On our seventh day, a Friday, we learned of the arrival of our second granddaughter, Clara; 10 years and 10 days after our first, Ruby. In short, she is beautiful, bouncing, blonde, baby Clara, BBBC. Described by her lovely mum, Charly as a gorgeous, chunky monkey she arrived screaming and weighed in at 9lb 3oz. Look out Milo here she comes!
Destination ‘Desirable’ Doldrums
The ITCZ is like a box of chocolates, you never quite know what you are going to get. We have been crossing this area either side of the Equator and reaching from Africa to Brazil now for four days and have had to motor most of the way because of lack of wind, The Doldrums. The area changes in width at different times of the year and for us it has been 300 – 400 miles wide and hopefully we will leave it today 23rdApril and pick up some sailing winds.
The cloud formations in the ITCZ have been spectacular, I will post some pictures on the blog later but they will not convey the all over splendour. Many clouds shapes, heights and colours all at one time and some developing into squalls; the day before yesterday we grabbed the plant-based body wash and rushed to the foredeck for a wonderful rain shower in cool fresh water, it was bliss and lots of fun too.
We had a nasty squall just before the ITCZ at just after midnight when I was on watch. It crept over us from ahead, while I had been checking the sky astern, so it caught me unawares. Suddenly the wind was up to 24 knots and I dashed below to get Rob up so we could snuff the Diva, (cruising chute). As I made my way up the companionway steps again Zoonie went into a broach, heeling right over. Rob hauled down the snuffer bag but there was nothing in it, the Diva was dragging alongside Zoonie’s hull and by now it was pouring with rain, making her fabric heavy and at risk of sinking. The sail fabric was still attached to the clew and tack so we weren’t going to lose it.
She had been assaulted while on stage and so wounded waved a resigned gesture as she fell into the oceanic orchestra pit.
Instinctively neither of us went to turn on the engine because of the risk of trailing sheets getting around the prop and by this time the wind had passed and we just had the rain to soak and cool us while we dragged the masses of sailcloth safely onto her side-deck ready to bag it. For the rest of the night, we sloped along with the genoa poled-out and I felt decidedly annoyed with myself, but relieved in a sense that it didn’t happen on Rob’s watch so he’d have to deal with the emotions.
I was scrolling through one of the instruments a couple of days later and discovered that the daemon gust that blew out our Diva maxed out at 29.2 knots and was the only gust of that strength we’d had since leaving St Helena.
Suffice it to say I was not going to let that gust get in the way of the Diva’s future career and now she is back in her bag, all repaired and ready to go once more. Rob and I worked like a pair of Trojans along with the Pfaff 6 hand sewing machine, and the blessed calm of the Doldrums, (who’d ever think I’d be praising their flat calm conditions) for one and a half days to get the mammoth task done. So, we thought we’d try her out today but now the NE Trade winds are starting to set in so the wind direction will be all wrong for her. Never mind if those repairs don’t work, I’ll eat my hat; and I have a choice of five, two straw, two cotton and one man-made fabric, maybe not the last one though. She might be a little saggy in places due to stretched fabric but then so are we both and it doesn’t make us any less lovable! Or useful for that matter.
We learned a few things from that experience: –
1 A changing weather pattern beware, as we found the squalls came at us from all directions
2 Re-set the max wind tolerance for the Diva to 19 knots, not because she might split again in higher winds but because she might not and Zoonie’s broach could be even worse.
3 The repairs were easy because her construction and fabric are very light and we were able to use the fabric left in her tapes to repair the splits rather like taking a skin graft from another part of the human body because it is the same type.
Equator day was on the 21st April and to mark the occasion Zoonie did an involuntary turn under auto pilot, due perhaps to the growing electrical activity to be encountered in this atmospherically volatile area. She has done two more since; seventy degrees either way and with thunderous clouds up ahead at the time and an elegant serpentine manoeuvre when she just didn’t know which way to turn.
There has been plenty of thunder and some sheet lightning in the squalls so retrieval of our devices for our use has been from the oven and microwave, our Faraday’s cages. To be honest we were too busy on the day heat sealing all the Diva’s fraying edges to think about having moved back into the Northern Hemisphere and North Atlantic for the first time since 25th March 2016, but here we are again sailing towards our outward passage from the Cape Verdes to Guadeloupe at which point, in about 11 days’ time, we definitely will celebrate completing our ocean circumnavigation!
So, we have completed about one third of the passage to the Azores, measured from St Helena to the Equator at 1224 miles. Zoonie will reach the next waypoint this evening, on the other side of the ITCZ and then the next one we have set at a point to give us a nice sailing angle: 25’N 40’W. 1554 miles away.
Yesterday I was standing on the fourth step of the companionway, watching the rain and waiting for the bread dough to rise, not long in the 37-degree cabin heat, when I thought we could have a second rainwater shower on the foredeck. So, stripped of our singular item of clothing and clasping the body wash off we go again. All lathered up and ready for the rinse, guess what happened next, well, nothing, it stopped raining!! Two sudsy souls made their way back to the cockpit for a rinse off below.
We know we’re in the North Atlantic because there is Sargasso weed all around us and the Watt&Sea cannot work because it is clogged up.
In another 4 days we will be out of the path of naissant hurricanes which can start forming from early May, so that will be a relief. Yesterday I asked Neptune for some sailing winds for our three yachts and he has tentatively obliged and now we are creeping north at around 4 knots in the very start of the NE Trades.