CAPTAIN'S LOG
SEA DATE 11 AUGUST 2009
Azores to Portugal. Drama on the high seas.
Dear all,
“Here we go .......... again.
As I type this, we are about to leave Mallorca.
Anchoring and flags. One flag in particular, the tri-colour. Red white and blue - running vertically not horizontally. It is French and has a particular meaning; “Anchoring practices not in practice - keep clear”. Don’t get me wrong, I love the French. Our favourite islands on the Caribbean are French. The people are wonderful, very friendly. Their food is the best and they love it when I try to speak french.
While cruising around the Caribbean we saw that the carriers of this ensign are the worst at anchoring. They anchor too close and when they do anchor they just drop the anchor on the bottom, dump all the chain on the top, take all their cloths off (these particular fillies certainly are built like racing tadpoles - mustn’t grumble, mustn’t grumble) and dive into the water.
Okay, anchoring 101:
1. Before you drop the anchor make sure there is plenty of space between yourself and all the other boats. Its the old story, first up best dressed. If you arrive in a bay and drop your pick (thats boat talk for an anchor) and swing too close to somebody that was there first - they get to stay. You move.
2. Drop the anchor. When it reaches the bottom, slowly go astern so the chain runs along the seabed in a line and does NOT sit on top of the anchor. Amount of chain to let out is at least 3 times the depth of water that you anchor in. I usually do 5 times. Thus in 5 metres of water we let out between 15 and 25 metres of chain. Its okay, its marked. I don’t have to count the links as it goes out. When it is all out you slowly go astern until the chain is extended pretty straight - then hit the revs to make sure it is stuck in the bottom of the sea.
Too easy.
20 minutes ago I had this epistle very rudely interrupted by a boat flying the afore mentioned tri-colour. The bugger is about 5 metres off my Port beam as I am typing. The guy goes up and preps the boat for anchoring. I honestly didn’t expect him to drop it right there.
Wrong. Bugger. (Shit).
Obviously used to play rugby and loved the physical contact in the scrum.
I am out my seat faster than Jacky. I holler at him and say no - too close. He looks at me as if I am stupid. I climb out of my shell and state the position. “Our boats will be kissing later on so I want your insurance details now to cover any damage. Do you have any questions?” The bows started drifting together and I clambered into the lazerette to grab a fender, to put between the boats - not to put it up his - oh never mind, but fortunately he popped his bow thruster and moved his bow away from us or the boats would have kissed. He let out a lot more chain and dropped a wee way astern and said he would be okay. I said no way - when the wind changes, your chain will wrap around ours. Pick up your anchor and move. Which he did. He’s now on the other side of us but about 30 metres away. Still too close for comfort. I was not too impressed.
I will see if he drags over the next couple of hours. If he does I will go and ask him for the name of his insurance company and write it in my log book. Wonderful thing the log book. It is a legal document and not just a bunch of words in a book. I have used this method before. If someone anchors too close I will sniff up to their boat in our dinghy with my log book out and camera around neck. Do a couple of circuits, take a photo or several of their boat showing proximity to our boat and the name of their vassel. Including their Registration number. I will then surrepticiously (if that word was shorter it would be a good one for scrabble - if it had a q or z in it) approach their stern and chat. Interestingly enough, they are usually in the cockpit watching me. I ask for the Captain and let him know that he is parked too close to my wheels and ask him for his insurance papers in case “his” vassel bumps into ours and causes damage. They usually move. I prefer this subtle approach to that of a fellow cruiser that appears on the back of his boat with an axe. He tells them that if the boats bump in the middle of the night, he will wake them up by banging their boat with the axe. Different system, but his works as well. He REALLY likes it if they don’t move and he has to wake them up.
Back to us, as it always about us, well Jane anyway but I won’t go there. The next option is to crank up the stereo with some solid hard rock. ACDC usually works. We have done this a few times and it works a treat.
Back to the timeline of my journals - crossing the pond.
We are now ready to depart from the Azores. Although both Dick and Lawrence were going to continue on to Portugal, Lawrence has decided to head back to Vancouver as his business is pressing.
We depart Horta in the Azores and head to the most eastern island of the Azores called San Miguel. We (well, Dick kindly did) rented a car for the day and drove around the southern part of San Miguel. Thanks Dick. Per earlier epistles, this has been covered by the trouble and strife.
We depart San Miguel for Lagos in Portugal. Date June 14.
Not a lot of wind first day.
Not a lot of wind second day neither.
And again on da turd - not a lot. This could be a bit short of a minor epistle.
Speaking of which, received an email from number one daughter Amy. Tells me I should call them Mammoth Epistles. Not sure why .....
So here we go - wind up to 25 knots.
Wind dropped to 10 to 15. Bugger.
In fact the most exciting part so far is keeping an eye on all the ships. There is major traffic around. The Auckland Star passed just ahead of us - about 0.25 of a mile. Be a shame to be run over by our countries biggest smoke. Bigger than Tamauranui I hear, and that’s on the main trunk line.
One interesting part revolves around radar reflectors. We had one on the Waatea and it was apparently one of the best available at the time. With our radar scanner on, we cannot see boats that are endowed with this piece of apparatus so they are pretty useless as far as I am concerned.
We didn’t have a radar reflector on the Ta-b so Jane did some research and came up with the one that we now have fitted. At $800 it was pretty close to a boat unit - but the best rated passive reflector on the market. On our trip from Bermuda to the Azores we picked up a ship on our AIS. Remember from epistle numero uno and dos? - Automatic Identification System. I called him up on channel 16 for a bit a chat and he told me that he had had us on radar when we were 11 miles away. I like that. Really, nothing can ruin your day like bumping into another boat. Especially a tanker. Not nice. That would be a bad hair day.
Ships Log
0450 hours. Vessel astern. Contact on channel 16. Go to 12. He has us on radar plus visual. Asks we maintain our course. Will pass 1.5 miles astern. On his way to Lisbon.
I like that.
Digression - Here is an example of Dick’s thoroughness. As an architect, we have to love engineers. Not really sure why as they always put in beams that we architects think are way too big.
Log:
0950 hours. Genoa fairlead does not line up properly when close hauled. It needs a toggle, or similar, to allow it to rotate and line up with the sheet. (The longer shackle to solve the binding problem when sheeted out would not solve this problem). Discuss with Lewmar Rep? Look at catalogue/website? I love that constructive feedback. Thanks Dick.
The log is a mixture of general info, things to do, sail changes, wind changes, calculations on how far to go to our next port etc. Many notes on this trip however have to do with the traffic. This is a pretty busy thoroughfare. The busiest part is yet to come. As we approach Portugal, there is a major traffic separation area. Four lanes. North bound vessels have two lanes about 5 miles wide. These lanes are inshore. South bound vessels also have two lanes but are offshore. Dividing north and south lanes is a 5 mile “center medium” as it were. The dotted lines separating the two north lanes are 1 mile. Same for the two south lanes. All in all about 27 miles of playing dodge ’ems with small freighters and massive tankers.
Timing is everything. We don’t want to do that one in the dark.
0400 hours. 122 miles to separation zone.
Our best time to cross is 0600 hrs. That way we can make our Portugal harbour in daylight. Always good. We have two options. Option two is to cover the next 120 odd miles at around 60 knots, or slow down and average 120 miles over 26 hours. What ever the maths is. That one is too difficult for me, I’ll pass it to our Navigator / First Mate (or there will be trouble) aka Jane.
Decision time: 60 knots is perhaps not our optimum speed, so we will slow down and try to be there around 0600 hours the next day.
Still a lot of traffic. The traffic separation zone is for boats running close to the Portuguese coast and heading to or from the straight of Gibraltor and into the Med. Problem is of course, there are many ships running between the African Coast and either France or the English channel so they will not be in the Separation Zone as it is considerably off their course. We are approaching that area and we have one rather close call. Dick calls me up for my watch at 0100 hours and gives me a quick summary of the activities. Jane is trying to get some shut eye in the saloon area.
Dick has a boat on the radar on our Port (left) side and it is heading south. We are heading East. Both boats (us and them) appear to be going to the same spot. Some would suggest that we are on a collision course. It is pretty windy and the sea state is up. We are humming along at around 9 knots. The radar is great, but if the sea state is up, the area surrounding the boat - on the screen that is - shows similar colouring as a ship. That means the area within about a 0.5 mile radius of us is pretty useless. This can be remedied but we don’t have time to adjust the screen.
The other ship doesn’t have his AIS on, which is very naughty. He is legally required to have it on all the time. We don’t know what size he is and thus how maneuverable he is, or his course and speed. He is about 5 miles away and we are on a converging path. Sounds a lot better than collision course, but we still have time to dis-converge, as it were. If it did. And I hope it does. I call him on channel 16 and he says that he will turn to port. I don’t like this as it still keeps him across our bows and not passing behind us. I assume he knows what he is doing and guess that he is on a big ship and with the wind and sea state he is better turning to port.
He is now 2 miles away and we still have him on the radar. Channel 16 again and I tell him that we are now on a collision course. Jane wakes up from her dozing. Can’t blame her. We are all feeling rather nervous at this stage. He again says he will turn to port.
Bugger. But I assume he knows what he is doing. He should have more electronics on board than us and a lot more experience. We think.
1 mile away and we still have him on radar, but he is rapidly approaching the “sea state area” mentioned earlier. Channel 16 again. He turns again to port.
0.5 miles away, and he is now lost in the middle of our screen. He is now classified as “sea state”. Channel 16. I ask him if he can see our running lights at the top of the mast. There should be a red one in front of him. I am inside the boat on the radio so cannot see a lot outside. Very fortunate. Jane and Dick can see his starboard (right side) light - green - right on our beam - not good. He says he will turn to port (left) again. Jane yells out “No - tell him to turn to starboard”. I can now see his starboard light from inside the saloon and it is now very close to changing underwear time. Certainly no time for a cuppa. I call back to him “No - go to starboard. HARD A STARBOARD” His light immediately changes to red so we now know he is passing behind us.
We see him pass astern, very close. Just a small freighter and almost stopped. I thank him very kindly for missing us and he rather nervously responds with “you told me to turn to port”. Yeah right. I think he was having caniptions and thankful he didn’t run us over.
What a relief. I cannot imagine doing these crossings without electronic equipment. The visibility was very poor and we would not have seen him until too late.
We are approaching the traffic separation zone. Now for some REAL excitement. We will be there in the morning. Too much wind. Only 15 knots of so, but we need to keep our speed down to less than 4 knots to arrive at about 0600 hours - sun rise.
Right on time we approach the first separation zone. It feels a bit like running across a motorway and dodging in and out of the cars, but it is all in slow motion. We enter the first “lane” in between a couple of ships. They are quite a distance apart so its not really as bad as we first thought. We cross on an angle and go with the flow. Once you have run across one lane, the rest are easy. We make it through unscathed even though there is a pretty steady stream of boats traveling both north and south.
At last “land ho” goes the cry from the crows nest.
Cabo de Sao Vicente. 4 miles off the port bow. Misty - visibility 4 miles.
Many ships lost here during the Napoleonic wars. Huge history as this is were it all happened. We are now playing dodge ’ems between the fishing nets, numerous floats with different coloured flags on them indicating where the nets “may” lie. The wind has dropped to 10 knots or so and we quietly drift along the coast enjoying the view of the Portuguese coast. Just gorgeous.
Docked at the port of Lagos - 1500 hours.
Passage time 5 days 20 hours 20 minutes.
Back to Dick. At the end of our crossing he made a comment which I was pretty chuffed with. He said “thanks for the reefing system Russell”. Meant a lot to me. One of the biggest challenges with a boat this size is handling all that cloth stuff that is attached to the mast and boom. When it starts to blow, we have to reduce sail or we are in big doo doo. To give you an idea, the Mainsail is 74 sq metres - 800 sq ft. The genoa is 45 sq metres - 500 sq ft. All in all about half the area of the 3 floors of our house in Vancouver. We have 3 reefs, with 3 reefing lines on the luff (front part) of the sail and 3 on the leach (back part). They all run into the cockpit by means of a bunch of spring loaded blocks at the base of the mast. This was an area where we chucked a bunch of boat units (a boat unit is $1000) at FKG rigging in St. Maarten and they made the system that I had in my mind work. Shag the Aussie rigger did a bloody good job. I know I mentioned all this in Epistle (minor thanx Amy) uno, but I have to re-iterate it all because it is such a good system. Shag told me how to reef going down wind, which I had never tried before. Even in 20 to 30 knots of wind it’s a breeze to work. I actually prefer to reef down wind now as there is far less flogging of the sails. Figure it out. Downwind with 25 knots of wind and say 7 knots of boat speed is only 18 knots of apparent wind. Doing it upwind gives 30 plus knots of apparent wind. So thanks for the feedback Dick, I really respect your comments and input.
As I scribe this mammoth epistle at our new anchorage I think to myself - its tough out here. I can’t just walk off the boat down to the nearest pub in Londres for a quick pint followed by a couple of slow ones, or down to the Royall Vancouver Yacht Club for a game of pool with a couple of buddies or a jar or three with a member or four. We have to put up with excess heat, humidity, sometimes it is windy, sometimes the sea is bumpy, sometimes I am an early riser -and just get kneed by Jane.
As a man, a hunter, a gatherer, hands that reach down to my knees, I have to do my part. I am always busy. I gather water and electricity. On numerous occasion I have to start up the generator and spark up the water maker. This is a rather tedious job which requires much patience and expertise. There is a through hull fitting that lets water into a shut off valve that I have to open. If I leave it open all the time, it may break off and our home on no wheels may sink. I start up the generator, turn on the low pressure pump, then the high pressure pump, then increase the water pressure through the membranes (they turn the salienated water into potable water - which is in fact a tad (several tads in fact) better than the stuff that you get out of your tap. I then have to wait until a series of lights indicates that the water is okay. This is the tricky part. There are three green lights and one orange light and one red light all in a row. I have to wait until there is only one green light (mind you, two is still pretty clear).
The responsibility is huge.
THEN, I have to gather electricity. We have a wind generator which knocks out lots of amps when the wind is up, and a host of solar panels that also help ME manufacture amps (a special part of electricity that we sailing hunters and gatherers know about). To get the wind generator to help ME produce amps I have to turn on a switch and sometimes turn the wind generator around on its pole to look at the wind to make its propellor thingie rotate. That is all relatively easy but a job never the less. When I have to hunt and gather amps with my solar panels, I really have to work at my job. I have four of these things to operate.
Sometimes a shroud (that is a bit of wire that holds the mast up) may cast a shadow on a panel or two. I may have to move the boom across to the other side of the boat to reduce the shadowing effect on the panels. If I feel like moving. As per an earlier epistle you will know exactly how many amps they produce, so I will not re-bore you with details, but suffice it to say, the more amps, the better the freezer runs, the more ice at my finger tips for Jane’s G & T or other poison which currently is a Painkilller.
Details to follow later.
The responsibilities of being the Hunter and Gatherer are rather wide and completely onerous if a man does not carry out his duties with complete dedication. No amps means No ice which means No. What can I say?
Its tough out here.
The Hunter and Gatherer at work. Mind you, the integrated on board systems that we threw lots of drinking vouchers and too many boat units at have helped a little. You know ... it is still tough out here.
The most important part - the Painkiller recipe
2, 3, OR 4 ozs of dark rum
4 ozs of pineapple juice
1 oz of orange juice
1 oz of cream of coconut
Serve on the rocks. Stir. Grate fresh nutmeg on top.
The number of ounces of rum depends on the amount of pain that needs to be killed.
Signing off
Her Jane
Me Russell