22 December 2017 East London, South Africa
When we dragged ourselves out of bed, there about a dozen yachts anchored - a horde of international yachts taking advantage of the weather window. I’m guessing that they will all be staying for Christmas, so we shouldn’t be “Lonely This Christmas”.
The Yacht Club is all closed up, but the toilets and showers are open. I rang the club secretary, Ilsa, who confirmed that we’re okay to stay on the visitors berth for as long as we want. We’re really pleased that we’re alongside for the Christmas period. There’s a strong south-west gale forecast to hit East London on Christmas Day and it’s nice to know that we’ll be tucked up nice and secure instead of worrying about dragging our anchor. (Although we’ve been told that the holding is good.)
We rang Eagle Taxis, who took us to the Hemingway shopping mall, which is on the north side of town. East London is a large city, but once again, there’s no real town centre, just a lot of sprawling suburbs. There’s a small shopping mall about a mile away from the yacht club, but it looked really dodgy and the taxi driver told us not to walk around by ourselves.
The shopping mall is another huge place packed with the same shops as in Richards Bay (and I guess every South African shopping mall.) The place was heaving with people panic-buying for Christmas - just the same as the UK. We’d come to do our Christmas shopping. As usual, we made it into a game - we had 1½ hours and a budget of 200 Rands (£10) to buy presents for each other. Not surprising, we bumped into each other in the only Dollar Store in the mall…
After a nice lunch of pasta and provisioning at the supermarket, we tried to get a cab back to the Yacht Club. Eagle Taxis said that it would be at least ½ hour before they could get there, so we decided to get one from a taxi rank. After asking around, we were directed down the road to the “Taxis”, which turned out to be the local minibuses - I don’t think so. We tried asking again for the taxi rank, but it seems that there is none.
One of the security guards said that he’d get a cab for us and stopped a dodgy looking black guy in a dodgy looking car, who didn’t have a clue where we wanted to go and wanted to charge us more than Eagle Taxis - I don’t think so… We lugged our heavy shopping bags back to the mall entrance, called Eagle Taxis and only had to wait 20 minutes.
The yacht club was open when we arrived back and we were astonished to be given a Christmas Bouquet that had been sent from the UK by our son Brett and his wife Tasha. Glenys was so overwhelmed that she shed a few tears. It put us in the Christmas spirit, so back at the boat, Glenys dug out the Christmas decorations and plugged Christmas songs into the stereo.
The yacht club bar was open in the evening and they lit a braai, so all the yachties turned up and we had a good evening making new friends. We met a few boats briefly in Durban, but most are new to us. There’s a huge mixture of nationalities - German, French, Spanish, Dutch, USA & Israel. Each country celebrates Christmas in a slightly different way, so it will be interesting time.
23 December 2017 East London, South Africa
Graham from the yacht club organised a fuel run. Eight or so people took him up on the offer and we all jammed into 2 pickup trucks with our 30+ jerry cans. We were taken to a truck refuelling station, where the pump attendants were totally unfazed by us all piling out of the pickups - they’ve obviously seen it before. We were back at the marina within an hour - a great service from the yacht club.
The yacht club is very friendly and eager to help their international visitors. They have plenty of fore-aft trot moorings, which most of the fleet have picked up. After the fuel run, they took two separate groups of cruisers off to the nearby supermarket and had eight huge sacks of wood delivered to make sure that we would be able to Braai over the Christmas period when they are closed.
A spring had broken in our aft heads door lock, so I brushed up on my Metallurgy and made a new one. I used a spring from a clothes peg, first heating it up to glowing red and letting it cool down slowly - this tempers the steel and makes it very malleable. I was then able to bend the steel wire into the shape that I wanted.
The next stage was to re-harden the steel, which is done by heating the spring up to cherry red and plunging it into water. This makes it hard, but also very brittle, so I needed to temper it back to be slightly more malleable. I cleaned up the surface of the metal, so that I could see shiny steel and then reheated the spring slowly until the surface went a straw colour and then blue. I then let it cool naturally which gave me a strong spring. It took a couple of attempts, but I soon had a working lock again.
It rained in the afternoon, so everyone hunkered down and the planned Braai was cancelled.
24 December 2017 East London, South Africa
Most of the Cruisers here are European - French, German and Dutch. In Britain, we open our presents on Christmas Day morning, but Christmas Eve is the big day for most Europeans, so a party has been organised for the evening, with tomorrow being a family day.
We chilled out for most of the day and, in the afternoon, we got together with Dirk from “Peregrine” and Antoine from “Toomai” to play a little guitar music, which was fun.
The party was good, chatting to people and slowly getting drunk. We lit a barbecue and had the inevitable Braai. Glenys took along a bottle of Rhum Arrangé, which she had made from 70 proof sugar cane rum bought in La Reunion. Several other cruisers also brought Rhum Arrangé, so there was plenty to drink…
25 December 2017 East London, South Africa
Unsurprisingly, we were nursing slight hangovers this morning. After breakfast, we opened our presents. Both of us had bought the other some Biltong – South Africans love this dried meat, but after trying it again, we’re not too keen. The rest of the presents were fun little toys and gimmicks - ever tried a Finger Fidget? I bought Glenys a “Growing Egg”, which you put in water and it hatches after 24 hours - goodness knows what’s in it… Glenys broke her 200 Rands (£10) budget by buying me a pair of stretchy jeans for the next time that we go horse riding.
Apart from being away from our family, it was a perfect Christmas Day – Roast Lamb with all the trimmings for our Christmas Dinner; a nice bottle of wine; an afternoon nap and then a James Bond movie with mince pies and port.
26 December 2017 East London, South Africa
We chilled out on Boxing Day. Glenys’s “growing egg” hatched a yellow and green Chicken. It’s made from some strange rubbery plastic which carries on expanding if you leave it soaking in water – it’s weird, would probably give a child nightmares and I suspect is highly toxic.
Some of the yachts left to go down to Port Elizabeth – 120 miles away. There’s a short patch of strong south-west wind coming in tomorrow evening and the fleet hope to beat it to Port Elizabeth. We don’t particularly want to go to Port Elizabeth, because it’s reputed to be a dirty commercial port, so we’re waiting until the 28th. This should definitely get us to Mossel Bay and there’s a chance that we might be able to carry onto Cape Town.
This coast is proving to be very tough to sail. We’re told that the weather windows this year are unusually small, so perhaps we should have taken every opportunity to gain a few miles instead of waiting for a longer window.
We were ready to leave Richards Bay on the 4th December and 22 days later, we’re still only half way to Cape Town. However, to put it in perspective, the distance from Richards Bay to Cape Town is 950 miles – which is the distance from the UK to Gibraltar.
27 December 2017 East London, South Africa
Glenys was suffering from Cabin Fever, so we went to the East London Museum, which was surprisingly good. Their star attraction is the first Coelacanth to be discovered, which is stuffed and on display.
The primitive-looking coelacanth (pronounced SEEL-uh-kanth) was thought to have gone extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But its discovery in 1938 by an East London Museum curator on a local fishing trawler fascinated the world and ignited a debate about how this bizarre lobe-finned fish fits into the evolution of land animals.
There are only two known species of coelacanths: one that lives off the south-east coast Africa, and one found in the waters off Sulawesi, Indonesia. Many scientists believe that the unique characteristics of the coelacanth represent an early step in the evolution of fish to terrestrial four-legged animals like amphibians.
Coelacanths are elusive, deep-sea creatures, living in depths up to 2,300 feet below the surface. They can be huge, reaching 6.5 feet or more and weighing 198 pounds. Scientists estimate they can live up to 60 years or more.
The most striking feature of this "living fossil" is its paired lobe fins that extend away from its body like legs and move in an alternating pattern, like a trotting horse. Other unique characteristics include a hinged joint in the skull which allows the fish to widen its mouth for large prey; an oil-filled tube, called a notochord, which serves as a backbone; thick scales common only to extinct fish; and an electro-sensory rostral organ in its snout likely used to detect prey.
The museum also houses the world’s only intact Dodo egg; a huge shell collection; a maritime section with photos and models documenting two hundred years of the East London port; a large collection of stuffed animals, birds and fish; and a large collection of Xhosa beadwork. There was so much to look at that we spent four hours there – not bad for 15 Rands (£0.75) each (pensioner’s rates, of course). They even have a pleasant little cafe where we had a nice toasted sandwich.
We called a cab to take us to a supermarket to do our last minute provisioning before we leave tomorrow. In the evening, the remaining cruisers organised a Braai at the Yacht Club - we all leave for Mossel Bay tomorrow.
28 December 2017 East London to Mossel Bay (Day 1)
We had a last check of the weather forecast and there’s still a large window, which will get us to Mossel Bay, but it’s (once again) closed up and isn’t big enough for us to sail around Cape Agulhas. The next strong SW hits Mossel Bay on the night of Sunday 31st. It’s 320 miles and even if we only average 5 knots, it will take us 64 hours, so there’s plenty of time.
We struggled with a dilemma about precisely when to leave East London. The wind in the morning was forecast to be SW 10-15 knots, which will give horrible choppy on-the-nose conditions, but as the day progresses, it should gradually back, so that by 05:00 tomorrow morning it will be ENE15 – much better for sailing.
However, if we leave early tomorrow morning, we’ll have a great start to the passage, but we’ll have less of a safety margin if the south-wester comes in early. We decided to hedge our bets and head out at 17:00, aiming to arrive at 05:00 on Sunday morning, which is an average of 5.3 knots and still gives us a 20 hour safety margin.
I had a major panic this morning. The display on my laptop started to judder, indicating a hardware problem with the lead or the display itself. I don’t think that there’s any problem with the display driver circuit because it works fine when I plugged the laptop into our TV projector. My laptop is now totally unusable, which is a major problem because it’s our main navigation system, interfacing with our AIS and satellite phone.
Fortunately, Glenys has a small netbook, so I spent the morning backing up the data from my laptop and transferring our navigation programs to the netbook. Once again, the fiddliest part was setting up the email and satellite phone, so that we can get weather forecasts while on passage, but by lunch time I had a working system. I’ll have to get the laptop repaired in Cape Town.
Clearing out was very easy. The yacht club gave us a single form to fill in, which we took to the Port Police. We walked up some steep steps just outside the yacht club security barrier and then over the railway bridge. The police station is just under the bridge on the right, but you have to walk 100 metres up the hill and right into the port. A nice policewoman took a copy of our form, faxed it to Port Control and we were finished.
After a nap for a couple of hours, we dropped our mooring lines at 16:00 and called Port Control, who asked us to wait around for 15 minutes because a huge oil tanker was moving out of port with another ship waiting to come in.
Outside the harbour, the rolling 1 metre swell coming from the south-west was topped by irritating wind waves coming from the south kicked up by a South 8-10 knot wind blowing against the one knot current coming from the north-east. We motored SSW keeping the wind and wind waves at 30 degrees off our port bow, trying to head out to find a stronger current - it was unpleasant.
At the 100 metre contour, we hit a counter current, so I headed more south, out to sea, aiming for the 200m contour. Our SOG dropped to 3.5 knots for an hour, but miraculously, at the 200 metre contour, we picked up a 3 knot favourable current and off we went. During my 7-10 watch, the wind remained at 8-10 knots slowly backing, but not enough to sail.
By midnight, the wind had picked up to 15 knots from our port quarter, but the waves became even more confused and we had to wait another hour until the wind had picked up some more, causing the waves to come from behind us and allowing us to sail. Gradually over my 1-4 watch, the wind picked up to 25 knots, so we were surfing along at 7.5 knots boat speed – 11.5 knots over the ground aided by a 4 knot push from the Agulhas current. It was a little too exciting, so after an hour, I rolled away the mainsail and we continued with only the genoa, still making 5.5 to 6.5 knots boat speed.
29 December 2017 East London to Mossel Bay (Day 2)
At 08:00, we were 25 miles SSE of Port Elizabeth, having sailed 128 miles in 15 hours – for us a record average speed of 8.5 knots. By this time, the wind had backed so that it was directly behind us and the sea was very confused, making it very, very rolly.
I suspect that the sea was chaotic because we were going over a deep ocean trough, which drops down to 2000 metres. I think that it’s a place where the colder waters are brought up to the surface causing the water to be turbulent. These rising waters also bring up plankton and nutrients attracting fish, evident by the thousands of gannets in the area, at times aggregating into flocks of hundreds dive-bombing shoals of fish. I’ve not seen so much birdlife since New Zealand.
As we passed Port Elizabeth, we turned west and moved out of the Agulhas Current into 100 metre deep water, where the current dropped to 1 knot. The weather forecast is still for the south-west winds to hit Mossel Bay on the evening of Sunday 31st, so we had loads of time and just continued without a main sail despite the wind dropping slightly.
After lunch, the wind picked up to ESE 25 and the waves increased to 3 metres, so we surfed and rolled downwind all afternoon. However, we made very good time and at 19:00, we only had 125 miles to go, so we’ll arrive tomorrow afternoon.
As we gradually head south, the sun is setting later - tonight it was still light at 20:00. Another thing that is very noticeable is that it’s damn cold - long trousers, socks and a jacket are needed when in the cockpit, especially at night.
Using our satellite phone, I emailed Mossel Bay Marina who told us that there are still no berths or moorings available, mostly because it’s the middle of the Christmas holidays. Mossel Bay is a very popular holiday resort – the moorings are all in use by locals until February. We’ll have to anchor outside the harbour in a place which is only barely protected from the SE, so we might have a bouncy 24 hours until the wind switches to the south-west. I spent most of the night worrying about it.
At our 04:00 watch change, the wind started to decrease and back to the east, so we pulled out the mainsail to port and switched the spinnaker pole out to starboard. By the time that we’d finished this 20 minute operation, the wind had died completely, so we started motoring.
30 December 2017 East London to Mossel Bay (Day 3)
By dawn, the wind had picked up to 8 knots from the north-west - dead on the nose and no good for sailing. I downloaded a GRIB file via our sat phone and discovered that a small low pressure area has developed off the coast at Mossel Bay. It’s going to head east and the wind should be about 10 knots backing to the East by this evening. The strong south-westerly system will still arrive tomorrow afternoon.
While I was receiving our weather emails, I also received an email from Mossel Bay Marina, who tell me that they now have a berth available for us until the 2nd January. This is great news and I emailed them back immediately confirming the berth, which is a walk-on pontoon inside the harbour. I love being able to send and receive emails while at sea.
Glenys had two sightings of whales. She only saw the blow, so we have no idea what species they were. A little later, just south of Dalglish Bank, we had several sightings of Cape Fur Seals, which were drifting about on the surface, having a rest. We weren’t sure what they were at first because all that we saw were a few fins sticking up out of the water, but as we got closer they raised their heads, before disappearing below the waves.
The wind was a little fickle, but allowed us to do a few hours sailing. We sailed close to “Peregrine” and took some photos of Dirk and Gretchen while under canvas. At the entrance to Mossel Bay Harbour, we called Port Control on Ch12 and they gave us permission to go to the Yacht Club walk-on moorings.
We were soon tied up on the rather rickety pontoons. There’s an information box on the jetty, which has maps and information about Mossel Bay and also a temporary Membership card to get us in and out of the port gates.
Other boats who arrived called up Port Control, asked for a berth alongside and were directed to a concrete quay used by fishing boats at 34°10.723S 022°08.832E. After a shower and tidy up, we went for a walk. There’s some pretty heavy security at the gate out of the port, but once out, you are in Tourist Land with small restaurants and bars along the sea front quay – they were all packed with holidaymakers.
The Yacht Club is at the end of the quay and again has some heavy security. It was very busy with club members enjoying a Saturday Braai. We had a beer at the bar and discovered that there’s a party on New Year’s Eve with the inevitable Braai, so we’ll probably do that. By this time, we were feeling a little tired, so we retired back to the boat for a quiet meal and an early night.
31 December 2017 Mossel Bay, South Africa
We walked around the port around to see the Port Captain and other boats on fishing boat quay. Despite being inside the port, there’s another security gate at the end of the quay, where we had to breathe into a breathalyser before being allowed onto the dock. The fishing boat crewmen are not allowed onto the dock if they fail the breathalyser test. The guard lady told us that if yachties fail the test, they get escorted to their boats by a guard, but I suspect that’s discretionary. Being New Year’s Eve, I’m glad that we’re in the marina, where we’re not breathalysed…
The Port Controller told us to come back on the 2nd January and gave us a blank “Flight Plan” document to complete. Nothing else was done – it’s obviously a lot more relaxed once you get away from Richards Bay and Durban.
After doing some food shopping and lugging it back to the boat, we went for a walk along Marsh Street, which is the town’s main street. This is the first town that we’ve visited that has some kind of town centre – although it’s quite open and spread out.
We walked a couple of kilometres to the Cape St Blaize, which is very touristy with hotels, guest houses and restaurants. There are several campsites which were heaving with people all jammed in together – we’ve been told that it’s an annual pilgrimage down from Johannesburg. There are rock pools with hundreds of people swimming in the cold water and the smell of chips and fried food was overwhelming.
On the headland, underneath the lighthouse, we found a large cave, which was used as shelter by prehistoric man. I found this information:
The Portuguese Bartholomew Diaz was the very first European that set foot on (South) African soil – in 1488 at Munro beach Mossel Bay. Afterwards, the Cape was named in 1497 by Vasco da Gama, another explorer. He arrived in Mossel Bay on the day of St Blaize. The well known Cave at the Point in Mossel Bay was then named the St Blaize Cave.
In 1810 there was evidence found that the Cave had been inhabited by hunter-gatherers who ate mostly shellfish. It was only in 1888 that Sir George Leith excavated and found conclusively that the shell middens had been left by pre-colonial inhabitants. There was evidence of Middle Stone Age occupation below the middens. Recent excavations at other sites in the vicinity by Prof Marean of the Institute of Human Origins at the University of Arizona, found evidence going back 160,000 years.
After a quick look at the cave, we followed the path which becomes the St. Blaize Trail, which is a 13.5 km trail that follows the 30 metre contour along the cliffs westwards. We didn’t have the motivation to do the whole trail, but walked a few kilometres along the impressive cliffs and then back.
All restaurants at the Point were very busy, so we wombled back to the port and had fish & chips on a red London bus – well, we’re on holiday. The locals in the Yacht Club say that these are the best fish & chips in South Africa - very tasty.
We went back to the boat and chilled out before stepping out for the New Year’s celebrations. We ate at a beach-side Braai restaurant, which produced a huge plate of spare ribs – we shared one after our excesses at lunchtime. We then went to the Yacht club, but most people had set up their own Braais and appeared to be huddled in family groups, so we didn’t intrude. Instead, we had a leisurely beer and retired back to the boat to watch a movie. There were a few fireworks at midnight, but nothing to write home about.
There are more photos in our Photo Album section.
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