Another bad night’s sleep, not dropping off for nearly two hours then waking up an hour before I am due to go on watch. I have three large commercial vessels to contend with as well. Two look as though they are going to collide with each other until I blow up the schematic on the PC and can see they are actually about a mile away from each other. The third one, according to AIS, the Bow Panther, a very large tanker is coming almost directly for us and will cross our path between 1.5 and 0.2 miles away. Once I have their name I call them and am immediately answered by a very polite officer who says they will change course to give us a wider berth. Why can’t they all be this nice?
When he gets up and wanders outside, Mike notices a couple of dragon flies resting on the boat. They must have got blown here – what a long way from land.
Photo: An exhausted dragonfly takes a rest
In the night I heard a clank but thought it was something inside the boat that had fallen over. However, Mike discovers a cotter pin from one of the fittings which hold the batons on the mail sail to the mast. The split pin holding it together has broken and he goes out to put a new one in while the sea is relatively calm. I help by watching so that I know if he falls overboard.
Photo: There’s always something to fix
I go back to bed to try and catch up on my sleep but once again I give up and suddenly Mike has a tearful and frustrated wife crying onto his tee shirt. He persuades me to take something to knock myself out which I do and the next thing I know it’s gone 2 pm and I feel more rested than I have done for days. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that there is a weather front moving in across the area between us and Richards Bay, bringing northerly gale force winds. When these blow across the notorious Agulhas Current, they will whip up some really high seas and Mike feels it is too risky to contemplate crossing on the course he has already plotted.
He feeds me some delicious bread he has made and while he ponders an alternative (the unattractive alternative at this point is stringing out our huge hurricane lines from the back of the boat as a kind of sea anchor and hanging out at sea for an extra day) I drift off back to sleep until around 4 pm then let him sleep for a couple of hours.
There is chat on the SSB about how to handle the weather situation. David from Voyageur is of the opinion that going directly west to get to the coast of South Africa as quickly as possible then going south in shallower water is a safer alternative and Mike agrees with him. Dick on Tucanon also agrees. They all decide to wait until the weather forecast tomorrow morning to make a decision.
Just before dark we notice a swallow flying around the boat. This tiny bird is obviously exhausted and wants to land. Amazingly he flies into the salon by mistake and is just behind me when Mike yells to tell me he is there. He flies straight out again which I am thankful for as I don’t want to chase a terrified bird around as he tries to negotiate his way through a glass window like they normally do. He spends the evening perched on the helmsman’s seat. At least if he poops everywhere, it won’t be like the bloody great piles of albatross-like poop that we’ve had so far from other birds.
To ensure that I sleep again, I pop another pill. If this weather front comes through tomorrow, I will need to be as alert as I can be and that means sleep now.
Our position is: 28 deg 05 min S, 35 deg 48 min E
Distance so far: 17688 nautical miles
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