Latitude : 42.31816N
Longitude : 71.63867W
Some four years ago, 2012 or thereabouts,
a man approaching retirement was talking to his wife about his plans to sail
around the world. Evidently his wife scoffed at him saying “You’re not going to
sail around the world. You’re getting too old for that.”(*)
One outcome of this casual dismissal is that later this year, in August,
I will find myself cooling my heels in Istanbul for nine hours waiting for my
connecting flight to Mauritius where I will join this stung into action fellow
for one leg of his trip; Mauritius to Cabadelo in Brazil via the Cape of Good Hope, some 7,000 miles.
His voyage started in August 2014. Having bought a share of a catamaran with
two other fellows he met on the internet, they pulled out of Maine and headed
down the Eastern Seaboard of the US towards Key West to start the three year Blue
Planet Odyssey, a circumnavigation project with a
strong environmental theme. They ironed out the kinks in the boat and by
January 2015 had crossed Panama into the Pacific and have been wafting westward
ever since.
By the end of 2015 our traveller, Zeke Holland, was back in Maine for
Christmas and mentioned on his blog that he was looking for crew. I mentioned
this to Jeanie and I was taken aback when she said I should do it. So I wrote
to Zeke, who I hadn’t even met on the internet. Within a week or so emails were
exchanged, lunch was done and my ticket was in hand.
I now have six months to contemplate my folly.
Zeke’s rather good blog is here http://zekethesailor.net/
Here is the route overview:
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The stretch that I expect to be troublesome is the approach to Southern Africa and the hops down the east
coast from Durban to Cape Town.
The Agulhas Current
runs strongly down the east coast. The seas off the coast can be nasty when the
winds and current don’t play nicely together. If you click
here, you should get an animation of the current flows.
And if you click here, you should get an animation of the wind flows. If you follow
this over a few days you will likely see that the winds are very variable.
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I leave August 25th. We'll be in Mauritius for a day or so before heading off on the short hop to La Réunion where we will hang out waiting for a decent weather forecast.
(*) Decency dictates that I have to acknowledge that is is just one side of the story
