Monday September 26th. Odds & Sods

For the next days we will be hanging around Durban waiting for a favourable weather window for the leg down to Cape Town, a topic that figures in most of the conversations we have these days. So here are a few odd paragraphs to fill the time. The photos folder has some corresponding pictures.

Our guide, driver and fixer for the last week was Greg Garsons. He made all the arrangements, did all the driving, gave 80% of the talks on the places we got to and dealt with all the issues along the way. There is no way we would have been able to put something like this together for ourselves. We really did get to "Peep behind The Curtain" of this amazing country. Here's to you Greg.
http://www.garsons.co.za/

There is a picture in the folder of the small, tatty, sorta-kinda-like punt that was cobbled together by a local boat tech. A laser like hull, a solar panel, an electric trolling motor a couple of batteries and you have a workable stand-on runabout. I think this idea, with a couple of racks for jerry cans and groceries, would make a fine fine way to ditch the dingies-with-outboards, which are a bit of a production to use, to get around anchorages. Drop it over the side, step on and off you go.

Today was fix the niggles on the boat day. We started with a list and did a lot of stuff that wasn't on the list. Zeke had fun adding those to the list so he could then cross 'em off.

We have a couple human albatrosses in our midst, solo sailors who just go round and round. One is Chris Swallow from the UK on a 39ft beneteau. He was part of BPO fleet for a while. He has been here for a week and is itching to get going on his next leg from here to Cape Verde, 5,800 miles. The other is Web Chiles, the sailors among you may recognise the name. He has been at this for decades and has five or six solo circumnavigations under his belt. He arrived here directly from northern Australia, about 6,000 miles, in his flush decked 24ft boat described by a wag among us as a sailing submarine. Previously he rounded Cape Horn in an 18ft open boat, a Drascombe Lugger (You are reading this Chris, right?).  He has written extensively about his travels, http://www.inthepresentsea.com .

A small egret or ibis like bird has been hanging around the marina. The water is
full of fish and he likes to lower his head over the side to snag 'em. It is a bit of a stretch and sometimes he falls in.

There are a lot of catamarans here, power and sail. One of the cat's has what I assume is an electrical hydrogenerator  of impressive proportions. Another stretches the concept of a double hull by adding a second mast, so two main sails, two roller furled jibs/Genoa's, and a lot more than twice the amount of standing rigging. I went to take a look at it and think it's a bit of a dog's dinner. If you saw it on the water you'd likely mistake it for a seaborne electricity pylon.

Half a mile down the waterfront, The Victoria Embankment, there is a tidy little maritime museum. It does a nice job of covering the broad history of maritime activity here, including whaling activity. They have a few magnificent builders' models of the liner's and freighters that served the country. In their dock they have a steam tug built in Glasgow. Its engine room has two open crankcase three cylinder engines that are a wonder to behold. Its boiler room, with nine oil fired boilers, must have been hell on earth despite having huge ventilation fans. Moored alongside was a 1957  Camper & Nicholsons minesweeper painted battleship grey and built of wood. It is a shame that both are rotting on their moorings and neither look like they will last much longer.

Some things shouldn't be so hard. Nano sized sim cards are as scarce as hen's teeth. Some cell services work sometimes. Though I can receive cell calls from the US, I can't place calls; CellPhoneCo is working on it. (That said, the geographic coverage here is impressive.) We can't get our propane tanks filled, there are no adapters for their US fittings. "Yes we can replace those deep cycle batteries" means "I haven't a clue". After about two flawless decades one of my email addresses is on the fritz. Evidently I have to get onto my DNS registrar's site to tweak the Rackspace MX record entries; yup I'm in the middle of freaking Africa and I have my two factor authentication credentials Right Here.

The weather has been unrelentingly dreary, and will continue to be. It guess it is driving my North American compadres nuts; Americans, with the possible exception of folks from the Pacific Northwest, seem to unable to put up with a month's continuous rainfall without going loopy.

Yesterday brought one day's glorious relief so our tour guide Greg scooped us up to witness the Zulus dance: good weather is a prerequisite otherwise you get to witness Zulu mud wrestling, which might also have been entertaining. It was pretty good and the call &  response singing brought the blues to mind. We were also shown around a  reptile zoo housing an collection of a couple of dozen snakes species including Boomslang, Black Mamba, small Anacodas and a whopper of a python weighing in at over 100lbs. A good collection of crocodiles ended with a 95 year male of truly disturbing dimensions and his 48 year old mate; they remain a profile breeding pair. We took the scenic route back, and most scenic it was - a jaunt through The Valley Of A Thousand Hills, home to fancy enclaves and modest township style housing that share the extensive valley with the Inanda reservoir. We collected his daughter Emma, just back from London, and partner Sue and showed them over the boats. He rewarded this imposition on their time with a bottle of Three Ships whisky for each of the three boats, which will ease the nighttime watches as we round The Cape.

Saturday, September 24th. Mandela, Drakensberg and Ardsmore

When we left Rawdons the fog was thick, and the trees were dripping. A short drive brought us to the Mandela capture site and museum and the iconic silhouette sculpture installed there. The serious atmosphere of the place was dispelled by a horde of garrulous school children, scrubbed and uniformed, skipping and babbling through the place. I have never waved to and greeted so many people in such a short time. I had seen pictures of the sculpture memorial though it has a lot more impact in the flesh. It is set away from the current temporary museum, a good 200 yards walk, so you have time to think as you approach it. The silhouette is a profile of Mandela, about 30ft by 25ft,  that can only be seen from just one particular marked spot, and you have to get your position just right. The museum itself was informative and very moving in parts.

An afternoon's drive brought us up into the Drakensberg mountains to the Giants Castle lodge set in a world heritage site wildlife reserve. We spent all our time in a single valley which perhaps can be described as a large Scottish glen with baboons. Rounded hills covered in course grass, occasional groves of indigenous trees, a small babbling river running along a wide valley floor, cloud on the the higher hilltops. At 4,500ft elevation it was cool and a pleasure to walk through. The park is known for eland, though they eluded us, and vultures which were numerous and easy to spot. The lodge, like Hluhlwe, was a main building surrounded by numerous thatched cottages.  I was taken aback to find we had a wood burning stove whose metal flue went up through the thatch.

The attraction here, other than the scenery, are cave paintings done by the Khoi San Bushmen, a tribe of diminutive stone age hunter gatherers who lived in the area until the end of 19th century. Their descendants now live in the Kalahari and Namibia. A park ranger gave a thorough talk on the paintings and the current thinking about their meaning plus a tongue knotting demonstration of the Clicks and Tsks of a Khoi San dialect. A British regiment was stationed in the valley in the late 19th century to stop the bushmen taking domestic cattle and their bullet marks are easily seen on the painting walls. The bushmen included a depiction of this event in the paintings and I have to wonder if this is the only place in the world where modern men, English soldiers, are shown in a stone age man's paintings.

Back on the road we headed out of the hills down to visit the Ardmore Ceramics centre. Now I am no particular aficionado of the arts and wasn't relishing the prospect of an afternoon with derivative renderings of mugs, bowls animals and human figurines. I was stopped cold to find work that is dazzling in its vibrant creativity, execution and finish. It was started in the middle 80's by Fee Halstead to foster the work of Zulu artists and has since grown to an extent that must wildly exceed what she hoped for. Dozens of artists have worked here, most starting from nothing and coming from deeply impoverished backgrounds.  The Aids/HIV epidemic has claimed the lives of many of the artists and their work has been used to raise awareness of the disease and new work has addressed it directly. One piece, that I was unable to get a decent photograph of, presents a nightmarish depiction of the disease. Ardmore has of course been discovered by the art world and has a world wide reputation. Their website does a fairly poor job of presenting the breadth of their work. You will find some here http://www.ardmoreceramics.co.za/buy/ardmore-ceramic-art, with other examples scattered across the site. A Google search yields a generous result, select the "images" results. I've added my few pictures to the web folder including picture of the "Aids Monster" lifted from the web. The unpainted pieces were works in progress.

Late afternoon found us back at the marina in Durban and me in dire need of a pot of tea. In the last eight days we have driven over 1,000 miles and have mingled with people from the poorest townships to wealthy enclaves and there is one overarching impression that I have to write large, particularly given this country's woeful history, remarkable transition, poor reputation and undoubtedly grave problems.   Everywhere, without a single exception, we have all been welcomed with disarming friendliness, freely offered. From the gritty city streets of Durban, to the rude hovels surrounding Gandhi's home site, to our rural stops for lunch, to the staff and guides of the lodges, to the downtown hotel in the coal town of Dundee, to the unlikely country house that is Rawdon's to the rarified atmosphere at Ardmore. The reception has been the same from the Zulu Africans to the Indian Hindu's, to the Muslims, to the descendants of British, Dutch and German colonials. It is sobering and stands in stark contrast to what I find the US and Britain.

Friday September 23rd. Photographs and video.

I've reorganised my inadequate pictures and added a few.

This LinkToPictures should get you there.

Wednesday September 21st. Off to meet Judi Dench's Sister

We spent the morning in the iMfolozi half of the game reserve, generally lower Savannah land. Today was hot and dry and it reminded me of the interior of Spain or Majorca. There is lots of budding greenery after the recent rain which brings out the wildlife to graze. We saw far too much to write up, but the highlights were giraffe, right at the road side, towering above us and moving with a languid sashay. We got close to rhino, buffalo, impala and miscellaneous other small antelope varieties, monkeys, gibbon, warthogs, elephant, grouse, eagles, vultures - it reads like a punch-list and creates the impression of teeming hordes of life. It wasn't like that at all. If you looked out over the veldt at any given moment it would seem vast, empty and arid, covered variously with low scrub, grassland and trees struggling back into life. The river gullies are a riot of jungly growth, including tangled growths of palm. Usually you can spot solitary of groups of wildlife off in the distance, but it is difficult for these old eyes to spot.  

In retrospect the strongest impression left on me was the breathtaking wide open spaces of rolling hills stretching as far as you can see. The air is wondrously clear and sweet to breathe in deeply. The silence is profound and pervasive and not much broken by birdsong. Sundown brings haze and shadows, the ranks of hills thrown into sharp relief out to the horizon. It is just magic and tragic when you see it surrounded by the march of big agriculture with it's huge timber and cane plantations and the spread of scruffy village sprawl with free roaming herds of cattle and goats. Wishing for the unenclosed African past is clearly futile and sentimental, but something precious and irreplaceable seems as good as lost to the march of progress.

Onward.

Most the day was taken up with a bum numbing  140 mile drive, stretched over eight hours, up to Dundee. We stopped for lunch at a cafe in Melmoth and continued on. Twenty miles out one of us remembered they had left their cameras at the café. As we pulled over and groaned the prospect of a forty mile detour, a pick up truck pulled front of us. Out jumped the café owner with cameras in hand, an impressive kindness and for me emblematic of the friendliness we have found everywhere in South Africa. We arrived in Dundee about an hour before sundown and checked into the Royal Hotel Country Inn. The hotel is a real throwback, established in 1886, it is filled with colonial war memorabilia from African, British and Dutch sources; all authentic we are assured. Our rooms are set around a small open courtyard filled with flowering plants dominated by the heavy scent of Jasmine. I'd defy anyone to resist having a gin and tonic there, while wondering when someone will show up to help remove your cavalry boots. The place is run by Motz Bezuidenhout, but you would swear she is Judy Dench's long lost twin sister.

For a rather good selection of wildlife pictures, take a look at Zeke's blog

https://zekethesailor.net/2016/09/21/wildlife/

Monday September 20th, On the road again.

Up the motorway/highway,  160 miles to St Lucia, the country looks like England's Kent, without the traffic and with the occasional palm tree. The rain adds to the feeling of familiarity. From a distance the sugar cane looks like corn, the extensive eucalyptus plantings do not look exotic. I have to make an effort to remind myself I am in Africa. The clues are there though. People hailing taxis on the highway, pedestrians on the hard shoulder (breakdown lane), workers riding in the open backs of large dump trucks, small rustic farmsteads, the exotic Zulu place names (Pongola, kwaMbonambi,   kwaMsani, Ntambanana), on one stretch a couple of dozen roadside stands peddling pineapples.

The side road to St Lucia presents a more compelling African scene. Rambling villages of small houses, goats and cattle roaming around, pedestrians everywhere, walking along the road side and appearing out of the bush from narrow tracks, children of all ages making their way home from school all immaculately turned out in in school uniforms.

St Lucia itself is a small tourist town. Souvenir shops, beach gear, a dozen firms offering safari tours, a burger joint and the firms offering jaunts up the estuary to commune with hippo's and crocodiles, which was what we had come for. Off we went on an oversized pontoon boat up the very muddy waters of the estuary several tens of kilometers long. In recent years the rain has been lacking and the water level in the estuary has dropped a couple of feet so it is now cut off from the sea by a barrier beach. It is now more of a fresh water lake than a salt water estuary. The mangos swamps have dried and large banks of reeds line the bank. The hippo's live in family groups and there are plenty of them; groups huddled around in the water, lolling about on the banks and one active group who eyed us with great suspicion and agitation. They are dangerous and account for very many deaths a year.

The crocodiles were thin on the ground, and do not grow to any impressive size. The few we saw were more cute than terrifying though we were told there are many more of them in the lake than hippo's and that they keep themselves concealed.

Hippo's and crocodiles now crossed off the list, we headed inland to the HluHluwe - iMfolozi wilderness park. HluHluwe defies pronounciation, and is usually rendered something like "shoosh-looway". The oldest game reserve in the country, it covers some 370 square miles of unmolested, uninhabited land. This was the Africa I had come hoping to glimpse. The country we saw is hilly and covered alternately in light scrub on the higher ground and dense undergrowth in the hollows and river valleys. It is very scenic and not wide open flat savannah grass land at all.  The wildlife is unavoidably Right There. On the few miles of paved road to the lodge where we are staying for a couple of nights we saw White Rhino, Zebra, Wart Hogs a pair of lionesses, Buffalo and various impala, antelope and the like. The rather swish lodge is set on a hilltop and offers stupendous views over the country. Frome here we set out out for a three hour tour in the ubiquitous Toyota trucks fitted out with a rack of bleacher seats, added elephants to our haul and got a much closer look at the animals. We were fortunate to be shown around by the head guide, he has been at this for thirty years, was an inexhaustible fount of expertise and possessed eagle eyes; on our way back to the lodge he stopped to point out a chameleon in a tree, we were less than four feet from it and I could spot it at all.

Nighttime brought a moonless sky filled with stars, the southern cross and milky way clearly visible. As we drove we swept the land with search lights and sniffed the fragrant night air. Eyes shone back at us and plenty of wild life was on the move. It is early spring here, and we are a couple of thousand feet above sea level the evening air was pretty cool.

Tuesday had us rested and up for a trip to a big cat rehabilitation centre. A night in a soft and immobile bed was most welcome. The cat centre exists to breed four species of cat for re-release into the wild. The population is split into the permanently captive breeding stock, which we get to see, and the offspring bred for release which are kept separated from human contact as much as possible. The high point was getting to stroke a full grown cheetah, who deigned to put up with us. It is not something you get to do everyday. The smaller cats, ranging from housecat size to mountain lion size, were lovely to behold and very interesting to learn about.

Back at the lodge I got to spend sometime catching up on the blog on the hilltop veranda looking out over the reserve. Basking in the cool breezes and warm sunshine soon brought on a nap.

A less than awesome connection here, so photos to follow.

Saturday, September 17th Durban

Today we escaped our yachtie's compound for a guided tour of Durban's surroundings. Durban itself is a good sized city, vibrant but it gives the impression of impending decay. There is plenty of life on the streets and from the waterfront you see a familiar high rise skyline, but get up close and you see fading glory. Most of the business and commerce seems to have moved out to the suburb of Umhlanga, of which more anon.

Five of us piled into a minivan and headed forty miles out of town to kwaDukuza to visit Shaka's grave. Shaka, or more properly Shaka kaSenzangakhona, is credited with establishing the Zulu nation in this part of South Eastern Africa in the early 1800's, around the time the colonizing Europeans started arriving in force. He was quite a character and his name, and his mother Nandi, are still held in high esteem. Next week is the anniversary of his assassination by two of his half brothers, an event marked by the attendance of hordes of Zulu dressed in traditional tribal garb. We are told you can't get near the place then. The site is a modest and tasteful park and museum set in the middle of a bustling small town which rather detracted from my ability to project myself back into the high veldt of two hundred years ago.

From there we took off to Groutville to visit the Albert Luthuli museum, most of  you are excused for thinking "who?" (Gary, you are not excused at all). Luthuli was a black African statesman and contemporary of Nelson Mandela who was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1960 but who was not allowed to leave the country to receive the prize. He was a staunchly anti-violence in the mold of Gandhi and in contrast to Mandela who sought a more robust response to violent oppression. Under mounting international pressure he was very grudgingly allowed to go to Oslo in 1961 to receive the prize. The USA piled on the shaming pressure in 1966 when Kennedy sent his brother Robert to visit Luthuli at his very modest village home.Today the museum homesite is still set amid a gritty township neighbourhood which I found far more appropriate than some spiffed up park setting.

Up next was Mohandas Gandhi's home site. Gandhi arrived in South Africa in response to a petition from Durban's ex-pat Indian population who sought some legal representation to counter the oppressive regime that had brought them in to cut sugarcane; the African population having declined to make themselves available for the work. Gandhi came from a very well heeled Indian family and  bought the 100 acre Phoenix Plantation for his homestead. At that time he was completely pro-British. Legend tells that his Damascene moment came when he was turfed out of his first class railway seat in Pietermaritzburg for "Riding The Railroad While Coloured". His wealth notwithstanding, the home site (reconstructed following it's destruction in 1985 during the death throes of Apartheid) is also a modest affair. He described it as a pleasant spot with a stream at the foot of the hillside teeming with fish. In the years since a very rough and ready township has grown up to surround it, the stream is now muddy and loaded with trash. I should note that this has been a very wet, windy and grey day. All the rivers we saw were muddy carried a heavy burden of trash. For all that I found it a very evocative spot to contemplate the history and the rain didn't detract from that one whit.

Up next was the site where Nelson Mandela went in 1994 to cast his first vote in the newly democratic and emancipated South Africa. The prospect of visiting this place did not excite me at all. Surely a place of only symbolic significance after all the hard fights had been hard won in places far more significant and poignant than this. I found myself in Ohlange Secondary School, aka the Zulu Christian Industrial School founded by John Dube, one of the founders of the ANC, in 1900. The story of the school is worth looking up and it continues to operate today though clearly it is struggling. Having cast his vote, Mandela walked to Dube's grave on the Ohlange property to report to Dube that Africa was now free. Now I don't know how this happened, but I found myself quite choked up by this experience, and even now, hours later as I write there is a lump in my throat. Even though I had no part in it, I remember well the my initial awareness of the Apartheid issue in South Africa, it's development and resolution. To stand there on this perhaps "after the fact" and perhaps "only symbolic" spot was profoundly moving.

Thursday September 15, Durban, almost.

The final approach to Durban was unexpectedly simple. No current to speak of, light winds though plenty of freight traffic. This is a large and busy port. Port traffic control told us to come in, but to stay out of the channel, so in we came hugging the wrong side of the channel markers with some trepidation to be met by a very large outbound freighter with tugs leaning hard against its sides to keeping it straight in the channel.

We found our slip in the marina, kindly provided by The Point Yacht Club. We were greeted by a club member with a bucket of iced German beers that slid down most satisfactorily. Said member, Ed, also acts as a guide for us to immigration and customs; all simple enough for us in the end though it has taken over 24 hours to get through it. It has been a Kafkaesque nightmare for another boat in our fleet, a husband whose wife has two children from a previous marriage in Slovakia. Recently enacted anti child trafficking laws required them to prove legal guardianship and they were looking for original notarized birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce certificates and a host of other documentation which a less scrupulous couple would have just cobbled together in PowerPoint and printed on store bought fancy bond paper and stamped with an official look stamp made locally. The English begetters of bureaucracy have a lot to answer for. Through all this Ed has been a model of patience, willing to do an unreasonable amount of running around on our behalf.

The folks in the yacht club have been super friendly and fortunately have a decent bar and cafe in addition to hot showers and the like. We have been a rather captive audience for them, but I can think of plenty of worse places to be stuck.

We have met with a tourist advisor who is putting together an itinerary for us  which should get us out for an edifying look around. The country's history over the past 200 years, and the more recent dissolution of Apartheid, looms large over most conversations we have had with white South Africans here, all of whom a quick to profess their deep attachment to this country.

So, a bit of a slow start, but very promising.

Link to photographs

I am still unable to post pictures within the blog.

I have put them up on a shared folder on the web here:

Link

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/777m1sl5uebzqey/AABaKPwzXV0e_WlXZC0LDhDja?dl=0

I am not able to annotate them, so you are in for a guessing game.

If they show in date or name sequence you may be able to figure out which ones are Mauritius, which are La Reunion and the crossing to Durban.

The scenery pictures are a very poor substitute for being there in person.

I have a couple of short video clips and panoramas that I will add, bandwidth willing.

Thursday, September 15th; Durban

Single picture test.

This just to see if I can post pictures now that I have a decent internet connection.

This from the lounge of the Point Yacht Club at 7:30 am. My body clock is so screwed up.

Wednesday, September 14. Approaching Durban

It is 3:45am. There is zero wind and we have lightning storms behind us and ahead of us. The currents are tricky, here one moment and gone the next. As I write, our course is 290 degrees and our heading is 325 degrees. We are fifty miles from Durban. There is not a breath of wind as we motor on.

We have been kept on our toes the last couple of days as conditions have ranged from "calm", to "rolling right along" to "OK, now you have our full attention". We have avoided anything like "downright perilous". At worst we may have seen the wind at 40 knots, though the anemometer at the masthead may have been fooled as the mast swayed back and forth; the low thirties is a better estimate of the maximum. Our top speed of was 14 knots as we ran down the face of a wave, but again a better estimate of our top speed  is 10-11 knots, which sounds glacial on land, but out here it feels pretty quick. Grand whooshes as we run down the face of a wave, seas breaking around us, broken water caught by the wind washing over us. In one memorable moment we went out into the cockpit to reduce sail. We were running along  the glassy trough between two waves, almost too high to see over, both having broken crests carried away by the wind. Being broadside to the waves is not the sort of place to be in a monohull, but the catamaran was as steady as you could wish for.

It is now 5:00am. The lighting has faded away it is flat calm and on we go, somewhat sideways, westward to the now looming lights of Durban.

Monday September 12, Plan B

The dragons that haunt this voyage are the currents and winds off the coast of East Africa, especially on this approach to Durban. The Agulhas current generally runs strongly to the southwest along the coast. When the wind blows with the current from the northeast the sailing is straightforward. When the wind blows against the current from the southwest conditions can be nasty, very nasty. The route from Durban to Capetown has a fearsome reputation. Researching it would give all but the foolhardy the willies.

Plan A was to head for a point about 200 miles northeastish of Durban anticipating that the current would carry us south as we sailed east. The risk in our trip is that when we left La Reunion (it seems so long ago) we couldn't get a remotely reliable weather forecast, so you pick a day that looks good for the next week and go, knowing that the trip takes more than a week and we will just have deal with what we find when we get there while hoping that the dragons are getting along that day.

According to our weather dude, there will be a nice southwesterly wind waiting for us as we close in on Durban, exactly not what we were not hoping for. Fortunately, we are told, the current will be very weak, around a half knot or so, so we should be good. Plan B then is to head a little south of Durban to ride in on the expected southwest wind unhindered by the weakened current. We expect to get to Durban in a couple of days. What we think we do know is that two days is a long time in forecasting the weather around here.

Sunday September 11th. Down to Business

By yesterday evening the wind had risen to 20 - 25 knots and the seas were building. It was a rough night in my hidey hole bunk up front. When I started my watch at 3:00am there was little change; a dark starless night, lumpy seas the boat lurching about the place. Sunrise brought daylight, heavy overcast and no sunshine. The shipping traffic had all melted away.

By midday the winds had strengthenend to between 20 - 30 knots and confused breaking seas all around, the waves around around 12 - 15 ft high and not much distance between them. A couple of freighters slid by, one bound for Singapore emerged like a grey ghost from the murk taking the weather in her stride.

Whereas it is nice to be out of the weather in the pilot house, it is not so comfortable and seems to exaggerate the boats irregular motion. I sat out in the cockpit for a while and watched our grey ghost slip by. It was pleasant, if blustery,  and more comfortable than being inside. It reminded me of my trip across that Atlantic many years ago with a stiff wind on the quarter and Loujaine going like a bat out of hell with a human hand on the helm. This boat has hydraulic steering which gives zero feedback to the helm. The auto pilot keeps the boat with +/-30 degrees of our course.

Saturday September 10th, The Opposite of Yee Haw.

Lat 27 26.23S
Lon 42 26.16E

And then the wind died.

The seas quieted away until were were left lolling about on glassy seas in the fading swells. Down came the sails, and on came the port side engine; it is so nice to be able to choose between two engines.

I hit the sack and came back up on watch at 3:00am to a damp and clammy night. Everything was dripping with condensation and before long my clothes were damp and clinging. The night sky above was clear but I could see nothing along the horizon. Sunrise was a dull ochre ball rising through the progressive pink haze wash that ringed the horizon. The colours worked their way through the spectrum as I looked higher into the inky blue/violet/black sky directly above. The dawn's canvas bleached away quickly enough to full daylight and it didn't take long to burn off the damp.

It is now midday and the engine drones on. (The two engines are set at the very back of the hulls and in truth are very quiet compared to every monohull I've been on.) The chart plotter still shows that we are surrounded by freighter traffic, but as we look out we are alone in our seven mile diameter bubble. We wouldn't know they were there except for the often inane babble on the radio.

We are well into the Mozambique channel in a steady southerly current. Our course over the ground is 280 degrees, our boat is heading at 303 degrees with about 420 n.miles to go our turn into Durban. It is all very quiet and calm.

Friday, September 9th. Yee-Haw

Lat 26.973S
Lon 44.6 58E

The winds continued to build through the night. From my bunk up front the racket from the seas and the riggging was deafening and I resorted to earplugs which helped, a lot. We were running under the smaller spinnaker and howling along, all the while I expected to be called to help shorten sail. That call came around 11:00pm and I came on deck to find 30 knot winds with the boat making 14 knots in the wave surges. We swapped out the spinnaker for the jib and even with no sails set we were humming along. Changing foresails on the foredeck of a heaving monohull at night in a lively sea is tricky business. On a catamaran it is a piece of cake, having all the room in the world on the trampoline strung forward between the two hulls.

It was a spectacularly pretty night with the half moon turning the seas to liquid silver and the air warm enough to be in shorts and T-shirts. From time to time I still have to pinch myself to remind me that I really am in the middle of the Indian Ocean and to be here on a shimmering night like this really was something special.

I came back up on watch at 3:00 am and we were making fine progress though the moon had set leaving a clear star filled night sky. At 5:00 am we rounded the southern tip of Madagascar and made our turn for our Durban waypoint which puts us close to Richards Bay. From there we expect to be washed south to Durban as we cross the Agulhas current or put into Richards Bay if we need refuge. We are about 550 miles from that point, so 750 miles to Durban.

Today is another lovely sunny day, about 85F and the breeze feels cool. Our instruments show that we are surround by freighter traffic, I can see over 30 within scanner range and it looks like a dodge'em car track, but only rarely can we actually see more than one at a time with our own eyes. The horizon is deceptively close when you are sea level.

Thursday September 8th. And what did we see? We saw the sea.

Lat 25.441S
Lon 47.862E
Around noon, by our increasingly inaccurate ships clock.

We have now settled into a routine. Galley duty and watches roll by. The sunrise and sunset creep later and later. Scanning the horizon we see little shipping though our chart plotter generally shows one or two freighters heading east or west. Looking at the chart plotter it can look crowded, stuck between a luff and a hard place, but our closest approach to a ship was just over a mile.

The winds have held steady at around 20 knots for the last 24 hours and the seas have built accordingly and now the going is lumpy. The bridge deck is regularly thumped by a wave passing under us, alarming the first dozen times and disturbing when you are trying to sleep.

The next main event is arrival at our way-point about 60 n.miles south of Madagascar, far enough off shore to avoid the the high seas that build in the shallower water. We should make that turn in about 24 hours then set a course for 200 n.miles ENE of Durban.

Wednesday, September 7th. En Route to Madagascar

It is now Wednesday afternoon and a picture perfect sailing day in the Indian Ocean, though a little more wind than our current 8 knots would not go amiss. The water here is about 2.5 miles deep. The sun is very hot and the wind is cool. We are running under sail and engine power to keep our speed respectable, and to make up on an electrical power deficit; at this low speed the wind generator and hydrogenerater can't keep up with demand from the autopilot's hydraulic  steering, multitudinous instruments and various small water pumps. We might even get a bit of hot water of it, which would be very welcome.

We have settled into a three four-hour watch system for the overnight sailing. My allotted place is 3:00am to 7:00am, not so different from my old part time job taking inventory very early every morning, though this place of work is a bit easier to take. I sleep easily enough, though my bunk is waaaaay up at the front of the port hull where the boat motion is exaggerated. When No Regrets drops off the front  of large swell and down into the trough I find myself airborne and happy that I have a pretty thick mattress beneath me. The others have let me use their bunks amidships when  they are on watch and that is a lot easier. 

We are now about 300 n.miles out from La Reunion with another 257 to go to our first turn about 60 n.miles south of Madagascar. From there we set a course that aims somewhere north of Durban that is estimated to bring us to Durban as we enter the strong southbound Agulhas current.

Tuesday September 6th 2016 Second day at sea.

On Sunday night the crew from the three boats, Luc, our amazing fixer and three other fellows who have helped us here, all met for a farewell dinner at a creperie in St Gilles, a pretty little fishing town about 25 minutes down the coast. I rode with Michel, a French Frenchman who retired here after a working life as a machine shop professor. He has a fully equipped shop at his house in the hills behind the port and had made some parts for another boat. He was very cheerful and chatty stretching my execrable school boy French well past its limits. He is 69, and about to move all his gear to Madagascar to start a new life and a new family with a new wife who is from there. He is very excited to be starting over and wants to establish a mechanics school. It was a fun night. Crepes have become like pizzas in that any goes. They're are proud of their local hard cider offerings, four or five varieties each offered in dry medium and sweet. Their idea of dry is my idea of sweet, Woodpecker with extra sugar, but the tastes are delicate and lovely.

Monday morning saw us up early, at sunrise, getting ready to leave. An hour later we were re-watered, de-trashed, untied and on our way into a gorgeous sunny morning. The ocean swells showed up quickly, the wind blew around 10 knots and we were rolling along at an amazing 8 knots. For a few miles out the swells which curved around both sides of the island got back together making for a lumpy uncomfortable sea. The wind would rise to 20 odd knots and fall back to 10. It took a while get clear of the island's influence on the wind and waves. By dark things were settled and we were on our way.

As I write this on Tuesday morning it is overcast. We have around 15 knots winds, shortened main, a screecher up front and 6 knots speed. We are not inclined to trim things strictly given the winds variability; this set up will allow the wind to change direction and come and go without having to change things.

The screecher sail is peculiar to catamarans, though it looks like a Genoa to me. Given a cat's beam it can be sheeted well out without needing whisker poles and the like. The wind is currently on our quarter. If it comes further aft and looks steady we will swop it for the spinnaker,  which is also flown without a pole. Cat's are weird.

Onward.

Sunday September 4th 2016. La Fournaise

Today we headed south to meet our guide Ivan in his home town of Le Tampon. We had the now usual climb up from the coastal plane through the cane fields then unexpectedly lightly wooded pastoral grassland. Cows, sheep, hay bales, pungent farmyards and so on. It could have Constable’s England and certainly Vermont.

On and up to a national forest of evergreens, dense and dark.

Up again to  what I can only describe as heath land; endless moors of low growth that should have been heather, and then we landed on Mars. The road dropped down to what appeared to a Billiard table flat red plain. No growth at all, and a couple of miles wide and crossed by a dead straight dirt road carrying a few cars, each streaming a tail of dust in the wind. It was eerie, and struck us all the same way. Graffiti proclaiming “Matt Damon was here” would not have been out of place. I stopped to collect a sample - it was all volcanic cinder globules around a quarter of an inch diameter.

On again we went on up to La Fournaise volcano, the only active volcano on the island which last erupted, fairly calmly, in 2007. We parked on the rim of the caldera that rises about 500 feet above a relatively flat basalt floor. It is a few miles in diameter, and opens on one side to the sea. The active bit is a geologically new cone set within this older caldera. The rim rises a modest 500 feet or so above the floor. Also on the floor is  a very cool 150 year old cinder cone maybe thirty feet high and a couple of hundred feet across the base. As volcanic features go, it is as cute as they come. We hiked a goat path down to the floor and climbed all over it, then tackled the inevitable panting crawl back up to the rim.

We stopped for lunch at what can only be described as a greasy spoon restaurant for lunch filled with locals. A broad menu offered hot and robust choices. Goat masala got the most votes, though some of us settled for the pork version. It took a while to get out of there as said locals wanted to know who all these anglos were and telling our story took a while. It was very sociable and welcoming.

A quick dash back to the boat to clear customs for an early departure tomorrow, impressive that Les Douanes came to us, and on a Sunday too.

Our Weather Walla has told us the outlook could not be better and that we should leave for Durban as soon as we can.

And so, to borrow a line from Lord Of The Rings’ Thorin, “Now is the time for Bilbo to perform the service for which he was included in our company; now is the time for him to earn his Reward”

I’ll be back online in a couple of weeks. Hopefully with some pictures.

Saturday September 3rd. Cirque de Marfate

Today was a quick run out to the Cirque de Mafate caldera and back.

After yesterday's excursion, the climb up several thousand feet above the cloud base, through countless switchbacks is becoming passe. First through the villages, then the sugar cane fields, into the national forest (grassy forest floor and achingly pretty groves of fairytale trees laced with picnic benches where you could eat your last supper and die contented), emerging above the treeline into highland scrub, densely populated by luxurious gorse, of all things. It looked just like Wales without the rain. And the howling wind.  And the sheep. And you could see forever out over the coatal plain across Indian Ocean. And it was warm and sunny. And the open air cafe served great coffee and was not jam packed with lads from Manchester in dripping cagoules thawing out in a tobacco laden fug that you could cut with a knife. It wasn't like Wales at all, but it does have a lot of gorse.

A short hike up from the car brought us to a precipice overlooking the yawning abyss that is the caldera. Yesterday we were beaten to a dizzy pulp by the drive into and through the Cilaos Caldera. Today we stood on the rim above the Mafate caldera, on the edge of a vertical cliff that plunged thousands of feet to the floor and looking across its miles wide length and breadth.

Mere hyperbole can't capture this any better than any of our photographs. It was awe inspiring. The view fills your entire field of vision. Several thousand feet below, the caldera floor is a broken tangled mass of peaks and spires and valleys and gorges and ravines. It accessible only by foot, but there are clusters of hostels, huts and tiny hamlets spread across it. It must be a murderous walk in and grueling hike through. It was marvellous just to sit in the long silence of the high clear air and drink it all in.

A tourist helicopter buzzed my perch shattering my reverie and I turned to leave. The visceral reality of the vision began to fade as soon as I put one foot in front of the other.

Friday Sept 2nd. La Reunion

Today was tour the island day. Two hours into this I was prepared to write about a day of minor frustrations with rental cars, driving licenses and traffic. Now at the end of the day that has all faded into utter irrelevance. Ile del la Reunion is a jaw droppingly spectacular place and I am told we haven't seen the half of it.

We headed down the coast to St Louis, a multi ethnic melting pot. A good sized town of narrow streets filled with shops and busy with traffic, it is not a tourist town at all. We headed inland to Cilaos, and if you are inclined to, you will be rewarded by checking it out. It is about 10 miles from St Louis to Cilaos as the crow flies. It is about 23 miles miles by the shortest road route. The town sits in a volcanic caldera at 4,000ft above sea level, the rim of the caldera rises to about 10,000 feet. The road runs through the most vertiginous country I have been in. In places the view from the road shows a mountain wall miles long and thousands of feet high almost completely vertical and covered in vegetation. The road is a riot of switchbacks, both up and down. Most are barely two lanes and often single lane. The hairpin turns are tight and mostly taken in first gear. 

There are a handful of bare rock wall, single lane tunnels that feel very tight in our modest European rental car. If you arrive at the entrance, you go through. If there is traffic approaching you, you wait. It works well enough, usually. The area is well served by buses and we saw heavy construction trucks. How they survive a career negotiating these goat path roads is beyond me.

The scenery is jaw droppingly spectacular from the get-go. The run in from St Louis is up a wide River valley canyon with walls towering above you. The river bed is a couple of hundred feet wide and rock strewn. Though generally fairly dry, these islands are known for prodigious bouts of rainfall the record being 73" in 24 hours in 1952.

The further you go, the better it gets. My vocabulary of superlatives didn't last long and I gave in to raw wonder.

Cilaos is a decent sized spa town of around 6,000 souls that grew up on hot springs, the visitors being carried in by porters before there were roads. It is one of three calderas that are linked by hiking routes, multiday affairs that are served by hostels that provide dinner bed and breakfast. The hostels are still provisioned by porters. Our guide, Ivan, has hiked extensively and we met another sailor who came for the hiking.

I am intensely annoyed that I am still unable to post pictures. I'll figure something out before we leave here. Google images has better images mine, and wikipedia has a decent write up of the island.

Our weather chap tells us that Monday is a particularly propitious day for departure, so we are back to prepping the boat, the larder and ourselves.