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.
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