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.

Wednesday August 31st - La Reunion

August 31st.

We arrived at La Reunion shortly after sunrise. Most of the trip was a bit of a ride. Winds between 25 and 30 knots 12 - 18ft swells coming almost broadside. No Regrets was all over the place, so no lashing the tiller and falling asleep leaving the boat to sail itself. The saving grace was the autopilot which did a good job of keeping us on course but there was still a lot of motion and the seas slapping the bottom of the bridge deck between the two hulls would have scared me to death at times but Zeke didn't bat an eye lid, so hey-ho and on we go.

Despite all that it was a lovely clear night. No moon, clear skies full of stars,  It really is something special to be carried along over the open ocean under a hemispherical night sky with lots of wind and a lively sea. We raised the main with a couple of reefs and let her run. By daylight we had passed Tahawus and had been in touch with port traffic control.

Entry formalities were straightforward if protracted due to an out break of Foot and Mouth disease among the Island's live stock. All foodstuffs from Mauritius were confiscated to be burned. Boats that provisioned in Port Louis for the trip on to Africa lost a significant amount.

We expect be here for just under a week waiting for a favorable weather window for the next leg to Durban, about 1,640 miles as the plane flies, rather more around the south of Madagascar. We have a professional weather guy on hand to help plan the route, but forecasts are unreliable ten days out, which is very roughly when we will approach Durban and cross the Agulhas current.

Our satellite tracker is on, so you should be able to follow he board's progress here
http://cornellsailing.com/sail-the-odyssey/blue-planet-odyssey/follow-the-rally/track-the-boats/

Sorry about the lack of photographs. the internet  connections are few and far between and of limited bandwidth. I'll work on it.

Monday August 29th -Black River to Port Louis

Sunday August 28th. - Preparation
We spent Sunday getting ready to move the boat from Black River to Port Louis, the Island's principal town. One of the boat's dagger boards had been left for repair having been damaged by an encounter with coral. We found it didn't fit in its slot and arranged to have it shaved down. We spent the rest of the day getting in some basic provisions, getting familiar with the boat and trying to find wifi. The weather is unsettled, wavering from cool, sunny and calm to very windy, fogged in and rainy. These wet and episodes evidently known to the locals as God's Sneezes.

Monday August 29 relocate to Port Louis

We refitted the Dagger board, replaced a fuel tank sensor, removed a bird's nest from the roller furling gear and headed out through the gap in the coral into open water for the twenty mile run up to Port Louis.

It was wonderful. Plenty of good wind. Glorious and sunny alternating with cloudy wet and chilly. Low ocean swells running under us.

God's Sneezes pushed us along under jib only. It was a novel experience for me to be in a strong breeze on a sail boat that stayed level. A monohull would be over on its ear with the crew wedged in place.

The island is is very pretty from the water. Craggy mountains rising steeply about 2,000 feet from the generally level landscape.

Port Louis is a good sized industrial port. Large docks cranes, container ships, rusted fishing boats, large warehouses and grain terminals. The tourist basin is pretty full, most of us rafted out from the concrete wharf. Our sailing compatriots are all here, now just three boats; Maggie, Tahawus and ourselves No Regrets. We gathered for drinks. Zeke happy to see old pals, Nora & I happy to meet new ones.

Tuesday August 30th depart Port Louis for La Reunion.

The three boats  decided to head out around noon for the overnight leg to La Reunion. A midday departure intended to get us into La Reunion in.  daylight. Zeke headed out to deal with customs and immigration, Nora and I to see the town. The town is busy busy busy. There are police directing traffic everywhere you look, in fact there are police everywhere you look. The city itself is a mix of Tourist-Resort Modern, pretty quiet in the morning, Fairly Modern Business District, with plenty of local and international banks, Colonial Holdovers with plenty of charm even if does evoke the Colonial era. Around this inner core there is a vibrant local business district packed with small shops, traffic, street vendors that is pretty shabby. We ran across old and historic mosque tiled and bright inside with lovely woodwork.

The unexpected highlight were the markets and  old arcades. One very makeshift with stalls cobbled together with found materials. We tried to buy a bite to eat, but the vendor could not make change for a 500 Rupee note, a modest amount, less than twenty US dollars. There was also a large produce market in an older building where the goods on display were immaculate and displayed with great care. We picked up some samosas from a street vendor and got a coffee before heading back to the boat.

Zeke was back and not so happy after yet another encounter with officialdom. Not only are the rules and procedures different in every country, but they are different every day of the week. It was all sorted out in the end, as it always is but it does waste your time and suck out your humor and energy.

We all managed to leave around noon and as I write this we are three hours gone under partial clouds, moderate winds, running diagonally into the swells, which give a weird boat motion in a catamaran. 15 knot winds just forward of the beam have us sailing at around 6 knots with just the jib set.  we are proceeding at a leisurely pace. We have spotted our first whales. The overnight watch system is agreed at four hours - which is fairly long but much easier to manage given the enclosed pilot house, completely sheltered from the weather. The auto pilot takes good care of the steering duties.

Tahawus is beginning to disappear over horizon, Maggie is bring up the rear of our fleet of three. So we are on our way for real. So far, so good.

Mauritius

THE JOURNEY OUT

Boston's Logan airport was a zoo. Overrun with a diverse group of characters heading off to Asia and the Middle East, it is easy to imagine them in costume and fitting right into the Games of thrones.

The flight was packed. I weep for the fish that gave it's life for my supper. It was sorely abused by the Food Excellence Quality Process that rendered it an inedible brick. A poor woman behind me very noisily lost her lunch when the sensation of sitting upright did not square with the view through the window that told her the plane was cranked over on its ear affording a fine view of the Bosphorus far below. 

The approach to Istanbul showed a city that stretches as far as the eye can see. Ranks of concrete high-rises mixed in with battalion formations of four-decker apartment buildings. I regret that I didn't venture out for a look around the old city.  The prospect of three hour  security  lines and a very jumpy security force got the better of my sense of adventure. The airport itself makes Logan look like a hick backwater.

Mauritius is a good sized tourist resort island. At 780 square miles it is roughly three times the size of Anglesey (for my anglo readers), about three quarters the size of Rhode Island (for my American pals) and a whole lot bigger than Inishmore (For my sole reader in the Aran Islands). For those of you who inhabit the Realm of the Internet, far removed from the venal planes of mere national politics, it comes out at about 7.0439e+8 square smoots.

We are presently camped in a resort marina, where the choices seem to be swimming, eating or cleaning the boat. The weather is temperate and the breeze is soothing. It's nice. You would like it here. Nora, the third crew, member arrived yesterday and had the boat re-booted and aired out. We hope to push off in a day or two for La Réunion, about 100 miles southwest of Mauritius.

March, 2016

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:

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.

If you can stand to read more, there is an subscribe-by-email below. If you are up on these things, you can also get a feed through your RSS reader.

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