Maldives – Here we come!
My friends and crew, Laith and Bernard, and I seem to have settled into our routine quite easily. It’s only really been disturbed by Laith’s bout of seasickness a couple of nights back, but that was no great drama as Bernard and I split the missed watches.
The main routine is dictated by our night watch system – three x three-hour blocks from 9 pm to 6 am. I’ve got the middle one tonight – my least favourite, as it splits the sleep up too much. It’s much easier with three onboard compared to two. We maintain watches during the day but are more casual about the timing so long as one of us is on watch and we all do roughly the same time.
We are now making good progress. We spend the daylight hours planning and eating meals, trying to understand the weather and solving the world’s ills. I’m not sure that we will have them all covered in just two weeks, but we’ll see what we can do.
We are still going on fresh food. We will run out of fresh fruit and veggies soon and will have to rely on limes stuffed in the necks of Corona bottles to ward off scurvy. We have also caught a couple of tuna who have been content to supplement our protein intake. A lovely looking Dorado was ‘the one that got away’.
We did laundry yesterday (Bernard and I) and today (Laith). The fabric softener in seawater trick seems to work well, requiring a small-ish amount of freshwater for the final rinse. The starboard side (with easy, kayak-free access) looks like a Chinese laundry now.
As I write this, we have about fifteen knots of breeze from the North. It’s completely contrary to every weather forecast we have. The forecasts say one-to-two knots, so I shan’t complain.
4 April 2009
The wind has been a bit fickle the last few days, but since this morning we have been making reasonable progress south, about 200 NM off the west coast of India.
We continue to see scores of flying fish, as they scatter out of the way as we approach. The ones we’re accustomed to seeing up and down the coast of Dubai only really jump out of the water, but the ones we’ve seen pretty much since leaving Fujairah have much longer ‘wings’, and actually flap them periodically to stay above the water. I’ve seen some energetic individuals scoot along above the surface for more than fifty meters.
I’ve been surprised to see birds so far off the coast too. A few days back a strikingly marked bird fluttered around the boat, checked us out, then drifted off. He looked a bit exhausted and like he didn’t really belong so far from the coast. He had very well defined blue and black stripes and a long beak. Laith reckons he’s a relative of the woodpecker family.
We’ve had distant encounters with whales, and close encounters with tuna, the latter being enjoyed on the plate in more and more imaginative ways.
We were given a fantastic performance by the local dolphins this morning. I’m not entirely certain, but I believe they were working up a fish-ball, where they work as a team to confuse the fish into a tight group and then voilà… its breakfast time! These guys were really jumping to make a splash, not like the refined sea-world type jumps when they’re just plain old showing off. It’s always struck me that when you see dolphins in the open ocean they always seem to be going somewhere with some determination. Some of the dolphins we’ve seen earlier in the trip looked more like they were loitering around, but these ones this morning had a real sense of porpoise (sorry!)
5 April 2009
The total distance of the first part of this trip is about 1,700 NM. That’s about 200 NM from Dubai to Fujairah and about 1,500 NM from Fujairah to The Maldives. We topped up the diesel tanks in Fujairah and started with enough fuel to motor for about six days or 800 NM. That means that the wind must provide the balance of power…
We’ve had a real mixed bag on the weather. The last few days have alternated between motoring in the sweltering stillness and brisk but normally short-lived stints of cool sailing.
As we left Ras Al Hadd, two days out from Fujairah, our desired course and the wind direction meant that we tacked just short of the point to sail away from the coast in a perpendicular direction. At the time, it felt like we really hadn’t jumped off ‘the edge’ (as the name Ras al Hadd roughly translates) but after a few hours of building winds and seas, we were in no doubt that the vastness of the Indian Ocean lays ahead. We’d just reefed in when a wave broke over the cockpit, drenching Bernard and Laith. Luckily I was behind the spray dodger, so remained dry. So we stashed away any remaining loose stuff, and put the wet cushions etc aside for later drying! We reefed in some more- and we were still touching seven knots boat speed with just a scrap of sail up!! Aroha was handling like a champion, straight like a train on rails. I was just afraid that something else was going to go ‘pop’ like the furling drum did the first day out from Dubai. I’ve had enough fun on the foredeck for one voyage.
I think I’ve learnt as much about Aroha in the last two weeks as I have in the last two years. I guess it’s because once you’ve made the decision to leave, you just have to face whatever conditions are thrown at you. I never imagined that she could clock seven knots of boat speed with so little sail up. I also didn’t know she could sail so well in light airs- on a casual jaunt up or down the coast from Dubai, we never used to bother with the sails if the wind was less than about ten knots!
We’re now about 420 NM from our destination at Uligamu, North Maldives, with enough fuel for about 250 NM. The last few days we’ve been getting ‘sail-able’ breeze for about ten hours per day, so I think we’ll do just fine. We’ve already taken a sweepstake on our arrival time… all of us betting on Wednesday…
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