Back in the Northern Hemisphere
We arrived back in Gan in Addu Atoll in the very south of the Maldives chain yesterday after just under three days passage back from Chagos. It was fairly smooth sailing overall, but the first 24 hours was not too much fun due to rolling seas on the aft quarter. We are now filling our faces on the treats we have been missing out on. Veggies are on the list but we confess so too are coke and fries!!
It seems strange being back in what we amuse ourselves by calling ‘civilisation’. Don’t get me wrong, the Maldives is a beautiful place, but it only caters for basic needs. That said, it really makes us think how we are so ‘over catered’ in the so-called real world. Sure, there are things we miss, but not so much we couldn’t do without. We had our first walk on tarmac yesterday after one month, which felt odd using certain leg muscles again. Oh!! And we shook hands with the Maldivian president! He was on an atoll tour and was ‘meeting and greeting’ on the street right next to the cafe where we were feeding our faces on cokes and fries!! The locals were saying the old president would not have done this kind of walk about so it was quite an event for them too. One of the president’s staff approached Bryan later and gave him a CD containing a couple of photos taken by his staff including Bryan and the president. However, given the goofy look on Bryan’s face and the comical plastic bag of bananas he’s holding, I don’t think it’ll be gracing the wall of the study.
We have motorbikes (OK, scooters) booked for this morning. Bryan is just making toast on the BBQ – one of his cravings that needed satisfying! We’ll leave Gan in about three days and will start our island-hopping tour of the Maldives up to the capital Male.
3 Aug 2009
We arrived in Foammulah Atoll yesterday at around 5pm, luckily just before sundown to be able to see our way into the island’s only harbour. Despite the name it’s not actually an atoll, but a solitary island. It has a population of around 10,000 and is approximately 5km long by 1km wide and as such is the single biggest island in the whole of the Maldives. It is also very fertile, producing many of its own fruit and vegetables. Though there is a beach around the whole island the reef that fringes it is narrow so is pounded by waves on all sides. In the past there was no real safe anchorage, but in 2003 a harbour was opened on the south corner of the island and this is where we are anchored now. It looked quite daunting entering with waves pounding the full stretch of the harbour wall. The swell decreased as we followed the bends of the harbour wall until we entered the calm of the inner harbour – although still occasionally dusted with sea spray of the waves pounding the outer harbour wall.
This was our first time entering a Maldivian commercial harbour. Thankfully ‘commercial’ in Maldives terms doesn’t mean too big, with the numerous tuna fishing boats and occasional supply boats roughly twice our length we don’t feel totally outside of our element. We’d bumped into Bryan’s friends Lisa and Dave a couple of months earlier in Gan. He knows them from his days in Jersey, when Dave taught Bryan one of his scuba qualifications – a small world or what!? They are frequent visitors to Foammulah on the liveaboard dive boat they now run and gave us some pointers including confirmation that it’s possible to anchor inside the harbour with sufficient room to swing. What we didn’t expect though was the challenge of navigating the anchor lines which the local boats string across the harbour. The boats moor against the inside quay wall but use anchors set across the harbour to keep the boats from banging against the wall. It was a good test to see if I was awake as we came in and I got quite a start when I spotted the first line in the fairly murky harbour water just as the rudder was about to pass over it! Oops!! We passed safely over that one and a number of others, putting the engine into neutral each time to minimise the mess if we did snag one, and anchored in the inner harbour.
This morning we set out to explore the island and all struggled a bit with the heat and the distance that we walked. We found a small restaurant for a lunch stop where we proceeded to be amused by the fact that most of what was offered on the menu was out of stock. We are only about thirty miles from the regional capital of Gan but the limited offerings from the restaurant made it seem much more remote. The biggest disappointment was the fact that the supply of fries had run out. You can imagine the distress that caused! On the way back we visited the island’s fruit and vegetable market and stocked up on salad supplies, some bananas and a locally grown papaya which we have been promised is very sweet and juicy. It’s very difficult to buy local fruit and vegetables as most Maldivians have their own gardens.
Tonight we will head to one of the island’s other restaurants (we think there are only about three anyway). We ate there last night and saw some tasty looking pizzas being served. The kids and Bryan have been craving them ever since. Tomorrow we set off for Huvadhoo atoll, about 50 miles north-west of here. We will leave mid-afternoon and then sail through the night with the aim of entering the atoll and anchoring the next morning. The trip will take us back past the equator so I will keep a keen eye out for the red line that marks the division of the northern and southern hemispheres!!
4 Aug 2009
Just before 10 pm we crossed back across the equator, nearly three months to the day that we last crossed heading south from Sri Lanka. Bryan offered the obligatory bottle of champagne in celebration, but at the time had changed course to sail along the equator line to show the track on the chart plotter. The only downside of this was that we were fighting against the swell on this new point of sail and I was struggling to keep my dinner down and thought it better to avoid turning the champagne into a champagne cocktail! Bryan was rather pleased with himself though for balancing the latitude numbers at 00 degrees 00 minutes, although occasional slipping off the equator meant that we ended up crossing it about eight times. As I got greener and greener I feebly asked “how much longer are we going to do this?” to which Bryan replies …“till we can show it on the blog”.
We had set off from Foamullah at 4 pm the previous afternoon with the intention of having an overnight sail and arriving at sunrise to enter the atoll. We actually made better speed setting out than we needed and arrived close to the atoll in the wee small hours of the morning. We would never consider entering an atoll in the darkness as the charts simply aren’t accurate enough to navigate by chart plotter alone and you need to navigate visually – eyeballing the local navigations aids such as sticks stuck into coral heads, or the reefs themselves. To make this atoll even more interesting, the navigational lights have absolutely no resemblance to those charted. We hove to (used the sails to keep us in a more or less stationary position) until the sun rose when we were able to motor into the atoll with a light breeze and good sunlight.
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