Excitement In The Night
One of the aspects of this type of cruising that I really enjoy is the planning… the preparation… the deciding where to go and when. It’s all fine and dandy being anchored off an island or in a local harbour, but I also enjoy the anticipation that goes with thinking about ‘moving on’ to the next stop.
We have a rough idea of which atolls and islands we want to visit, from talking to locals, Lonely Planet write-ups and a few scraps of information Helen’s found on the internet from other cruisers. When I originally applied for the Inter Atoll Cruising Permit, I was told I needed to list every single harbour we planned to visit. I spent hours researching and planning the perfect itinerary, but when the precious permit arrived it simply listed every major atoll between Addu and Male, so it was a pleasant surprise that we can be as spontaneous as we like.
A day or so before each departure the paper charts get spread out on the saloon table and the callipers are applied against the latitude to double-check passage lengths. We work on an average speed of about four or five knots, although we discovered last week that choppy seas and wind on the nose can easily halve that. We check the charts and different sources, and talk through ‘bolt holes’; alternative destinations, should making our original destination too tricky, or arrival not possible within daylight hours. We check the tides in Male and Gan; the closest tide stations on our chart plotter; and apply a wide margin of error to cover our guesswork. Aroha’s keel is 2.0 meters below the surface, although we normally aim for 3.0 meters depth so we have a bit of clearance for a missed clump of coral or some other depth anomaly. Both the paper and electronic charts lack detail – none of the local harbours we’ve stopped at are even shown on the charts! When we get close to a harbour, reef, channel, or something else under the water that could cause us grief, Helen keeps a watch from the pointy end of the boat while I drive. We communicate using our handheld VHFs on low power.
The most tricky aspect is getting in and out of harbours because of the spider web of ropes that the local boats use to moor and manoeuvre themselves in confined quarters. I often curse the locals when I see their ‘inconsiderate’ use of these lines but have to remind myself that it’s their harbour and their method that we have to adapt to. Besides, the local boats are built with long shallow keels, with a skeg hung rudder enclosing the single propeller. This arrangement gives them limited manoeuvrability at low speeds but when they want to cross a floating line, they simply power towards them, then cut the engine at the right time and glide over. Foolproof? Not quite; I’ve seen three boats catch lines in their props. The way to drive the dinghy in a harbour here is one hand on the throttle and one hand on the top of the engine cowling, ready to lift the engine and propeller clear of the water at the right moment to pass over the lines.
We have taken to following the fishing boats lead and mooring stern-to. This is the mooring method preferred in the Mediterranean, presumably because you can fit more charter yachts against a length of quay wall. The method is to reverse towards the wall (usually involving a fairly sharp three-point turn inside the harbour, whilst dodging the aforementioned ropes), drop the anchor about three boat lengths out, then secure a line from each aft quarter to the quay wall to form a Y-shaped arrangement. The locals are usually friendly enough to take and secure the stern lines and Alex winds them in onboard. The downside of parking with the cockpit facing the town quay is the loss of privacy as the locals often line the quay wall and stare across the few meters to the boat. It’s a pity – we spend a lot less time in the cockpit when moored stern-to, for fear of the shouted persistently repeated “how are you?” and “where do you come from?” questions, at around the time when we usually just want to put our feet up after a passage.
We are now anchored in the ‘old harbour’ at Nilandhoo. We first came into the new harbour on the top of the tide (to ensure maximum depth through the uncharted shallow channels), anchored in 2.6m of water and then calculated that the outgoing tide would lower this to about 1.6m. Call me old fashioned, but I believe it’s bad luck to anchor a two-meter deep boat in water that I could stand up in. A helpful local clambered on board and we came through another passage in the reef (later calculated at only 1.6m above chart datum!) (we will definitely be leaving this place on the top of the tide!) to the nearby old abandoned harbour. The harbour walls are falling in, but the breakwater itself is largely intact just below the high-water line and we have a big space to ourselves. A combination of clear water and a white sandy bottom gives this anchorage and surroundings the most incredible aquamarine colours.
24 Aug 2009
Helen woke me at about 3 am with a “Bryan!” that had more ‘curiosity’ in it than urgency. Half asleep, I stumbled up the steps to the cockpit to see the quay wall less than a meter off our starboard aft quarter – just the Avon dinghy (the world’s most expensive fender?!) holding us off. We’d moored stern-to and the anchor had dragged and resulted in us being carried back towards the concrete wall.
Our brains went into overdrive; how do we get out of this one? In our favour, the breeze was a moderate fourteen-ish knots, although on our side; the dingy tubes are underinflated (the temperature has dropped since I last inflated them); and it’s only an hour off the high tide.
I’m both surprised and impressed at how half-asleep brains can still engage. Helen surveyed the scene, dinghy, and anchor. I dashed below, opened the engine water cooling stopcock, turned on the engine starter battery, and grabbed life jackets (not that we really thought we’d need them for flotation – they make a handy place to clip the VHFs onto), torches, and handheld VHF radios.
Thirty seconds later we’d formulated a plan. We talked it through quickly but clearly: we’ll take the slack off the stern lines (to keep them away from the propeller), motor forward (releasing the stern lines again), bring up the anchor, re-anchor further out, then reverse towards the wall as we bring the stern lines in again, to make that Y-shaped mooring arrangement.
It all goes pretty much to plan but I can’t bring Aroha’s nose through the wind on her beam – a common problem with yachts of her design – the pointy end is the lightest, so catches the wind and moves with it. OK, a moment to gather our thoughts and work out another plan.
We drop the stern lines and go for the simpler solution of anchoring in the middle of the harbour. The stern lines get slipped on board – oops, I let go of the wrong end of the port side one, so I release the other end and abandon that for later collection.
Re-anchoring took three attempts. I was puzzled as to why our fancy-schmancy “new generation” Manson Supreme anchor from Downunder isn’t working. It turned out that a heavy-duty bag fouled the point of the anchor, stopping it from digging in. Helen threw that off and she bites (the anchor, not Helen). By now, the breeze had dropped to only about seven knots, so driving around in a shallow and dark harbour isn’t quite as exciting as it was half an hour before. Thankfully, we were just about on high tide (a whopping 2.9m!) while all this action was taking place. We knew the depth dropped off steeply near the broken down breakwater and so we stayed well clear of that side.
But there’s still a fair bit of adrenalin in our systems and we put the kettle on to bring us back down. By now it was 4 am. By four-thirty, a random mosquito decided to take a quick trip around our cabin; awake again. At 6 am a flock of black crows very vocally decide to compete for the top spot on the mast sampling the weather vane at the very top, the radar halfway up the mast and even a halyard rope as possible roosting spots. But at least the sun is up. The boat is in the same place we left her last night and for the first time in about six days, the sun is actually shining!
The kids slept through the whole episode and each one has at different times this morning asked, unaware of the excitement in the night, “why did we move?!” Well, at least they noticed!
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