Madagascar to South Africa Day 3 – Shaken not stirred

We know we have to push hard to get to Inhambane on the Mozambique coast, our first planned shelter point en route to South Africa, by Wednesday evening when southerly winds are forecast. That means we have to work Adina as hard as we can. With the winds slowly picking up but not yet enough to reach our target speed with white sails we decided at 6am to get the spinnaker up. It’s been a long time since it was last hoisted in the Maldives but we made sure we briefed ourselves to avoid as many errors as possible. Susie manages the mast and cockpit while Tom plays on the wobbly board at the front of the boat otherwise known as the bow. Up it went and did a good job. Looking at the weather forecast we estimated it would be up for five hours before the winds would become too strong. Fortune was on our side and we stretched it out to eight hours.

Timing the spinnaker drop always involves some debate with us; Susie is the more sensible risk-averse, Tom tries to maximise its use. His theory being it’s him that pays the price if he pushes it too long into strengthening wind as he has to go on the wobbly board to get it down. When hoisted our parasailor has something that looks a lot like a witches hat sitting on top of it. It’s called a collar and is connected to a sock which you pull down around the sail. In parasailor promotional material they show somebody standing on the bow and effortlessly pulling it down, the sail glides in nice and easily. In reality Tom stands on the bow pulling like mad as Susie handles the lines to de-power the sail. Susie yesterday afternoon, “Do you ever get scared trying to get the parasailor down?”, Tom “No, I’m just damned determined it’s coming down.”

Life seemed good, the sun was shining, moderate sea state, blue, blue waters. It wasn’t to last.

With the winds moving to be right behind us it called for the dreaded goose-winging method of sailing. The main sail pinned to the one side and the big front sail, the genoa, pinned to the other side using a spinnaker pole. We’re becoming good at playing on the wobbly board getting it all set up. A few hours on and we had to swap the pole to the other side of the boat. The most temperamental piece of equipment on Adina has to be our electric genoa furler. In theory with the gentle push of a button you can furl it away. It can be a right princess; don’t time it right and the internal drive belt snaps. And in recent months it’s being powering itself on and off and sometimes just outright refusing to work. It has a magic black box of electrics to control it and even a back-up magic black box should the first one fail. By now the sea state was getting up and the bow had become a wobbly board on steroids. Said princess furler decided not to work. We checked the belt, tried swapping over to the back-up black magic box, we changed the circuit breaker. Alas nothing. So that means with a little handle we have to sit on the bow of the boat and bit-by-bit manually furl it away. Then we can swap the pole over and then we can manually unfurl the genoa. Just as we had completed the task, princess furler popped up her head and said hi, I’m back and working. Fickle, very fickle.

So goose-winging we rolled away and made steady progress.

Heading into the night the winds picked up and the seas picked up. By midnight the seas were decidedly grumpy, snarling and frothing. Adina’s stern would be lifted by a wave we’d surf down before quickly being picked up by the next wave. The waves were coming from different directions and Adina spiralled away, left to right, right to left, heeling over this way and that way with waves breaking away around us. It was simply unpleasant and trying to sleep with your body being thrown around is impossible. There are times you have to question what you are doing when on a Sunday evening you could be relaxing after a nice roast dinner with a good class of Cabernet or two.

On the positive side, our speed over ground average is up to 6.1 knots! Another day of winds ahead before they start to die on Tuesday and we’ll have to work hard to be in by Wednesday evening. There is a bail out point called Bazaruto on Tuesday and this will be our check point.

We’ll keep on pushing.