OCC Flying Fish 2023-2 by Ocean Cruising Club

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OCC officers

FOUNDED 1954

COMMODORE Simon Currin VICE COMMODORES Phil Heaton Fiona Jones REAR COMMODORES Zdenka Griswold Reg Barker REGIONAL REAR COMMODORES GREAT BRITAIN Carol Dutton IRELAND Alex Blackwell NW EUROPE Hans Hansell NE USA & ATLANTIC CANADA Janet Garnier & Henry DiPietro SE USA Doug Selden W COAST NORTH AMERICA Liza Copeland CALIFORNIA, MEXICO & HAWAII Jonathan Ganz SE AUSTRALIA Scot Wheelhouse NEW ZEALAND & SW PACIFIC Viki Moore SOUTH AFRICA John Franklin ROVING REAR COMMODORES Steve Brown, Guy Chester, Thierry Courvoisier, Andrew Curtain, Bill Heaton & Grace Arnison, Lars & Susanne Hellman, Jurriaan Kloek & Camila De Conto, Stuart & Anne Letton, Pam MacBrayne & Denis Moonan, Simon Phillips, Sarah & Phil Tadd, Rhys Walters

PAST COMMODORES 1954-1960 Humphrey Barton 1994-1998 1960-1968 Tim Heywood 1998-2002 1968-1975 Brian Stewart 2002-2006 1975-1982 Peter Carter-Ruck 2006-2009 1982-1988 John Foot 2009-2012 1988-1994 Mary Barton 2012-2016 ..2016-2019 Anne Hammick

Tony Vasey Mike Pocock Alan Taylor Martin Thomas Bill McLaren John Franklin

SECRETARY Rachelle Turk Tel: (UK) +44 20 7099 2678 Tel: (USA) +1 844 696 4480 e-mail: secretary@oceancruisingclub.org EDITOR, FLYING FISH Anne Hammick e-mail: flying.fish@oceancruisingclub.org OCC ADVERTISING Details page 204 OCC WEBSITE www.oceancruisingclub.org 1

CONTENTS

PAGE

Editorial Sailing Around Cape Horn Mentoring and the OCC Sending Submissions to Flying Fish East Greenland, At Last Row, Row, Row your Boat Using Satellite Imagery with OpenCPN Source of the Milky Blue Waters From the Archives:... The Ups and Downs of Sailing Exploring the Galapagos Preparing for the 2023 Clipper Race Book Reviews

3 5 17 23 24 33 47 57 71 80 92 97

An Atlantic Circuit in Iron Bark, Part 2 107 St Lucia to the Marquesas 129 Memories of Sailing to Ukraine 137 Finding our Way in Greenland 146 Book Reviews 159

Bengt in the South Seas 166 Caribbean Odyssey 175

Jeremy Bagshaw Julian Mounter Rev Bob Shepton Rob Barton Sherry & Dave McCampbell Jonathan & Rieka Flack Gwen Skinner Neil McCubbin Laura Hampton CCA Guide to the Viking Route, Living Through The Gale, The Good Stuff: Book 1, The Liferaft Survival Guide, The Deep Ocean, Reeds Astro Navigation Tables 2024 Trevor Robertson Tom Lawson Marjorie Robfogel Alex Mansfield & Angie Garz Cornell’s Ocean Atlas, North Africa, Blue Machine, The Adlard Coles Book of Baltic Cruising, The Hunter and the Gatherer Wim & Elisabeth Van Blaricum Richard Freeborn

Obituaries and Appreciations 189 Advertisers in Flying Fish 203 Advertising Opportunities 204

HEALTH WARNING The information in this publication is not to be used for navigation. It is largely anecdotal, while the views expressed are those of the individual contributors and are not necessarily shared or endorsed by the OCC or its members. The material in this journal may be inaccurate or out-of-date – you rely upon it at your own risk.

As I’m sure all OCC members are aware by now, the era of small-format, six-monthly Flying Fish comes to an end with this issue and from 2024 you will receive a single, somewhat larger issue each December, whether physically or electronically. Perhaps the change is overdue, as when Commodore Simon Currin consulted the membership in his August Commodore’s Letter some 85% of those who responded were in favour, an endorsement which surprised even me, and I suggested it! The new size – 240mm x 165mm, compared to the current 210mm x 148mm – was chosen as offering considerably more space on each page while not being so large as to be difficult to hold, carry or fit in an onboard bookshelf. Among its advantages will be the flexibility to print a few longer cruise accounts in their entirety, without either having to cut drastically or to split over two issues, neither an ideal solution. Trevor Robertson’s Atlantic Circuit In Iron Bark, Part 2 (the sequel to his North Atlantic Wanderings in Flying Fish 2022/2), which occupies pages 107 to 126, has given me an ideal opportunity to trial this approach – do send your feedback to flying.fish@oceancruisingclub.org flying.fish@oceancruisingclub.org. Could I stress, however, that such articles must, like Trevor’s, describe a challenging cruise covering considerable distance, take the reader to some out-of-the way places, and be illustrated by excellent and varied photographs. It is not a licence to waffle! In addition to Trevor’s contribution, what will you find in this issue? All the articles are really varied and interesting, of course, and traverse waters from the Black Sea to Chile, but the two which will probably stay with me the longest are Jeremy Bagshaw’s gripping account of Sailing Around Cape Horn in the 2022 Golden Globe Race and Rob Barton’s tale of rowing from Australia to Africa to raise money for charity. Flying Fish doesn’t receive nearly enough technical articles, but I’m quite sure the two in this issue – Using Satellite Imagery with OpenCPN by Sherry and Dave McCampbell and Alex Mansfield and Angie Garz’s Finding our Way in Greenland – will both be of real, practical assistance to members sailing in poorly-charted areas or in ice. Both use ‘compare and contrast’ photographs to illustrate their points and next year’s increased page size will allow such pictures to be reproduced noticeably larger. Finally, the DEADLINE! It’s obvious that an annual Flying Fish will only be feasible with the help and co-operation of members. Although the final, ultimate deadline remains 1st October, this assumes that the majority of articles will reach me much earlier than this. Most similar publications are put together by teams of people, but with Flying Fish it’s just me plus my indefatigable band of proof-readers, so the more we can get done ahead of schedule the better. In addition, an issue may close early if it becomes full. So don’t miss the boat – send me your article as soon as you’ve finished writing it! Anne Hammick, Editor Cover photo: Jeremy Bagshaw’s Olleanna sailing off Les Sables d’Olonne before the start of the 2022 Golden Globe Race – see Sailing Around Cape Horn: A Golden Globe Race participant’s perspective, page 5. Photo Jean-Luc Lhomond. 3

ADVERT 01

SAILING AROUND CAPE HORN: A Golden Globe Race Participant’s Perspective Jeremy Bagshaw (The original Golden Globe Race took place in 1968/9 and was won by Robin Knox-Johnston in his 32ft ketch Suhaili, the only one of its nine starters to complete the non-stop singlehanded circumnavigation stipulated in the rules. A 50th Anniversary race was announced for 2018 and attracted 18 entries, all sailing monohulls of between 32ft and 36ft and similar to those available in 1968/9. Except for safety equipment, no modern technology was allowed. Five yachts finished and there were several dramatic Southern Ocean rescues. A ‘Chichester’ class was introduced for those forced to stop once en route. Four years later the Golden Globe Race returned, this time with 16 starters of whom again just five finished. It was won by South African Kirsten Neuschäfer, the first time a woman had won such a race. Three of the finishers sailed non-stop while two, including Jeremy Bagshaw, made a single stop, in his case in Hobart, Tasmania to deal with a barnacle infestation and take on fresh water. A photo of Olleanna sailing off Les Sables d’Olonne taken by Jean-Luc Lhomond features on the cover of this issue.) I am a lifelong sailor, having been introduced to the sport by my father when I was six and, over years of competitive dinghy sailing, graduated from Optimists to Lasers and Fireballs. My first taste of offshore racing came when I was 22, crewing on a 33ft (10m) IOR racer in the 1985 South Atlantic Race from Cape Town to Punta Del Este in Uruguay. I then sailed the return delivery to Cape Town in the autumn with a short-handed crew. Jeremy Bagshaw sailing Olleanna in Table Bay, South Africa. Photo Eben Human

Later that year I did my first delivery as skipper, of a Farr 38 from the East Coast of South Africa to Mauritius, then skippered the race back from Mauritius to Durban. More recently I’ve won the Governor’s Cup Race from Cape Town to St Helena twice, once as skipper of an inexperienced crew of Saint Helenians and the second as co-skipper of a Farrier 31 trimaran, sailed double-handed. After selling my business in 2012 I decided to slow things down a bit, did some Indian Ocean cruising with my family and subsequently skippered many deliveries throughout the Indian Ocean, South Atlantic, Mediterranean, North Atlantic and Patagonia. I’ve recently started a rigging company with two friends. I came across Olleanna, a 1973-built OE32, in 2019 in the marina at the Royal Cape Yacht Club, where she was lying after being repaired following the capsize and dismasting she suffered 400 miles southwest of Cape Town when being sailed by Are Wiig in the 2018 Golden Globe Race. I purchased her and continued the refit before Covid delayed everything for a few months, but by late 2020 I was able to relaunch and start getting to grips with solo sailing. I day-sailed extensively in False Bay from my home club in Simon’s Town, but my first overnight passage alone began on 29th April 2022 when I set sail from Cape Town towards Falmouth, England. The twomonth delivery to Europe was an excellent learning experience that helped prepare me for the following nine months at sea. I suppose the competitive nature of racing is an inspiration in itself, but for me it was the rawness and beauty of the Southern Ocean, as partly experienced on a charter to Tierra del Fuego with Pelagic Expeditions in 2007, that was the catalyst for this Golden Globe Race venture. More on www.jeremybagshaw.com. As a member of the Ocean Cruising Club since 2014, I proudly flew the OCC burgee from Olleanna’s port spreader during the build-up weeks before the start of the 2022 Golden Globe Race. She is a 32ft full keel, heavy displacement, cutter-

OE32 interior layout and line drawing

Olleanna in Les Sables d’Olonne before the start. Photo Jean-Luc Lhomond rigged cruising boat designed in Sweden by Olle Enderlein and displacing around 6200 kg (6∙8 tons or 13,670 lbs). I received many comments on the burgee while alongside in Les Sables d’Olonne during the week before the race, where up to 15,000 very knowledgeable visitors per day walked the dock looking at the 16 entrants’ boats and chatting to the skippers. I must admit that there were a few jokers who commented on the fact that this was supposed to be a race and not a cruise!

The route took our fleet around the world from west to east via three of the Great Capes – Good Hope, Leeuwin and Horn – non-stop but with check points at Lanzarote, Cape Town and Hobart. This article does not aim to report on the whole race or to offer commentary on any aspect of it, merely to relate my own experiences and my observations of my competitors’ experiences of the westto-east rounding of the legendary Cape Horn and whether it is a feasible route for cruisers to follow in the course of an ordinary circumnavigation. All estimates Olleanna’s cockpit enclosure and spray dodger. Photo Jeremy Bagshaw 7

Jeremy and Olleanna prior to the start of the 2022 Golden Globe Race, 4th September 2022. All photos JeanLuc Lhomond

Jeremy on arrival at the control point in Table Bay, Cape Town. Photo Eben Human of wind speed, boat speed and wave heights are just that, estimates, as we were not permitted to have any electronics on board that would allow us to measure the conditions or our position, this being derived only by celestial methods and dead reckoning. The first of our fleet rounded the Cape on 18th February 2023 and the last of the seven entrants to pass the landmark did so on 4th April, giving quite a wide spread of seasons and an even larger spread of conditions which sadly resulted in the loss of one vessel, a Tradewind 35. Following a route that takes one around Cape Horn only becomes an option for those cruisers in the South Pacific who intend to spend time in Chilean or Argentine Patagonia, to visit the Antarctic Peninsula, or to transit to the South Atlantic and visit the sub-Antarctic islands of Falklands and South Georgia before continuing east or north.

The rules of the Golden Globe Race require participants to stay north of 47°S until they reach 115°W, then leave 50°S 90°W to port before turning in for the final run down to Cape Horn, which lies at 56°S and 67°13’W. These waypoints and limiting latitudes were not decided arbitrarily but were agreed between the race organisers and the various safety bodies representing the countries responsible for maritime safety in that stretch of ocean, namely the Chilean and New Zealand MRCCs. They serve as a good guideline as to what are regarded, after many years of data capture and hands-on experience, as the safer areas of a notoriously volatile piece of ocean. Of course no amount of historical data and forward planning can guarantee that those conditions will be experienced and, although the race organisers tried to pick a start date that would see most of the competitors transiting Cape Horn in the middle of the austral summer, as do all the around the world race organisers, the disparity in speed between the boats for reasons including boat design and the skipper’s skill, as well as environmental factors like barnacle infestation, resulted in the wide spread of dates for approaching the Horn. Ordinarily cruisers in this region would have access to weather information either through their own HF radio or Satcom equipment or via resources such as Passage Guardian Radio operated by Peter Mott from Christchurch, New Zealand (see https:// passageguardian.nz). In the case of the Golden Globe Race, entrants are restricted to HF Weatherfax, where available, and HF WMO weather forecasts read out over HF by volunteers such as Peter or the likes of Cape Town Radio operators. Race Management had a safety policy of advising competitors if there was a probability of them encountering a system in which they were likely to face winds of sustained 35 knots or more (force 8), and suggesting courses of action to minimise the risk. To the best of my knowledge, all of the seven skippers who rounded Cape Horn successfully received such advisory warnings – in fact I received two. The first was on 24th February and advised me to stay west of 120°W and not to cross that longitude before 0000 UTC the next day, due to a big depression in that area at around 1800 UTC, with strong northwest winds backing southwest and increasing. It was quite difficult to comply with this recommendation as it’s not easy to slow a boat down in the fresh conditions and large following seas that I was experiencing. Initially I furled and dropped all headsails and sailed under double-reefed mainsail alone, but that was still too fast so I doused the main and raised a storm jib to keep boat speed under 6 knots. At the time I estimated the wind at around 25 knots sustained in the northwest segment of the front, increasing to 35 knots as the southwest swing came through. The sea state, as noted in my log, was an estimated 4–6m from the northwest and west. The barometer dropped from 1009 millibars to 998 in three hours before eventually bottoming at 993, so I was aware that, at 46°30’S 121°W, I was quite close to the centre of the depression. The second safety warning I received was on 7th March when I was at 52°25’S 87°30’W. The warning advised me to stay north of 53°S for the following three days to avoid a severe storm passing further south. At the time I received the warning my barometer was reading 982 millibars and rising. In order to soak up some time and not progress too far east, as this would affect my angle of approach to Cape Horn, I experimented with deploying warps and recovering them and also heaving to under various sail configurations. For my troubles I was rewarded with some seriously 11

Olleanna’s interior. Photo Jeremy Bagshaw sore arm and back muscles from the recovery of 300m of warps of various diameters. While hove to, admittedly not very successfully, a massive wave which seemed to be a combined swell from southwest and northwest boarded Olleanna from abeam, smashing my spray dodger at the exact moment that I opened the companionway hatch to go out into the cockpit. Around one cubic metre of salty Pacific Ocean drenched my chart table and galley! (This estimate was based on the approximately six minutes it took the bilge pump to get rid of it!) The conditions at the time, as recalled from my logbook, were that the wind was from the northwest at an estimated 50 knots (force 10) with stronger gusts, and the barometer was at 991 millibars and rising. I still had two days to kill while waiting for the depression to pass south of me and, not wanting to make too much progress to the east, I again hove to under different sail configurations. I found that for my design of boat, with her full keel, keel-hung rudder and pronounced cutaway forefoot, the most effective way of heaving to was with a triple-reefed mainsail only. When the wind became too strong even for that sail area, Olleanna hove to quite effectively with no mainsail and only the bulk of the sail lashed to the boom providing the necessary drive. Admittedly the wind was in the constant 40+ knots (force 9) range. Late in the afternoon of 9th March I got a message from Race Management to say that they considered the worst of the system to be past me and I should be clear to resume my course for Cape Horn. With the wind still in the northwest I poled out my storm jib (flown on the inner forestay) with my purpose-built whisker pole, unrolled about a quarter of my yankee-cut genoa to leeward and started making very rapid progress in a breeze that had dropped to around 25 knots (force 6) on a rising barometer. I managed a decent six hours of exciting sailing in seas of around 6m before the barometer dropped from 994 to 990 millibars in two hours and the wind increased again to 35+ knots (force 8). I was unable to get a position fix as the massive seas made it difficult to get a clear horizon for a sun sight, not to mention the almost 100% cloud cover, but my dead reckoning position as noted in the logbook was 51°28’S 83°W. With the building wind backing into the west, I furled the genoa, gybed the storm jib and continued to surf towards the Horn, but now with a very uncomfortable and 12

disorganised sea. My Windpilot self-steering gear handled the conditions amazingly well and at no stage did I feel that I was needed on deck to steer, until at 1600 local time a huge cross-sea, presumably a combination of the leftover northwest swell and the building westerly swell, literally picked Olleanna up and threw her sideways, resulting in a knockdown to what felt like 75°. The masthead did not go underwater but a passing wave did knock the Windex out of shape! The plywood vane on my Windpilot was snapped like a twig, but that was remedied in minutes by fitting a replacement from the eight that I had in my spares locker. I immediately dropped my storm jib and proceeded for the next 22 hours under bare poles, making an estimated 5 knots in the right direction. The interior of the boat was almost unaffected as I had been in ‘storm mode’ for several days and all lockers and floorboards were well secured. What I had neglected to do, however, was to sponge out the dregs of water that had remained in the bilge after the previous day’s flooding, below the level of the float switch so not removed by the automatic bilge pump. It had combined with a bit of diesel that had escaped through a vent on the fuel tank and the resulting mixture spread across the cabin sole in a thin layer with all the grip of an ice rink! It is incredible how far a little diesel can spread, how difficult it is to clean up and how dangerous it makes even the most routine tasks. For a few days, until I had conditions that allowed me to do a proper cleanup, working in the galley Broken wind vanes. Photo Jeremy Bagshaw became an extreme sport! The actual rounding of Cape Horn was a bit of an anticlimax as the weather was totally overcast with intermittent rain, hail and some snow. I had navigated by dead reckoning for the previous three days and was very relieved to find Diego Ramirez on my starboard bow early on the morning of 14th March. The wind proceeded to drop almost completely and went into the southeast, which was a little inconvenient, but I was very happy that it was not the forecast easterly gale. Helped by the southwesterly swell I was able to make decent progress on course for the Horn under full sail. Later that afternoon the wind came back from the southwest at full strength and I went down through all the gears until eventually I had only the storm jib set. Possibly I could have carried more sail, but with the gusts being at least twice the average wind speed it would have required me to be on deck full time in the icy conditions. The gusts also 13

brought hail, and without my spray dodger to hide under it would have been a very unpleasant rounding of the iconic landmark. I was prepared to accept a small speed sacrifice for the sake of health and comfort! At twilight the northern horizon cleared enough for me to make out Isla Hermite to the west of Cape Horn, and about three hours later, through the gloom of low cloud, I was able to make out the twin lights on Isla Hornos bearing 345°T and 350°T respectively. This enabled me to derive a position and establish that I was approximately 15 miles south of Cape Horn and that I had just passed its longitude. It was with a certain amount of relief that I noted this in my logbook, toasted Neptune and prepared to get some sleep while making a course for the eastern end of Isla de Los Estados. I had wanted to go through the Straits of Le Maire but the current wind conditions meant I would have arrived there with a foul tide and in the middle of a moonless night! Shortly after passing Isla de Los Estados, the wind backed into the northwest and rose to an estimated 30 knots with much stronger gusts. My intention to follow the Argentine coast northwards became impossible, as did my plan to pass to the west of the Falklands. Once northeast of the Falklands it was apparent that I’d left the southern ocean swells behind but, although the sea state had moderated substantially, I was soon to find out that, even this far northeast, one cannot assume that the worst part of the transit of Cape Horn is past. Definitely the worst storm I had during the whole circumnavigation was the one I encountered on 31st March at 33°36’S 36°30’W off the coast of Brazil, during which, according to the Brazilian Navy, southwesterly force 10 winds were experienced for three days. This, coupled with the most belligerent sea state, was seriously unpleasant, especially as without the shelter and protection of a spray dodger I was effectively limited to only being on deck for any sail handling. But eventually one gets far enough north to escape the clutches of the frontal passages and from around 30°S the weather changed to much lighter airs, in itself a whole new challenge! The conditions experienced by my fellow competitors in slightly larger and heavier boats were very similar to those that I experienced. Three of them deployed warps, to stabilise their boats and to give their self steering gears a bit of assistance, but one of these suffered damage to his wind vane caused by the warps when recovering them. One opted out of the weather warning issued by Race Management a bit earlier than suggested in order to get a jump on his nearest competitor. He ran with much more sail than the rest of us and suffered several knockdowns which resulted in a fair bit of damage to his mainsail and also to his wind vane. Another suffered a knockdown and had damage to his masthead antennae. It seems that the disparity in timing and seasons did not really make much difference to the conditions experienced by the fleet, until the back markers came through in April when they experienced significantly stronger winds than the earlier group. In an interesting anomaly, I had a forecast of gale-force easterlies to meet me at the longitude of Cape Horn. This forecast was approximately three days out and by the time I arrived there I had a gentle southeasterly, quickly freshening to a strong southwesterly. Another competitor had a really easy rounding forecast two days before getting to the area but, once there, was met by a storm that, according to the Chilean Armada, had winds gusting to 90 knots. Another competitor was just north of Diego Ramirez and was completely becalmed for an hour and a half before the next front came through. Within half an hour he was down to storm jib only. He ran due east through 14

Jeremy receiving his ‘Cape Horner’s’ burgee from Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, President of the International Association of Cape Horners. Photo Tim Bishop/IACH the night with hail stones and squalls of 50–60 knots, which only abated slightly on passing the longitude of the Horn. This illustrates the rapidity with which the weather systems change and how even a trusted forecaster or weather site can get it wrong enough to be life threatening. By no means can one say that transiting the area earlier in the year is less risky. It’s just that there is a slightly smaller chance of the extreme conditions that are more likely later on towards autumn. Conclusion To return to the original ambit of this article – namely, is this west to east route around Cape Horn a feasible option for cruisers coming from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans? The answer, in my opinion and from my experience and that of the other race participants polled, is that it is definitely only for extremely well-found and equipped vessels with experienced crew and access to good weather information, preferably at the height of the Austral Summer. The vessel needs to be able to cope with regular, sustained winds in excess of 40 knots and often gusting to 60 or more. It needs to be able to be safely handled in sea states exceeding 10m and in seas that are often very confused and unpredictable. The crew need to be confident of their ability to deal with these conditions, sometimes for very extended periods of time in an area where running for shelter is seldom possible. In other words, it is not to be recommended for any but the most experienced and well-equipped crew and vessels and even then there is no guarantee of a successful doubling of Cape Horn from west to east, with the downside potential often being severe. 15

MENTORING AND THE OCC Julian Mounter The weather looks fine, all the stores are aboard and you replaced that bottle screw that had been nagging in the back of your mind. You even tasted the water in the tanks again and felt silly doing so, as it is the second time. Nothing for it but to cast off on your first ocean crossing. What will it be like being at sea for two or three weeks? Have you remembered everything? The crew look at you, trust you, but like you they haven’t been further than a trip to France from the Solent, up to the Bay of Islands from Auckland or down to the Chesapeake from New Jersey ... some occasionally tough passages, but basically coastal. Do you wish you could speak to someone who might reassure you? The Ocean Cruising Club can and does help! After a few decades of wonderful ocean sailing and cruising and OCC membership (I joined the OCC in 1992), my Admiral recently persuaded

Julian is just one of the OCC’s mentors who are happy to share their experience or point cruisers to the right experts on a host of subjects me to change my sailing boots for carpet slippers and our sailing boat for a motor boat. We will still have sailing times by chartering in unusual places and I maintain many close friends in the sailing world. But, as retirement has set in, one of the greatest pleasures I have is the mentoring I do for the OCC. He may have moved to motor boating but Julian is still proud to fly his OCC burgee 17

A common question from those planning an ocean passage is, ‘How will my children cope?’ Here Lily Eames-Thornton helms her parents’ 44 footer downwind while crossing the Atlantic – a very competent crew! I am just one of a number of members who pass on their experience and knowledge to those who are members or to those who contact the OCC looking for support or advice. The questions are on every subject one can imagine. Very few questions have a one-line answer and many have so many variations that I sometimes end up writing several pages to ensure the questioner has the full range of options. Sometimes I find it easier to chat on the phone and I have answered short texts sent by satellite devices from mid ocean. After more than 100,000 miles under sail I can offer some help on most subjects, but when I don’t know, or am not sure of my knowledge, we mentors refer the person to someone who will know. ‘How many crew should I take for a three-week passage?’ is a common query. Of course, before we can give the range of options we first need to know how big the boat is, what type of boat, the rig, the cruise range so we can research the likely weather, the experience of the owner/skipper and potential crew, ages, willingness and ability to do long watches, solo or accompanied, who will pay for the food and travel ... everything impacts on everything else and on the range of answers given. I sometimes wonder whether some people planning to cross an ocean have either only read the scary articles in magazines, or have only read books by Eric Hiscock (which are still well worth reading for their wonderful adventures and advice), because many of their fears are based on how things were back in the 1950s and ’60s when Eric and his wife Susan were travelling the globe. I reassure them that sails don’t tear as easily these days so they will not need a giant sewing machine and a generator to go with 18

it, that properly-serviced modern engines are more reliable and, unlike Eric, with the right communications they will be able to see big storms coming and have a chance of routeing safely around them. One couple contacted me just before they entered the so-called Atlantic ‘convergence zone’. Could I tell them what to expect as they had forgotten to ask before they left? I told them they might see some spectacular thunderstorms, with really amazing lightning, experience sudden squalls, but every trip is different and they might not even notice it. Had they earthed their rigging as we had discussed? If not, some cruisers theorise that wire or chain wrapped around the shrouds and hung overboard may provide some protection by possibly routeing a lightning strike into the sea. But my advice during the planning stages is to connect the mast to a grounding plate on the hull and to speak to an expert about how to do it. Not all questions are about the actual passages. Many, prior to a crossing, are about equipment. A typical one is, ‘Do I need an SSB?’. Because many of the questioners have extensive sailing experience but have not gone offshore for more than one night, they may be ignorant of all that has been written about historic versus modern communications equipment. VHF plus a mobile phone has previously met their needs. To answer, I tell them about the advantages of staying in touch with other cruisers in remote areas, both for safety and to maintain friendships, without having to pay for the communications. SSB will, of course, reach other countries, islands and anchorages where VHF cannot. But I also point out that the shore services that used to route radio calls to home and family are limited these days. Instead there are The Garmin InReach small hand-held satellite Mini2 is the size of a mobile communication systems phone and is one way to stay and other sophisticated in touch from the middle of ways of staying in touch an ocean. An SSB costing that do not need space thousands will do far more, for a large box of tricks but devices like this are down below nor licences, available for a few hundred exams, grounding plates, backstay changes or long whip aerials. Either way, costs can be high – the capital cost of fitting a long-range radio versus the call charges of using satellites. I had a message today from a family planning a circumnavigation asking, ‘We are going to fit a watermaker. Is one that produces 25 litres an hour big enough?’ Again, the answer depends. If you want to wash the boat every day, probably not! If you are going places where it rains and you can catch water as well, ‘maybe’. But some people run a large engine to get the power to run big units and then have to worry about diesel usage. I always suggest that people take extra water in plastic bottles, just in case something goes wrong with their tanks and I would not suggest they rely primarily on a watermaker. The questioners are as varied as the questions and what has surprised me is that, through helping OCC members, I have ended up helping numerous people who have 19

Many sailors who embark on ocean passages will experience nothing as tough or as threatening as they have while coastal sailing. This photo was taken in the Solent... nothing to do with the OCC but who subsequently apply to join our wonderful club, or intend to do so following their ocean passage. Understandably, there are a few who plan a trip, ask the questions, start preparing their boats – sometimes spending big money doing so – and then cancel completely or delay. I always encourage my ‘mentees’ to think very hard before committing to expensive boat changes or unnecessary equipment until the departure period is decided and all personal matters are settled. Last year, a couple who had the boat and were updating her in a yard while living aboard seemed exceptionally excited at the prospect of their upcoming voyage until one wrote saying that they had, sadly, parted. Another, a year or two back, had health problems and a third had a job promotion that she said she just could not turn down. The work doesn’t stop at advising before a cruise. I have had regular contact with cruisers who have become friends as they make their passages, sometimes expressing worries and at other times just sharing their experiences. Nor does it stop when they have cruised for a year or two and are back home with memories and photos, either planning the next voyage or returning to coastal sailing. In one case I got a call from a couple who, having completed a North Atlantic circuit, had a disaster while selling their boat. This involved an insurance claim, issues with the yard where their boat had been moved during the sale process, a selling agent who wouldn’t accept any responsibility and an insurance broker. They were distraught, as they faced losing a third to half of the value of their boat, which represented their life savings. I am no lawyer, but with some experience and the right contacts I was able to reassure them and point them in the right direction for legal advice and this led to a much better outcome than they had feared. I am not sure how they came across me, but a couple of years ago I received an e-mail from a young couple saying that they had heard of the OCC and asking, ‘We have bought a boat and intend to sail around the world, should we join the OCC?’. I explained the benefits and they said they would seek Associate membership prior to doing their qualification miles. Their experience was limited to crewing in local racing. This led to my asking about the boat and what came back was a worry. It was a very small, old IOR design, had serious osmosis, obviously needed extensive work around the keel and rudder and, worst of all, had not been surveyed, so they had no real knowledge of the extent of the issues. How on earth does one respond, without 20

smashing dreams on the one hand or failing to outline many of the safety issues on the other? People have gone halfway round the world in little more than converted beer barrels. I wouldn’t recommend it, but it is not my responsibility to stop mad adventurers achieving their goals. But I feel all we sailors have a responsibility to ensure that people who seek advice are informed of the general risks and steered towards seeking advice from the professionals who really know. I spent much of my childhood in a Cornish village where, like the local fishermen, we launched our boats off the beach. Each summer we would watch holidaymakers drive down the slip with their sailing dinghies or rowing boats, excitedly ready for sea. On days when the weather or sea state was clearly not right, a fisherman watching an intended launch would wander over and gently say, in a strong Cornish accent, something along the lines of, ‘I wouldn’t go out today, me ’ansome, seas are getting up!’. On numerous occasions the advice would be ignored and, a few hours later, we youngsters and anyone else on the beach would be recovering the soaking (and occasionally cut and bruised) occupants from the surf, along with their belongings and upturned boat. Jayne and Paul Eames-Thornton successfully crossed to the Caribbean, where they decided to marry. They remain special friends of the author One issue that is very hard to address is that of relationships on board. I have seen crew thrown off a boat never to speak to the skipper again and, in one case, a skipper who never recognised his faults so could not understand why his crew always fell out with him. I have known of friends never speaking with each other after a voyage, more than one married couple who separated after an ocean crossing and, while I personally have always had good experiences, I did have one young crew member who vastly exaggerated her experience, leaving me with the most tiring of voyages! My Admiral had recruited her in the Caribbean, having met her in a restaurant. She seemed pleasant, claimed to have a US qualification and had done ‘hundreds of hours of offshore sailing’. After a long day sail and into our first night, heading for the Azores, I left her on watch and turned in. Four hours later I went on deck to find we were sailing aback! I checked the log. Her hourly entries were simply copied from my own. As a result I never fully trusted her. My only other crew member was a young man, and we both had to do extra-long watches. Even during my ‘off watch’ time I would get up each hour to check on her. One night as we approached the Strait of Gibraltar, I thought I could hear a ship and called to her in the cockpit to ask if anything was in sight. She was tucked under the sprayhood to avoid the rain. ‘No,’ she shouted down, 21

‘no ships’. But the sound increased so I dragged myself up (I was fighting flu, caught in Horta) just in time to avoid a large freighter bearing down on us. All one can do is to advise skippers to be thorough when they are recruiting, get references, get to know the other crew and, delicate though it is to do, advise them to respect their crew, involve them in the planning, communicate clearly and be fair. So what about the young couple with the highly-questionable IOR boat? I always start with the sort of warnings that you get from finance companies or are written at the bottom of official documents. I make it clear that my views are personal and based on my knowledge and opinions only. Every skipper is responsible for his or her own safety and for the safety of all on board and should ensure that professional advice is sought on the suitability of the vessel for its intended use before leaving harbour. First advice, after that, was ‘please get a proper survey’. Next, I gently advised that if they could make the boat bullet-proof, with everything the surveyor would advise for an ocean passage including all safety equipment and reinforcement where necessary then, while I still would not advise that style of boat for a circumnavigation, I would wish them luck. I made a point of adding, however, that their intention of adding six new batteries, self-steering gear, solar panels on a gantry, a washing machine and a microwave would, in addition to the necessary spare anchors, storm sails and extra tankage, make her disproportionately heavy. She would wallow and, frankly, be dangerous, ‘so please rethink the weight, the cost and, indeed, the boat’. Three months later, predictably but to my relief, they wrote to say that the surveyor’s list of essential work would cost more than the boat had. They had rethought the whole thing and would work for two more years, sell the little race boat and buy a good Nic 32 or similar, if they could find one. I wrote back saying I was delighted. Maybe a light touch on the tiller by me and perhaps a great big yank on the tiller by the surveyor had saved the day. I hope to hear soon that they are underway and that one day they will send me a picture of their safer floating home, anchored in an idyllic tropical anchorage, proudly flying an OCC burgee.

Some reasons to cast off and head for the ocean – turquoise seas, golden sands and warm temperatures

SENDING SUBMISSIONS TO FLYING FISH CONTENT: anything which is likely to be of interest to other members – cruise and liveaboard accounts (including humour), technical articles, letters and recipes. Most articles need a short intro – who you are, who you were sailing with, the type and size of boat, etc – and all need titles. Please tell me if you’re sending the same piece elsewhere, inside or outside the OCC. Finally, please ensure that all place, personal and boat names are spelt correctly, including in the captions. Errors can give offence! LENGTH: no more than 3500 words except by prior agreement. It’s envisaged that the annual, larger-format Flying Fish will be able to accommodate a few articles of up to 6000 words, but such articles must describe a challenging cruise covering considerable distance, illustrated by outstanding photographs. It is not a licence to waffle! FORMAT: MS Word (any version) or PDF, with or without embedded photos (though see below), sent by e-mail to flying.fish@oceancruisingclub.org. ILLUSTRATIONS: up to 20 captioned photos, professional-standard drawings or cartoons. PLEASE don’t send more than this. Most digital formats are fine, other than HEIC files created on iPhones and iPads – please convert these to .jpg or .tiff. Photos should measure at least 16cm wide at 300 dpi or 67cm wide at 72 dpi (the default setting for most cameras). If this means nothing to you, please send your photos EXACTLY as they were downloaded from the camera or phone – merely opening and saving under another name degrades the quality. If sending photos by e-mail, manually attach no more than three per e-mail (do NOT use the ‘attach to e-mail’ facility available in many image programs, which compresses the file data), rounding off with a separate message telling me what you’ve sent. Alternatively use WeTransfer [www.wetransfer.com], a great little free (!) internet program. Please include a list of captions, including credits, in the order the photos relate to the text, and place the numbers (in red) in the text where applicable. Captions along the lines of: ‘01 (DCM 3285) Preparing the boat for sea; 02 (DCM 3321) Leaving Horta, John at the helm; 03 (DSP 00045) The whale! Photo Sue Black;’ are ideal. CHARTLETS & POSITIONS: please send a rough chartlet if relevant, for professional re-drawing. COVER PHOTOS: I’m always on the lookout for eye-catching, upright photos of high resolution and quality, with fairly plain areas top and bottom to take the logo and wording. COPYRIGHT: please ensure you either own the copyright of photos or have the photographer’s permission for them to be reproduced on the OCC website as well as in Flying Fish. A credit can be included, but Flying Fish does not pay reproduction fees. DEADLINE: the annual Flying Fish will be published in December, so it is hoped that the final deadline of 1st OCTOBER can remain unchanged. This will only be possible, however, if most articles are submitted much earlier – as soon as completed, for preference. As previously, an issue may be closed before the deadline if it becomes full. For more information please e-mail me on flying.fish@oceancruisingclub.org. Anne Hammick, Editor 23

EAST GREENLAND, AT LAST Rev Bob Shepton (Last winter I was in touch with OCC member Mike Brooks as he brought Cornelia, his rejuvenated Bruce Roberts 48, back across the Atlantic from Panama and settled in Kinsale, Ireland. At some stage I must have told him that I’d never visited East Greenland and wanted to, and that the Wild Bunch*, my climbing team from previous expeditions to West Greenland, might want to climb a challenging new rock route in Scoresby Sound. He said he’d be up for that. Then I had to organise the Wild Bunch – not an easy thing to do! – but it finally gelled with Nico, SeanV, Ben and Franco, a new member recruited in place of Oli who has a new life now. Ben agreed to fly over from America and meet us in Iceland, Mike found SeanB to help with the sailing, and we were on. Much of Cornelia’s route can be followed on the chartlet on page 58 of Flying Fish 2023/1.) 27th–29th June: Pulled out of Oban at 0830 and sped up the Sound of Dull (alias Mull, but as a local it has by now lost its initial charm), on past Canna, Skye, the Shiants, Stornoway and out into a decidedly bumpy sea to reach Tvøroyri on Suðuroy in the Faroes at mid-day on the 29th. 29th June–2nd July: Tvøroyri. There was a big local party on the Saturday night and some of the crew drank too much. Two of them were invited aboard a Polish boat where * The Wild Bunch first climbed with Bob in 2010. See Flying Fish 2011/1 and numerous online interviews and videos.

About to leave Oban

Flat stones for drying fish in old days. Two fishwives remain forever at work the two Polish gentlemen stated they were 80 years old. “Ah,” said Nico, “We have a crew member who is 88!” I enjoyed that when I heard it later. We were also taken to the old Boat Club by the Commodore (President) and were particularly intrigued by the field of flat stones alongside, which was used for drying fish in the old days. The climbing team did some bouldering in a roadside cutting to keep in trim. 2nd–5th July: Tórshavn, Streymoy. We went right into the inner marina, with showers and clothes-washing facilities available. It’s an attractive town, with interesting old fishing boats which can be hired for outings. The crew of a British yacht, Grace and Hope, whom we had originally met in Tvøroyri, were kind enough to show interest in my books. We picked up diesel on the way out and motor-sailed up the west coast examining the excellent climbing possibilities. The ferocious tides and strong winds prevented us anchoring at the northern end as originally intended, so we set sail for Iceland. Scottish beam trawlers in Tórshavn

Raufarhöfn harbour

5th–8th July: Excellent passage planning on Mike’s part gave us favourable winds for the passage to Iceland. We were finding that in some respects this was a hard boat to live on because, after his two years of rebuild (she was virtually a wreck when he had picked her up in Trinidad), Mike had run out of time to deal with a number of issues down below. But we were grateful that he had agreed to take me and my climbing team to East Greenland to climb a new route on Mirror Wall in Renland. The east coast of Iceland proved to be quite a long time a-coming and when in the evening the wind died away we put into Raufarhöfn on the east side of Iceland’s northeasternmost headland. 8th–10th July: Raufarhöfn turned out to be a pleasant, quiet ‘one-horse’ town where we walked, went bouldering (the climbers) and generally relaxed. Customs drove over from Húsavík to check us in, which seemed strange. A jam session aboard 10th–16th July: A long day’s sail round the headland and down to Húsavík. Húsavík is Iceland’s whale-watching centre and the harbour was accordingly busy. It also has an excellent swimming pool with a hot tub, showers, warmth and free coffee! It rained a lot, but we had a great jam session on board, though entertaining a couple of visitors made a big hole in the boat’s wine stocks. 16th–20th July: A hard day’s tacking against a strong west wind. In the evening we thankfully put into Ólafsfjörður for a rest. Another quiet settlement with nothing apparently happening, though judging by the spray appearing over the harbour wall 26

A guide on the bow points the way there was quite a wind outside. I was suffering from a streaming cold by this time, but the lads conscientiously continued to hold fitness training sessions in the local park. We were, after all, on our way to a climbing competition over on the west side of Iceland. 22nd–25th July: We put out into a favourable following wind which bowled us along towards the Hornstrandir peninsula, then on engine in dying wind for the last three hours to reach Norðfjörður. The lads went for a practice on the local rock, ready for the climbing competition on the Saturday. They won the competition, of course, though it was pleasantly friendly and unserious. We finally got an ice report showing that the ice was clearing from Scoresby Sound in Southeast Greenland. It had been late clearing this year. 25th–27th July: Sailed for Greenland at 0900. Benign conditions, becoming increasingly difficult the closer we got to Greenland and the ice. We had to tack out to the east and then north three times to get round the huge bulge of ice pouring out of Scoresby Sound, but the further east we got, the rougher the seas became. At last we could enter the ice, where it all calmed down, and we wove through 2-3/10ths pack-ice to the settlement of Ittoqqortoormiit on the north side of the entrance.

In Scoresby Sound

SeanV returning from a chilly swim 27th–29th July: Restocked with diesel, water and some supplies. Some of us visited Utilie, a well-appointed, friendly French boat and Ben did some underwater photography while we were at anchor. 29th–30th July: A fantastic day. It started with easy weaving through 2/10ths ice until we were suddenly stuck between two floes in 6-7/10ths pack-ice, needing to turn to starboard. SeanV leapt onto an ice floe, pulling and pushing us round the too-tight corner. Much pushing with tuks (ice poles) from the boat and somehow we fought her along and round. Thumbs up for steel boats! Later, as we continued up Scoresby Sound, the leads got wider and longer until in the evening light we were left with no pack-ice and magnificent bergs reflected in mirror calm water. Some time later again, we were pushing easily through patches of ‘sugar ice’ – old, melted, pack-ice still just lying on the surface – till it got colder and the patches froze together. We were stopped. But next morning when they unfroze we continued on through the Bjorne Oer (Bear Islands) and up Skillebugt fjord, which stabs into Renland, to land the climbers. Scoresby Sound had been stunning! 30th July–12th August: The walk in towards Mirror Wall was harder than anticipated, over glaciers strewn with huge ice boulders, big moraines and even sand on top of ice. It was a long way, too, and the climbers had to make more than one trek in to get all their gear to the Wall. Meantime Mike and SeanB did a great job tidying and cleaning the boat – they had obviously been waiting for ages for the chance. At one stage Nico fell

Approaching the Bjorne Oer (Bear Islands)

It was difficult getting the climbers and gear ashore in the shallow water

into an ice hole and cut his leg. He returned to the boat and we went to the Bear Islands for exploration and to chart anchorages there, before returning so Nico could walk back to join the climbers. The lads on the French boat Utilie also helped with carrying in some gear as, in the initial phase, had Mike. There was so much, for a major climb like this. 12th–24th August: While waiting for the climbers to return, the three of us made a circumnavigation of Milne Land with much plotting and charting of anchorages, some ‘new’ or not in the pilot books. Mike and SeanB went ashore at each anchorage to study the flora and evidence of animal activity for a report to the Royal Geographical Society. I went occasionally for exercise. There was one particularly noteworthy landing where we walked up through strange red sandstone terrain.

Made it to the top! The author on Milne Land 29

Advanced Base Camp with sheer Mirror Wall (arrowed) in the background We heard whilst on our way round that the lads were starting to come down from the climb. They had reached a completely blank section on the Wall bereft of holds and did not want to use bolts. Disappointing perhaps, but part of their climbing ethic is to climb free, not using aids. They had done well to get as far as they did. Trekking towards the Mirror Wall

25th August–1st September: We collected the climbers, who kindly gave me an in-depth debrief before we set sail for home, and made a brief stop in the Bear Islands to view the musk oxen. There was very little ice and few bergs in Scoresby Sound so, apart from a brief stop anchored by a sandy stretch of shore waiting for a weather system to move in, we went straight on out into the Denmark Strait. At first the Denmark Strait gave us rough, very cold weather, with a wave bursting right into the cockpit at one stage. It calmed down next day but ... the engine would not start. We completed the passage to Iceland under sail in calm conditions, sailing into Húsavík harbour under headsail alone, with directional help from the dinghy and outboard tied alongside. 1st–26th September: Some of us soon left and flew back home, though it wasn’t an easy journey across Iceland to the very crowded airport. Mike and the two Seans stayed and lifted the engine out of the boat (by mechanical means) to strip it right down and find the fault. Some of the necessary parts never arrived, however, and with the weatherwise cut-off date of 1st October for sailing back fast approaching, they were reduced to leaving the boat in Húsavík and flying back themselves. An enjoyable expedition if not entirely successful. But plenty of interest and exploration, chart plotting by the skipper and weaving through ice. And, from a personal point of view, I had got to East Greenland, at last!

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ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT ~ AUSTRALIA TO AFRICA Rob Barton Lots of people ask ‘why?’ and ‘what made you think of rowing an ocean?’. I had been looking for an ocean adventure for some time and coming from a family of sailors I wanted to do something a little different. Mum and Dad spent nearly 15 years sailing around the world and my grandpa Hum Barton, who founded the OCC, racked up more sea miles than I can count. Living in a Perth suburb bordering the Indian Ocean I was looking for something local and, stumbling down a rabbit hole on YouTube, came across a most inspirational young lady, Sarah Outen, who rowed from Fremantle to Mauritius back in 2009 when she was just 24 years old. I bought her book A Dip in The Ocean, which I thoroughly recommend, and decided I would do the same thing at the age of 59. Once I started researching, though, I discovered that no one had ever rowed non-stop to Africa. I decided that if I was going to do it I might as well go for a world first and go all the way. Given that rowing oceans is not particularly mainstream, it still captures a degree of media and public interest and I could see an opportunity to raise funds for charity. Before finalising on a specific charity, I arrived home from surf patrol back in March 2021 to find one of my daughters throwing up, having taken an overdose in an attempt to take her own life. She was, and is, one of the smiliest and outwardly happy people that I know, but on the inside she was suffering from anxiety and depression. Two years on, after two weeks in a secure Adolescent Mental Health Unit and lots of therapy, she is in a much better place but is still working things through. There is no magic bullet, it will take time, but she is now taking on new challenges for herself and has recently completed a stint working for Camp America, travel and new experiences proving to be the best therapy. I can only thank my lucky stars that I found my daughter in time to get her to hospital. Far too many parents are not so lucky and I can barely imagine the pain they must go through. Suicide is the leading cause of death among Australians aged 15 to 24, and it was for this reason that I decided that I would raise money for Zero2Hero whose focus is on suicide prevention amongst our youth and adolescents. Having decided to row the Indian Ocean, I figured I had better learn to row! I had rowed tenders and little dinghies, and I even Rob’s daughters 33

Rob circa 1972 did rowing for a single term at school about 45 years ago, but nothing close to ocean rowing. I found Dark Horse Rowing on YouTube and learnt basic technique, and then a rowing App called Asensei which helped me to improve my technique and general fitness. So I learnt to row properly from the internet and then put my new-found knowledge into practice in a coastal rowing boat. I researched prior crossings of the Indian Ocean. There had been seven solo crossings to islands along the way – Mauritius, Reunion, Madagascar and Rafael – and based on the times that they had taken I figured I should be prepared for a crossing time of 180 days. I also took the opportunity to reach out to the University of Western Australia (UWA). Professor Phil Watson from the Oceanography Team was a most enthusiastic supporter and assigned two PhD students and an undergraduate to research the best departure point and route to take. They built a data model taking actual weather conditions as they had been for the past 20 years and then input the basic information that we had on the performance of my boat to identify the best departure point. I had previously intended to leave from Geraldton or Kalbarri, as crossings starting from Carnarvon had had mixed results, but research completed by the UWA team suggested the latter was a good choice.

The data model was further enhanced so that Neil, my shore support manager, could input my boat’s position on a daily basis. The model would then look at the weather forecast for the upcoming ten days and the hindcast data for the last 20 years before providing a preferred route to take. This model was designed to get me to the northern tip of Madagascar, after which point hindcast data and weather forecasts become too variable to be reliable for weather routeing. In parallel I started the hunt for a boat. They just don’t exist in Australia so I found one in the UK, had it shipped to Perth and took it for its first sea trial at the beginning of February and then two further sea trials in March, a total of about 50 hours on the water. Probably not enough, but the logistics involved in training in an ocean rowing boat are challenging. It cannot be rowed into headwinds greater than 15–20 knots and the strong sea breeze off the Perth coast, typically from around 1100 every day, means a support boat is required for any outings where return is after this time. The boat had proven credentials, having been across the Atlantic twice as well as from Geraldton to Mauritius with two people on board, so sea trials were more about me gaining relevant experience than testing the boat. In any case, I could only take the boat out in fair winds which was not enough for a serious test. I identified some structural issues with the hull to deck joint, which was flexing and leaking, letting water into the food lockers. A local engineering company helped with fabricating and installing a stainless bracket to tie in the rowlocks to the deck and this solved the problem. A big part of my preparation was personal fitness and bulking up. Ocean rowers crossing the Atlantic, a much shorter crossing, typically lose 15–25kg (33–55 lbs), and at a relatively slim 75kg (165 lbs or 11st 11 lbs) I did not have the surplus to lose. For about eight months before departing I ate and ate and ate, and for the last month or so I moved to the GOMAD (gallon of milk a day) diet and managed to peak at 98kg (216 lbs or 15st 6 lb). I lost a couple of kilos prior to departure and then during the row lost a further 15kg (33 lbs), burning around 5000 calories per day. I was also training

Me and my tummy along with Sue and Sahil, my team from Strawberry Finance

Rosemary, Neil and Don see me off from the Carnarvon Yacht Club RIB, 26th April every day, surf-ski paddling four days a week with the surf club, weight training twice a week and completing an endurance surf-ski* paddle once a week. When it came to departure, the Carnarvon Yacht Club was incredibly hospitable, providing me with secure undercover storage for my boat. Then Don, one of the members, guided me through the unmarked sandbanks of the Facine, the club RIB providing a platform for my shore manager Neil to film from. They were accompanied by Rosemary who was reporting for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to be broadcast later on the news. I made a short video after everyone had left and, looking back on it now, realise I was a little emotional at saying goodbye to my four daughters. My youngest told me on my return that she thought she was saying goodbye forever. My attempts to reassure and provide evidence of prior successful crossings obviously failed to convince her that I would be okay. No ocean voyage is without risk, but I believed I had a good understanding of the risks and was well prepared with a sound boat and lots of safety equipment. Seasickness hit me pretty hard in the first few days, which came as something of a surprise. I had not been seasick since I was a child and it was completely unexpected, but the movement of an ocean rowing boat is unlike anything I had experienced before. Imagine motoring in a sailing boat at 1 or 2 knots with no sails to steady the boat and no keel to dampen the roll – effectively you are pitching forward and backwards in addition to rocking violently from side to side as and when waves break. I managed breakfast on my first day and nothing else. Day two I threw up breakfast from the day before and day three I ate nothing at all and just kept throwing up the small amount of water that I was drinking. * A surf-ski is a large, performance-oriented kayak designed for speed on open water, most commonly the ocean, though also well suited to all bodies of water and recreational paddling. The most common use of surf-skis is in surf lifesaving competitions and downwind paddling. 36

The sea conditions were such that waves were breaking over the boat, and the small cockpit, which was not self-draining except when the water reached Goodbye! deck level, was consistently full. I then discovered that the water was leaking from the cockpit into the forward cabin, my sleeping cabin. The aft cabin, used exclusively for storage, was also awash. It was at this point that I decided that I had had enough adventure and called Neil with a good excuse – the boat wasn’t up to it and I was heading back for Exmouth. I spent a couple of hours rowing back and it gave me time to think. The water level in the aft cabin was above sea level, so water had to be getting in from somewhere else, and I realised that the water leaking into my sleeping cabin was getting in through the conduit from a newly-installed chartplotter. I reflected on the fact that whilst my thirst for adventure had been satisfied with a mere sip, I was also doing this for my daughter and to raise money for Zero2Hero. This was a cause that was way bigger than my selfish desire to have an adventure, so I turned around and headed for Africa once more. I fixed the leaking conduit and closed the vents that had been the cause of the flooding in the aft cabin. It was not until I was into the second week and still popping seasickness tablets that I started to eat, and I was almost three weeks into the voyage before I was able to wean myself off the tablets and eat normally. Thank goodness for the extra padding! Mid-ocean swim

I recalled many pre-departure conversations when I had, with some bravado, talked about regular swims in order to scrub the boat and keep it weed-free. Once faced with the reality, however, my bravado somewhat evaporated and I put off scraping the boat for far too long. Weed and barnacles really impacted her performance so it was essential to keep the hull clean. On a boat that typically only does 2∙5 knots through the water, losing 1 knot to fouling made a huge difference. It took me about an hour to give the hull a really good scrape. On the last occasion many tiny little crabs came out of the weed, a few attaching themselves to me and one even trying to climb into my ear. They tried to hang on with their pincers, causing mild pain as if someone was trying to stick a pin into me, but gentle enough not to break the skin. Even after I climbed back on board they were still hanging on, and half a dozen ended up on the deck to be washed back to sea through the scuppers. That’s the first time I have had crabs! Somewhere along the line I picked up the title ‘the naked rower’! I think one of the interviews I did with ABC radio may have been the cause, but there is a very good reason to row naked. Sitting on your bottom all day in wet, salty conditions will cause salt sores, but these can be mitigated or even avoided if you sit on a sheepskin which wicks away the water and the salt. At the first signs of sores I would apply lanolin by day and Sudocrem* by night, and this largely kept the sores at bay.

Catching waves

Surfing down waves was the fun side of the voyage. It was not unusual to hit 5–8 knots and on a few occasions I was even into double figures, peaking at 14∙1 knots. However, all too often I had to contend with beam seas and these caused a few capsizes * An over-the-counter medicated cream with a water-repellent base, which contains antibacterial and antifungal agents and is used primarily to treat nappy rash. 38

The Mauritius Coastguard and many broaches. I could have put out a sea anchor and probably avoided them but it would have added weeks to my voyage, so I accepted the risk and had confidence in the boat’s ability to weather the inevitable. Twice I was capsized whilst rowing and thrown into the ocean. Being in the water and looking up at the upturned boat, willing it to roll back the way it had come was a little disconcerting, but each time I was able to clamber back on board and get rowing again. I think surf-ski paddling helped with the mental side of capsizing, as it’s not unusual to fall off a surf-ski in challenging conditions. On the 59th day I awoke to the throaty rumble of a powerful engine. I quickly checked my chartplotter, wondering why my AIS alarm had not gone off, but no ships showed up as being close. Then, sticking my head out of the hatch, there, not more than 200m away, was Coastguard Ship Victory from Mauritius. They were running in dark mode, explaining the lack of AIS alarm. They were barely moving and had obviously been there for a few minutes waiting for me to wake up! I turned my radio on and called them up to see what they were after. It was just routine ... ‘who are you? where are you from?’ etc. They were very nice and, after learning that I had been at sea for 8½ weeks, they offered me fresh food and fruit which I sadly had to decline. The record I was going for was solo unassisted and to accept any food or assistance would disqualify me. Once formalities were completed they wished me bon voyage and asked if it was okay if they took some pictures. I managed to find a pair of shorts and came up on deck and started rowing, a quick pose for the camera and then they were off. The first people I had seen since leaving Australia. The wildlife was very disappointing. On my first day back in Mullaloo, Perth I went for a paddle and saw four dolphins, but I didn’t see even one in the nearly three months of my crossing. I did see albatross, boobies, shearwaters and petrels, however, as well as three sharks and several large fish when they leapt from the ocean. Tiny flying fish would often cover the decks in the morning, although they were mostly washed off by the waves. One of the saddest things I encountered during my crossing was the huge amount of plastic waste, which was especially prevalent when crossing sea lanes. The UWA weather routeing did a great job of getting me to Cap d’Ambre, the northern tip of Madagascar, but from then on I was reliant on Neil, my shore manager, 39

Skin divers at the shoals off Zanzibar, with the Pemba Ferry in the background

and my Dad, Peter Barton, for weather routeing. I was able to download basic weather forecasts directly via my satellite comms hardware, but I was really after detail at a more granular level and also needed to know what the currents were doing as they had a major impact. A knot or two of current is not too much of an issue in a sailing boat that cruises at 5–7 knots, but for a boat capable of little more than 2 knots it’s a really big deal. Photo courtesy the Zanzibar skin divers! (see opposite) 40

Approaching Tanzania

At Cap d’Ambre there is a current that compresses along with the wind to form what Jimmy Cornell refers to as the ‘witch’s cauldron’. Huge waves, big winds and a strong current drove me along and I covered over 600 km (324 miles) in three days, double my usual mileage. Unfortunately not all of it was in the right direction and I ended up way further north than I wanted to be. The weather forecasts were consistently wrong, usually forecasting southeasters but delivering southwesters. The wind would often die away at night and I would take the opportunity to row southwest, winning back some of the ground that I had lost. A few days from the coast of Tanzania I spent a couple of days on my para-anchor, a large 3m (10ft) parachute that opens up under water and almost stops the boat from being blown downwind. I was hoping that the forecast would come good and a southeaster would arrive, but after several days of being consistently wrong I lost faith in it. The boat still moved with the current regardless of how effectively the paraanchor stopped downwind drift, so ultimately I had to haul it in and make a dash for it. Originally I was aiming for Dar es Salaam, but the northbound current I was in whilst on the para-anchor put paid to that and my new destination target became Tanga in Tanzania, just north of Zanzibar. Out of 54 hours I rowed for 50, and was halfway between Zanzibar and Tanzania when the wind changed to a westerly. This, combined with a northbound current, was enough to stop me from being able to reach Tanga. I turned around and headed back to a shoal just to the north of Zanzibar and dropped anchor. Here I met a group of skin divers who were fishing for marlin and they took a picture of me which they sent to Neil who published it on my Facebook page. I had an early night and took the opportunity to catch up on some much needed sleep. In the morning, whilst waiting for the wind to change, I took the opportunity to repack the bearings on the wheels on my sliding seat and cobbled together a couple of spares from all of the old ones. I had been remiss in not taking sufficient spares with me and was now struggling to create a serviceable rowing seat. 41

Passing a local fisherman on the last day I got some local knowledge from the skin divers as well as from the Tanga Yacht Club and was able to set off for Tanzania soon after lunch. I had seen Zanzibar the day before and not been too excited at the sight of land, but when I saw the Tanzanian mainland I literally jumped for joy I was so excited. The sun set behind the mountains as I approached and I rowed on into the dark, reaching a suitable anchorage by around 1am, anchoring close to the shore. I managed to get a few hours sleep before setting off

The welcoming committee escorting me in, 20th July 2023

Made it! at first light the following morning. This was my final day of rowing and I did enjoy it. There were lots of local fishing boats out, mostly little one-person dhows as well as a few larger boats with lots of crew. Two Aussie yachts had left Carnarvon just after me but got to Tanzania a lot faster than I did. They were joined by a third Aussie boat, and all motored out from Tanga to escort me in. It was great having company and being welcomed in this way. The Tanga Yacht Club was immensely helpful, first of all in hosting me but also in helping with customs and immigration, the Commodore taking time out to run me around to the various bureaucrats who needed me to complete paperwork. OCC Port Officer Representative Arthur Heywood was away when I arrived, but subsequently Arrival and paperwork

Unpacking in Tanga

we became firm friends. He helped to organise quotes for shipping the boat back to Australia, building a cradle and getting it packed into a container. The entire Tanga community was amazing, a great place to arrive if you are thinking of sailing to Tanzania.

Rob kept a daily blog on his Facebook page, so to read more and watch his videos go to https://www.facebook.com/ people/Robs-Row/100085457294871/. It’s not necessary to have a Facebook profile to do this – when prompted to enter a log-on ID just press escape (on the computer, not the screen) to access the page and all its history. By the end of October 2023 Rob had already raised nearly AU $150,000 for Zero2Hero. To add to this impressive amount go to https://www.mycause. com.au/p/292935/robs-row. Congratulations from my granddaughter 44

Save the Ocean, Protect Your Passion - Liz Clark, sailor, surfer, and environmentalist

“Join us today, we need all hands on deck if we are to have a living, thriving ocean for future generations to enjoy.” "-bѴouv -m7 0o-|;uvķ o b|m;vv Cuv|_-m7 |_; 7; -v|-ঞm] |_u;-|v |_-| o u o1;-mv =-1; v 1_ -v rѴ-vঞ1 roѴѴ ঞomķ obѴ vrbѴѴvķ -m7 l-ubm; _-0b|-| 7;v|u 1ঞomĺ obm "-bѴouv =ou |_; ";- o ;u;7 0 1;-m-Ľv 1oll mb| o= u;;m o-|;uv |o |-h; -1ঞom |o ruo|;1| o u -|;uvĺ

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USING SATELLITE IMAGERY WITH OPENCPN Sherry and Dave McCampbell (SV Soggy Paws is a St Francis 44 Mk2 catamaran built in 2004 which Dave and Sherry purchased in 2015. Since then they and their two cats have cruised extensively and at the time of writing were in Malaysia. Visit their website at https://svsoggypaws.com/.) For sailors planning to cruise internationally, including in the Caribbean, this is a VERY important subject. Based on our 20 years’ experience cruising in the Caribbean, across the Pacific and throughout Southeast Asia, we know that, away from the US and Europe, commercial charts are not nearly as accurate and detailed as they should be. Exclusive use of a chartplotter, even with expensive commercial charts, can be a big problem if, like many cruisers, you use it to cruise in relatively remote areas. The main issue is that these often expensive charts, though loaded with navigation information, are sometimes reasonably accurate and sometimes not. The problem is that you never know which is the case. Even if the chart is accurate, often the shoreline detail and near-shore depth indications leave a lot to be desired. Also,

A cruising boat aground in French Polynesia after using exclusively commercial charting. Photo Greg Bridges 47

Potential anchorage in the Red Sea, showing a commercial chart

Potential anchorage in the Red Sea, showing a different commercial chart

Potential anchorage in the Red Sea, showing a satellite chart

depending on the zoom level you use, you may not even be able to see a small reef or island ... so you must be very careful with zoom levels. At sea these issues are usually not much of a problem but near the shore they are. Cruisers are still running aground – some losing their boats – after using inappropriate charting for their cruising area. Recognising this, the overseas cruising community, at least in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, has joined forces to work on the problem. Many of us have been using satellite imagery for our close-in navigation charting with the open source navigation program OpenCPN for at least ten years. Our experience with it began with the release in 2012 of GE2KAP, a program to make charts from satellite imagery using Google Earth. The advantages of doing this over using even upto-date commercial charting are significant, including less expense, greatly improved accuracy and shoreline detail, and the ability to trade imagery, waypoints and tracks with other OpenCPN users. From the pictures above, which chart would you choose? The coloured lines are previous cruisers’ actual tracks into that anchorage, so one can be fairly certain where the good water is. 48

Several cruisers in the Pacific and Southeast Asia maintain large collections of satellite charts which they share with other cruisers. The images number in the thousands, covering the Eastern Pacific through the Indian Ocean, plus parts of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean, and are continually being enlarged and upgraded. Cruisers’ tracks in and out of many of these anchorages are also available. There are also huge collections of anchorages, with detailed information for each. One former cruiser, who maintains a database of all these anchorages including chartlets for each, expands and updates it monthly. All of these websites are linked on the Satellite Charts page on our website (see link overleaf). All this has been made possible by a former cruiser, Paul Higgins, who in 2012 developed the free internet utility GE2KAP. GE2KAP has now been greatly enhanced and renamed Sat2Chart, with many more options for converting a satellite image to a navigation chart. Besides just using satellite images sourced from Google Earth, a cruiser can now choose from among multiple images from several different sources in order to make the best quality chart. Several of these cruisers have also produced detailed instructional guides, including multiple articles and slide-show presentations describing the importance of satellite charting for safe off-grid cruising and how to make the charts. Several of these have been given as presentations in various places and are listed in the links below. On our boat, SV Soggy Paws, we have a small, modern Garmin chartplotter at our helm station. We like the fact that it’s weatherproof, user-friendly and also that we can see the bottom profile and type with its included depth sonar. Because of the issues with its charts in lesser-travelled areas, however, we rely on it only offshore and on the sonar when anchoring.

The helm station aboard SV Soggy Paws, with Asus tablet on the left and small Garmin chartplotter with bottomprofiling depth sonar on the right

Typically we lay our route using OpenCPN on the interior navigation station computer. This computer is populated with anchorage waypoints and other cruisers’ tracks, as well as both conventional and satellite charts. Once we are satisfied with the planned route we export that, plus associated anchorages, as a GPX file* to our 49

Garmin chartplotter at the helm station to give us an accurate and safe route to follow. That means we don’t have to worry about the accuracy of its charts. In tight near-shore situations we make sure that we have the satellite imagery with others’ tracks, our planned route and possible alternative anchor spots on OpenCPN running on both our navigation station computer and also on a tablet at the helm station. With the tablet running we don’t need to leave the helm to refer to our satellite charts. Commercial vector charting is usually based on various government data that may suffer from historical, datum and sometimes digitising inaccuracies. Here in Southeast Asia we are in the habit of warning new cruisers coming into the area to be careful if using only their chartplotters, or only tablet applications, and suggest they learn to use OpenCPN with satellite imagery as an important supplement to their current charting system. Sample satellite charts As an example of what is currently available, below is information on the satellite charts we have made for our upcoming passage through the Red Sea. These have been uploaded to our website ‘SatCharts’ page (see link below) for anyone to download. There are many other collections also listed there, for areas from the Atlantic to East Africa including extensive collections for Southeast Asia and the Pacific. In general, the charts made before 2020 are KAP files, those post 2020 are mbtiles. The mbtiles format, which was introduced into OpenCPN and Sat2Chart in 2019, provides greater colour variation and therefore much better detail at lower levels. To save the ZIPPED Red Sea files from our website to your hard drive right-click on each file, select ‘Save As’, and save to your Chart directory. Then unzip them and enter the folder path into the OpenCPN Chart Settings page. The Tracks and Waypoint files should be downloaded to a separate directory. Once unzipped they can easily be imported as ‘layers’ using OpenCPN’s Route and Waypoint manager. (Details on doing this are provided on our slide show Presentation about OpenCPN.) An example list of SV Soggy Paws’ Red Sea satellite chart sets on our website  Red Sea Planning Charts – A small set of charts that cover the area for planning purposes. Not detailed enough for navigation but easy to download and review.  Detailed area charts (broken up into groups to keep the download size reasonable) – Coastal and harbour/anchorage charts.  Tracks and waypoints for the Red Sea – Collected track files from other cruisers and a file of waypoints in GPX format. The link to our Satellite Charts page is https://svsoggypaws.com/SatCharts/. At the top of the page are internal links to sections of the page, including:  A list with links to all the major free chart sources that we are aware of. * GPX, or GPS Exchange Format, is an XML diagrammatic presentation designed as a common GPS data format for software applications which can be used to describe waypoints, tracks and routes. It is an open format and can be used without the need to pay licence fees. Thank you, Wikipedia! 50

 A guide on how to install the charts in OpenCPN.  Links to all our chart sets and associated waypoints/track files by region including: ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○

Red Sea Malaysia / Thailand PNG (Papua New Guinea) Solomon Islands Philippines Indonesia Micronesia Marshall Islands Between Fiji and the Marshall Islands Fiji Tonga Cook Islands French Polynesia San Blas Islands, Panama

Notes and cautions when using satellite charts 1. Satellite charts made using Sat2Chart are homemade charts taken from Google Earth and other satellite imagery (Bing from Microsoft, ArcGIS from ESRI, Yandex from Russia etc) by non-professionals. You should not trust your boat’s safety to these charts alone without other corroborating information from what you can see with your own eyes, other charts, cruisers’ tracks and waypoints, depth sounders etc. 2. Properly made satellite imagery charts are generally VERY accurate and detailed. They display the shoreline, harbours and shallow reefs in great detail. However, cruisers must familiarise themselves with how to ‘read’ the depths and learn to correctly interpret what the colour of the satellite picture implies. 3. Cross-reference accuracy with known waypoints before you fully trust homemade charts. Back this up with visual sightings. Early KAP charts had problems with skewed and misplaced images. The latest versions of Sat2Chart have eliminated the source of most of these errors but it is still wise to be cautious. 4. Sometimes satellite images are of poor quality due to low sun angle or clouds, so it is best to review multiple satellite chart sources and pick the best one for the area you are planning to cruise. 5. Very rarely satellite images may have remote reefs ‘missing’ or painted out, so don’t assume an empty fuzzy expanse on a satellite image is really empty. For example, try to find South Minerva Reef, Rose Atoll and Fonua One One (Tonga, South Vavau Group) on a Google Earth chart – you won’t find any of them. This is one reason that it is important to cross-reference satellite charts with one or more sources of other charts. 51

Four chartlets showing examples of missing reefs and painted-out detail 6. In areas with shallow patch reefs we have noticed that sometimes clouds form right over the reefs and small islands. You might think that’s just a cloud, but there’s a possibility it’s caused by a shallow reef warming the air above. Always be suspicious of clouds on satellite imagery – you can’t see what’s below them. See photograph opposite. 7. We no longer use the Google Earth program as our standard imagery source, but instead are using the program SAS.Planet. SAS.Planet makes it easy to check imagery from several sources quickly, including from Google. 8. The best download source for a known stable version of SAS.Planet, configured to work well with Sat2Chart, is Paul Higgins’ (the GE2KAP/Sat2Chart developer) download folder at https://www.gdayii.ca/Downloads/. 52

9. Download the SAS.Planet.zip file, unzip it and put the unzipped folder on your C:\ drive (no ‘installer’ needed). Make a shortcut to SAS.Planet.exe and put that on your Desktop or Start menu. 10. Most cruiser-made charts were made with Sat2Chart or GE2KAP. The developer continues to put hundreds of hours per year into development and expansion of this tool. His website is at http://www.gdayii.ca/index.php. 11. Likewise, the OpenCPN development team, an all-volunteer group of very dedicated programmers, also spends many hours adding useful features to the still free OpenCPN navigation program. Their website is at http://opencpn.org. Working with multiple chart sources in OpenCPN Once you have installed the charts to use with OpenCPN, make sure you have the ‘show chart outlines’ display option turned on. (Shortcut: type ‘o’ on the keyboard toggles to show and hide chart outlines.) You should then see red chart outlines for the charts you have added. You should also see blue, pink, and yellow/brown bubbles/bars at the bottom of the chart area (see graphic overleaf). These designate the available charts and will change as you move the chart around and zoom in and out. The leftmost bubble represents the largest scale chart available while the right-most bubble is usually the CM93 worldwide chart. The easiest way to zoom in and out is with the + and – keys on your keyboard, or your mouse wheel. If you have ‘chart quilting’ turned on in OpenCPN, toggle the light blue bars (KAP files) and pink bars (mbtiles) at the bottom of the screen to see which level of chart you can choose. The left-most bars on the bottom of the chart table are the most detailed charts and the right-most are least detailed. OpenCPN has excellent help files, and there is an OpenCPN User group on Facebook as well as a support forum on CruisersForum.com. Added benefits of OpenCPN include the following very useful Plug-in applications: 1. Climatology consisting of pilot charts displaying wind roses or wind barbs with wind, current and tropical storm tracks averaged since the 1980s and overlaid on your chart.

A sample OpenCPN chart table displaying some of the information described above and on the previous page 2. Radar Overlay for Garmin, Navico, B&G and possibly Raymarine digital radars. 3. Weather Routing looks at historical weather and current data to help you plan a future voyage. 4. Polar file creates polar (performance) files for your boat from actual data as you sail. 5. Voyage Data Recorder records and displays boat data from onboard sensors. 6. Stowage Manager allows a cruiser to create an onboard stowage file by location. 7. Logbook function lets you digitise your official daily logbook. 8. NMEA Instrument displays your course, speed, wind, depth etc on your computer, pad or phone. There are many more, with new plug-ins being developed often. Check out the plug-in section of the OpenCPN website for more details. Resources At https://www.svsoggypaws.com/presentations.htm you will find a collection of PowerPoint slide presentations which include electronic navigation, OpenCPN, satellite charts and passage planning in detail. Click on the Navigation link at the top of the page to jump to our presentations on navigation subjects. We hope the above information will help international cruisers improve their navigational safety in remote areas of the world by learning to use satellite imagery with OpenCPN. Given all the other things that can go wrong on a cruising boat, there’s no need to include an accident caused by charting inaccuracy. 54

6LOOHWWH

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6LOOHWWH FR XN 55

An Ocean Race Exclusively for Cruising Yachts

Marion, MA to St Davids Head, Bermuda Start Date: June 13, 2025 www.marionbermuda.com 56

SOURCE OF THE MILKY BLUE WATERS ~ A Summer’s Journey to The Kitlope Heritage Conservancy Jonathan and Rieka Flack (Jonathan and Rieka Flack own Harlequin, a 1984-built Hinckley SW 42 Yawl of which only four were built. She won the Cruising Class at Antigua Race Week in 1985, then sailed from Antigua to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. Jonathan and Rieka have owned her for the past three years, basing her in Washington State’s San Juan archipelago. While 2023 marked Rieka’s first long-distance adventure, Jonathan is an experienced ocean racing navigator having sailed extensively offshore and crossed both the Atlantic and the Pacific on a variety of yachts.) Many sail or cruise the inside passage to Alaska every year, yet few yachts transiting the inside passage venture into the wild and remote fjords which extend deep into British Columbia’s interior. More widely known as the Great Bear Rainforest, this 12,000 square mile region in northern British Columbia is laced by a web of long, deep fjords and is the largest remaining tract of unspoiled temperate rainforest on planet Earth. At the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest is its crown jewel, the Kitlope Heritage Conservancy, known to the indigenous Haisla Nation as Huchsduwachsdu Nuyem Jees or ‘the source of the milky blue waters’. It is so named because its waters are rich in powdery glacial flour – fine-grained, silt-sized particles of rock generated by grinding of the bedrock during glacial erosion. The 795,700 acre (322,008 hectare) Conservancy lies at the end of the Gardner Canal, 74 miles into the remote fjords from Kitamat and 94 miles from the entrance to the infamous Douglas Channel. The Conservancy has been jointly managed by the indigenous Haisla Nation and BC Parks since 1996. As a teenager I had witnessed similar actions in Clayoquot Sound, where a fierce environmental opposition movement ultimately gained protections for local forests and the establishment of the UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. In more recent years The Great Bear Rainforest

Harlequin at anchor in Connover Cove, Wallace Island

numerous First Nations rose up and formed a united opposition to the development of a Tar Sands crude oil pipeline which would have terminated in Kitimat, deep in the Great Bear Rainforest, putting the entire coastal ecosystem at risk. The Northern Gateway pipeline was finally defeated in 2015 when Justin Trudeau banned oil tanker traffic on the north coast of British Columbia, saving this rare ecological treasure. It was not until this summer, however, that we finally dropped our mooring on Bainbridge Island and ventured north. Our journey began with the short sail north to Port Townsend from which, after two days of near gale, we finally left to cross the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Victoria, BC and clear into Canada. We spent the evening docked in front of the Empress Driftwood signs made by yachts visiting Wallace Island 58

Hotel and Parliament, enjoying Victoria’s inner harbour. We departed the following morning for Saltspring Island in the Canadian Gulf Islands with its popular Saturday farmers’ market and wealth of great restaurants. We took advantage of the market to stock up with fresh vegetables and dined at the wonderful Treehouse Café, taking in an evening of food, libations and live music. Next morning we continued north to anchor in Connover Cove on Wallace Island. Entering Connover’s narrow entrance, flanked by a large unmarked reef, provided a great opportunity to make use of the Nantucket Sounder* from the bow. One of the great traditions of Wallace Island is to carve your boat’s name on a piece of driftwood and hang it in the abandoned house ashore. Many update their boards to mark their annual return. Trails can be found along the island’s entire length, offering a chance to get ashore and do a bit of hiking. Slipping out the following morning, we sailed north to the infamous Dodd Narrows which mark the northern end of the Gulf Islands. It is a clear delimiter between the lower islands and the more open waters of the Strait of Georgia, which cruisers must transit to reach Desolation Sound and all points north. Over the following days we sailed up Vancouver Island’s east coast, stopping in both Deep Bay and Comox, before pressing north into the Discovery Islands west of Desolation Sound. As we approached Quadra Island two humpback whales surfaced on either side of Harlequin, less than 10m off each beam, both showing their flukes as they dove deep. We quickly turned the engine off and waited some minutes before continuing our entry into Hariot Bay, ensuring the whales were well clear. After refuelling we made our way up a windless Hoskyn Channel, exploring Village Bay and Crescent Channel before stopping in Hjorth Bay ahead of the Beazley Channel transit the following morning. We rose early to transit the Beazley Passage and Surge Narrows, the approach to the eastern entrance to the Octopus Islands Marine Provincial Park, but opted to continue to the narrow northern entrance. This choice was vindicated later that afternoon when a yacht ran hard aground on one of the many reefs at the eastern entrance. Entering the first small bay, Harlequin anchored in 5m where we remained for two glorious nights. * A bronze leadline with the usual recess for grease or vaseline.

In the Octopus Islands 59

After a brief two-day rest we transited the two Okisollo Channel rapids into Discovery Passage and Johnstone Strait. Our plans were to put the latter as far in our rear view mirror as possible before a forecast gale arrived. This would give us an opportunity to make a quick tour of the Broughton Archipelago and better inform our return journey. Sailing with the 3-knot ebb we enjoyed unusually smooth water and a stable breeze, though throughout the day catabatic blasts tumbled down the steep mountainsides into the Strait. A first for Rieka. As evening approached we slipped into Billygoat Bay on Helmcken Island, situated directly between Current and Race Passages. The weather had deteriorated and the tide had changed to our disadvantage. With a light sprinkle of rain already falling we ate a simple dinner and fell quickly to sleep, with plans to rise early and take advantage of the tide to push north into Havannah Channel, the southern ‘back entrance’ to the Broughton Archipelago. 0430 came all too soon but with a beautiful sunrise. Rain had washed the accumulation of salt from the decks and canvas, as well as the residue from a fire on the far side of Vancouver Island. A favourable tide sped us out of Current Passage into western Johnstone. By 0800 we had made the turn past the Broken Islands and into Havannah Channel. The Havannah entry into the Broughtons is notable for strong currents, especially in Chatham Channel where they can easily run at 4∙5 knots. Rather than fight the current and risk opposing traffic in the narrow channel, we dropped anchor in Burial Cove just a couple miles from the entrance to Chatham Channel. Our patience was rewarded by a calm transit of the main lower channel and a swift ride up the remaining miles to the Blow Hole, the narrower channel guarding the east entry to Lagoon Cove where we planned to ride out the forecast gale. Lagoon Cove is famous for its warm hospitality and offers fresh water, fuel and a nightly happy hour that has become famous throughout the Broughtons. We arrived on 30th June and stayed for a couple of days, riding out the blow and feasting on spot prawns during happy hour. We departed on 2nd July in still windy conditions, sailing up Knight Inlet to the Tribune Channel. As we approached the upper channel the wind increased to nearly 30 knots and, on the ebb, the waves in the deep, narrow channel were also building quickly. We had hoped to make it all the way to Simoom Sound, 11 miles further down the Tribune Channel, but decided to duck into Wahkana Bay for the night. We slept well, surrounded by high peaks covered in lush forest. By morning the low had blown itself out and Tribune Channel was glassy, with advantageous currents all the way to Simoom. From Simoom we proceeded to Sullivan Bay, a popular stopover for fuel and provisions ahead of the next big leap north around the notorious Cape Caution. Fully provisioned, we departed in cold, dense fog hoping to make Blunden Harbor, but by 0800 the fog had lifted and conditions favoured pressing even further north. Radioing friends aboard MV Liberty, just a few miles behind, we agreed to meet later that afternoon in Skull Cove on Bramham Island to plan our next step north. By 1000, with Willoughby Rocks to port and Miller Group to starboard, we were once again enjoying a steady Pacific swell as Ripple Passage opened to embrace Queen Charlotte Sound and the Pacific. The approach to Skull Cove is littered with rocks and reefs, with strong tidal currents adding to the challenge. With patchy fog still an issue, we carefully threaded 60

The entrance to Skull Cove

through a maze of hazards under radar, also keeping a careful bow watch. Motoring through the outer reefs we often heard what we could not see, until we finally made the turn into Skull Cove’s narrow entrance. Minutes later the fog lifted, providing a beautiful view across the sun-splashed bay. An hour later, Liberty entered via the wide channel to the east.

Liberty at anchor in a misty Skull Cove

Signs remind the visitor how far they are from help in case of injury That evening we downloaded fresh GRIB files and carefully evaluated them against both ASCAT* and observed conditions over the previous days. Predictions were for light winds building to 12 knots in the afternoon, with good sea state – very favourable for our rounding of Cape Caution. The following morning, an hour after Liberty as we had waited for more wind, we left Skull Cove in a light but building breeze, sailing northwest to gain sea room. By 1300 we had Cape Caution some 8 miles off our starboard beam and eased sheets. Reaching in towards Rivers Inlet we continued on into Klaquaek Channel, threading the narrow entrance into the anchorage in Big Frypan Bay on Penrose Island. * The Advanced Scatterometer or ASCAT is derived from C-Band radar and is the only active instrument on the European Space Agency’s polar-orbiting Metop satellites. It transmits pulses of microwave energy towards the sea surface and receives and records the resulting echoes for transmission to the ground station. Its prime objective is to measure wind speed and direction over the ocean. Remote Hakai Beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean

That evening we motored near to Rivers Inlet aboard Liberty, catching two beautiful Chinook salmon which were quickly on the grill when we returned to the anchorage. We spent the evening in splendid isolation, feasting on fresh salmon, drinking wine and making plans for the following morning’s sail to Hakai. In the morning we motored in glassy conditions to the north exit of Klaquaek Channel. At Addenbroke Point we were able to hoist sail as we entered Fitz Hugh Sound, leaving Liberty in our wake to pursue more salmon. Hakai is a popular stopover for cruisers on the inside passage and the evening brought the first truly crowded anchorage in weeks. The Hakai Institute on Calvert Island conducts longterm scientific research along the coastal margin of British Columbia, welcoming cruising yachts and allowing tender access for those wishing to explore ashore. From the dock, a well-maintained trail leads through the forested peninsula to a beautiful sand beach facing the Pacific Ocean. The trail system continues for miles in both directions from the main beach to multiple other remote beaches. The coastal fauna and geography are breathtaking.

The area north of Hakai is incredibly complex and requires extreme caution After two wonderful days of adventuring ashore we grew restless, so ventured north through Hakai Passage into a geographically complex area with thousands of tiny islets and reefs scattered over nearly 300 square miles of exposed coast. We would see only one other yacht along this entire expanse of coastline. This part of the coast requires attentive, cautious navigation. Survey data, even on the official S63 charts used in our primary navigation laptop, indicate the category of confidence for the area as U, or ‘not assessed’. A diligent bow watch is advised, with careful attention to both the charts and the water surface for signs of danger. 63

Harlequin’s anchorage near Dodwell Island After crossing Hakai Passage we entered the narrow Ward Channel, turning to port into the Nalau Passage. Continuing west via the narrow passage between Hunter Island and Stirling Island, we exited into Kildidt Sound and open water, crossed the Serpent Group and, south of Lancaster Reef, entered the Kittyhawk Group and Brydon Channel. We anchored in the small south-facing inlet at the south end of Hurricane Island in 35m, over a mixture of thick clay-like mud, small gravel and shells. The following morning we motored south into the Spider Anchorage, turning directly north between Spitfire and Hurricane Islands into the Spitfire Channel. These channels narrow to just tens of metres in some places, with numerous rocks and kelp beds. Transiting this area at high slack water is strongly advised, as tidal currents and unmarked rocks are always a risk. We exited Spitfire Channel’s western entry into the open water of Queen Charlotte Sound and raised sail, falling off on a beam reach to the north and leaving the Simmonds Group to port an hour later. We then passed between the Prince Group and Dodwell Island before lowering sail and entering the passage north of Dodwell to anchor deep in a tangle of reefs and islets at 52°00’∙95N 128°13’∙12W.

The Kitasoo Nation Big House at Klemtu 64

Next morning we departed for Bella Bella via the Hunter Channel. The area in and around Bella Bella is well described in the local guides and marina facilities, fuel, chandlery, provisions and emergency services are all available. From there our journey north gained momentum. We made it north to Klemtu via the Seaforth Channel and Milbanke Sound in a single day, benefiting from moderate, favourable winds, before veering to the north along the Finlayson Channel for the last three hours. Rounding the northern tip of Cone Island we came south to the anchorage at Klemtu in front of the Kitasoo Nation Big House as the sun fell below the horizon and darkness enveloped all but the glow of the lights on the Big House.

At anchor in Khutze Inlet, where we saw our first grizzly The next day brought more good weather during which we transited Tolmie Channel into Graham Reach and up into Khutze Inlet. The channel from Klemtu to Split Head at the base of Tolmie requires planning as the tidal streams and reef at Split Head can be treacherous, especially if wind and current are opposed, but we timed it perfectly and spilled easily into Tolmie with the tide. By noon the current was against us, but we pressed on into Khutze, anchoring in 35m not far from Liberty, with an unbelievable view of the river and snow-capped peaks up the valley. We arose the next morning to the sound of the nearby waterfall and wisps of cotton-like fog clinging to the trees. The entire scene was incredibly mystical. This lasted for most of the morning, breaking to a glorious sunny day that had us peeling off layer after layer as the temperature rose to nearly 27°C. By 0900 we had entered Frazier Reach and by noon were clear into Ursula Channel, northbound to Bishop Bay, where we would stop for the evening to enjoy the hot springs. Just past Kid Point a large school of white-sided dolphins came to play, following us up the east flank of Gribbell Island. As we neared Riordan Point at the 65

A misty morning in Khutze Inlet entrance to Bishop Bay we were inundated by hundreds of horseflies. Armed with our trusty electric mosquito racquet we thought we’d make quick work of them, but horseflies are shockingly durable, taking two or three zaps before falling to the deck. By sunset the horseflies had gone, but only after our brief soak in the hot springs was long over. I have yet to discover what conditions bring these nasty critters out in such massive numbers, but Bishop Bay hot springs would be a wonderful stop if it wasn’t for these pests. Next day we continued our travels north into Boxer Reach, rounding Mary, Eva and Staniforth Points to enter the Gardner Canal. Rounding Staniforth Point was an emotional moment. With the weeks-long journey postponed for many years, here it was before us. Only 46 miles remained before we would finally set eyes on the ‘source of the milky blue waters’. We continued up the Gardner Canal past Rix Island to the entrance to Kiltuish Inlet, a shallow fjord offering the last easy anchorage before reaching the Kitlope Estuary. The entrance is narrow and winding, with shallows on either side that dry at low tide – prime grizzly bear habitat, rich with shoulderhigh grasses down to the water’s edge. Steep peaks rise up to heights of 1400–1650m (±10,000ft), creating a narrow amphitheatre that provides safety in all weathers, with secure holding in just 15–30m depths. Soon after making the turn into Kiltuish Inlet we were once again besieged by horseflies. If the previous night had been bad, this was horsefly Armageddon. Navigating the narrow channel while fighting them off was a challenge, but we made it through the initial narrows and had long enough to put on more protection and re-arm ourselves with the electric racquet before navigating a second narrows, just tens of metres wide and with only a metre or so under the keel. We came to anchor in 12m over solid, sticky mud. The horsefly onslaught continued so we retreated below until sundown. 66

The complex, shallow entry to Kiltuish Inlet Exiting Kiltuish Inlet and continuing down the Gardner Canal requires careful timing, as current reversal in the channel comes well after the narrow inlet drains. With no published data available, we chose to exit the inlet at high tide to ensure sufficient keel clearance, then re-anchor just to the east of the entrance for four hours before beginning the long run down Gardner Canal to Chief Matthews Bay. In the Gardner Canal the tall granite walls grew ever higher and waterfalls poured into the channel from every granite face, the water becoming richer and richer in glacial milk with every mile. As we approached the entrance to Matthews Bay the desire to reach the Kitlope overcame us and we abandoned plans for Chief Matthews Bay, pressing on into Whidbey Reach towards our goal. Eight miles later we rounded the final point into a bay surrounded by granite peaks, with two wide valleys radiating out from the main Kitlope estuary. An enormous waterfall in Whidbey Reach as we near The Kitlope 67

Beautiful Chief Matthews Bay

Two miles from the river we spotted multiple large vessels anchored close inshore, but as the distance closed it became clear that these ‘vessels’ were enormous oldgrowth cedar trees, once hundreds of feet tall, lying on their sides with their root balls projecting 25–40ft (8–12m) skyward, carried to this incredible resting place by spring floods. Early in the day lightning had sparked at least two small fires in the valley to the north and the estuary was pungent with the smell of wet, charred wood. We set the anchor nearly a mile from the river mouth, barred from further progress by shallows less than 100m from our anchorage. Extensive silt shallows extend more than a mile from the mouth of the river and support a veritable jungle of shoulder-high grasses that comprise some of the richest grizzly habitat in North America. An old-growth cedar tree in the estuary at The Kitlope Heritage Conservancy

Harlequin in Fiordland No sooner had we anchored than Tom and Nancy aboard Liberty deployed their tender for a run up the river. That evening’s excursion was the first of three days exploring the estuary by dinghy, forging further up the river on each high tide in the hope of making it all the way to Lake Kitlope. Despite repeated attempts, however, by day three the shallowing river halted further progress. Evidence of cougars and multiple grizzly bears made pushing on by foot inadvisable. We returned to the boats a little disappointed, but for more than three days we had not seen a single boat or human being. We were utterly alone in a wilderness few will have the privilege to witness. We’d seen grizzly bears, 5000ft (1500m) granite peaks rising from the sea on all sides, and 800-year-old trees swept by tremendous forces to the mouth of a river so completely choked with rock flour that visibility extended only an inch below the surface. The following morning we would reluctantly begin the long run back to Hartley Bay. Overnight rains brought badly needed moisture and stamped out any remaining hot spots from the fires. As we hauled up our anchor dense fog clung to the steep cliffs, forming a beautiful false ceiling and softly illuminating the icy blue waters. Over the next six days we made our way down Douglas Channel, back into Fraser Reach, Finlayson Channel and, once again, Klemtu. In the weeks that followed we explored the area of the Great Bear known as Fiordland, revisited Bella Bella and slowly made our way south into the Broughtons and, eventually, the Discovery Islands. Our cruise to the inside of the inside passage had more than met our expectations. We’d finally managed to make it into the Kitlope, one of our many remaining cruising bucket list places, yet all it did was fuel a desire to return. Perhaps we can carve out a little time on a future return trip from Alaska. The Kitlope would be extraordinary in its fall colours! 69

FROM THE ARCHIVES The Ups and Downs of Sailing Gwen Skinner (When this account was first published, in Flying Fish 1972/2, the Skinners were a recentlyelected family of New Zealanders (husband, wife and 11-year-old son) who had been cruising the world for the previous four years in Swanhilde, their home-built 40ft ferro-cement yacht. Gwen wrote a book about their wanderings entitled Swanhilde: Across the World in a Concrete Boat which was published in New Zealand by Hodder and Stoughton and may still be available secondhand. First Gwen recounts some of their Mediterranean experiences, followed in Flying Fish 1973/1 – which also announced the election of the first lady flag officer – with an account of their transatlantic passage.) Swanhilde had had impossible weather patterns in the Mediterranean. Just as ‘they’ had told us, it either suddenly blew like hell or there was nothing – literally nothing! On the heel of Italy, our faithful Henry Perkins decided to call the whole affair off. He’d motored us non-stop from France except for a wild squall off Italy’s south coast, a distance approaching 1000 miles, and he was as fed up with the windless conditions as we were. Taking his cue from the country of his origin, he staged a strike. When the motor heat-gauge needle swooped round and almost disappeared off the dash panel we knew he meant business. Instead of continuing across the Adriatic to Dubrovnik as we had planned, we looked over our left shoulders to the lights of Otranto only 2 miles to port and agreed to make the wisest move. We’d pull into the harbour for the night and continue the next day, having first administered soothing balm, or a lobotomy for Henry’s psychosis. According to our Perkins journal there was an agent in Italy. Morning light brought a sign on a shed on the dock into focus, stating that here in Otranto there was a subsidiary agency. The dinghy was lowered with all haste and Bernie rowed ashore. It was a national holiday in Italy. It gave us a chance to take stock of the situation and we weren’t very pleased with the result. We were certain the problem was a major one and all the song went out of us. Sitting there regarding Henry Perkins balefully, we could scarcely be connected with the breezy threesome who’d chugged around the coast quipping about the Italian Navy firing off meatballs and singing emotional, throat-tearing excerpts from Italian opera to the Italian dolphins which, incidentally, are decidedly short and fat! At this particular time of our voyaging we had exactly $150 and we simply could not afford repairs. In desperation we winched up the cockpit floor and attached pedestal and then, able to work on the motor which lives under it without suffocating in the tremendous heat, ordered a new head-gasket. It was rather like the ostrich burying its head in the sand. Even as we handed the sub-agent the precious and exorbitant $10 the gasket cost, we were hopeful we’d bought a cure and 99 percent certain that we hadn’t! We motored out of Otranto at 2200. Bernie had spent the whole afternoon frantically working on the motor. The agent had promised the gasket by 0900 and had delivered it 71

at 1430. It was already June 30th, and we had our next appointment with our ex-New Zealand friend Isabella Gordon on the dock at Dubrovnik on July 1st. Normally, with 150 miles to cover and Henry chugging us along at a comfortable 6 knots we’d have made it with about an hour to midnight, not that we would have expected Isabella to be waiting on the dock then! But the log was registering just 2 miles when the heatgauge needle again shot round to infinity, so we killed the motor. Bernie and I looked at each other hopelessly. There we were, 48 hours later almost to the minute, still watching Otranto lights over our left shoulders but this time without the optimism of two days before. ‘What a gorgeous bloody night,’ Bernie said, looking at the moon and following its silver streak of reflection in the still water. ‘There’s not even enough wind to blow us back to Otranto! What now?’ ‘There’s absolutely no point in going back anyway. If it cost us $10 for one headgasket you can imagine what major repairs would cost. We can’t get in touch with Isabella to tell her we’ll be late, so the sooner we start off the better. Bernie dear, it looks as though from here on, we’re ‘purist’ sailors!’ ‘Henry – why have you done this to us? 150 miles to go ... we’re only making 2 knots!’ ‘Oh, are we? I didn’t think we were moving at all.’ Suddenly I was gazing behind us, very alert. ‘Bernie! Look – a ship dead on our course! Oh, my God, this is when you miss old Henry, blast him!’ ‘There’s no way out of it – we’re hardly moving. We’ll have to put the spreader lights on and light ourselves up like a Christmas tree if they don’t seem to be changing course. Nothing we can do apart from that.’ Henry’s demise had created another terrible problem. Without him we had no way of keeping our refrigeration working. In the deep freeze we had a vast quantity of English pork sausages, genuine ‘bangers’, perhaps twelve pounds of them, the remainder of a generous gift from the galley of one of Her Majesty’s frigates. In Europe and, for that matter, in America also, we’d felt sadly deprived of our true ‘bangers’ and so, having received this large package of about 25lbs, we were savouring them and eating them as though each was made from pure gold. And now we were faced with the calamity of losing them. I wonder whether anyone else in the history of boating has cooked over 100 pork sausages while crossing the Adriatic in a 40ft sailing boat? There must be a place where curious ‘firsts’ are recorded and if there is, this surely must qualify. All of one day I laboured over the hot oven, dashing down periodically from watches to turn them over, ejecting one finished batch as I sweated in the windless heat and replacing them with another. As they cooled off I’d wrap them in suitable numbers in tin foil, wondering how in the world I was going to make 100 pre-cooked sausages seem interesting during the comparatively short period in which they would now have to be consumed! Poor Isabella, I thought, I hope you like sausages! Fifty-two hours after leaving Italy we still lay 20 miles southwest of Dubrovnik, once again utterly becalmed. Behind us, out to sea towards the Italian coast, raged a spectacular electrical storm with great demon’s forks of lightning that forced down so violently that they stayed shuddering in their angular pattern for a second or two before the thunder banged and slammed in. Ahead, the stillness and calm of a monastery lay illuminated by the moon. The coastal navigation lights blinked their monotonous 72

rhythm like monks counting beads. For 4 hours we’d lain there with the sails flopping. We rested along the cockpit seats, dozing intermittently then jerking awake to watch for coastal shipping. At 0300 a faint breeze began the merest chanting in the rigging. Stupefied with tiredness, we still struggled up and toyed with the sails. Half-an-hour later we were floating along at 3 knots. The wind built up, the seas with it, and by 1900 we were changing down sails, first the genoa for a working jib, then at 1915 we rolled the mainsail. By 2000 we were reduced to our small storm jib. ‘This is going to be bloody lovely – a full-bore ‘norther’ blowing when we make our first ‘purist’ entry without a motor!’ What a rotten break we were getting. Just before 0900 we were hurtling, close-hauled, down Dubrovnik Channel. Our themesong crossing the Adriatic so drearily, had been ‘I’d like to get you – on a slow boat to Dubrovnik...’. At one point when our lethargic 2 knots had suddenly increased to 3, our son Paul had suddenly yelled hysterically, ‘We’ve got a bow wave – we’d better reef!’ Now neither the song nor the comment applied. We were in the teeth of a fierce wind that built up over the high surrounding mountains and gusted into the gap, knocking Swanhilde down. For the first time in her 4½ half years of cruising she took water over the coamings into the cockpit. The gusts came and went; they’d flatten us, lighten away, then knock us down again, so that we swooped and zig-zagged, always swiftly and often with the speedometer registering 10 knots. A hill of bauxite piled beside its factory was blowing a steady stream of red dust from one side of the channel to the other. Bernie was on the foredeck making sure the anchor chain was ready to run. This was one time when there would be no chance to ‘do another turn’ or ‘have a look first’ ... there would be no prize for second! We were coming down to the line of boats now and felt no insult, only sympathy, for the few fellows who came out with extra fenders at our approach. In a flurry of efficiency, Bernie and Paul were forward dropping sails while I was rooted in a bath of apprehension to my post at the helm. ‘For heaven’s sake give me clear indications where you want me to go!’ I’d pleaded as Bernie left me. We, as with the majority of couples, have a system of hand motions and nods, all well-tried and inconspicuous, which are intended to take the screaming and yelling out of tricky arrivals. They’re also directed towards creating an envious and admiring line-up on the boats already comfortably docked. Usually all this professionalism works well, but there are occasions which come to all of us when the ordered succession of events gets off-skew! Then, when the customarily soprano voice (contralto if she’s forward working a manual anchor winch) gets around to desperately yelling – ‘what do you mean? I thought that’s what you wanted!’. She’s answered by a series of wrung faces and furious, urgent, soundless instructions, for invariably at the moments that matter her husband is standing downwind! These spicy interludes counter-balance the beautiful hours of deck-dozing ... the one makes you appreciate the other! I would willingly have swapped places with almost anyone I can think of as we flew down the channel and, still making a flamboyant 7 knots with only the mainsail up, made a spectacular sweep into the wind, dropped our anchor outside the boats exactly in the place we’d have chosen at 3 knots with Henry Perkins before he got so cantankerous and pronounced ourselves Arrived. ‘Whew! That was hair-raising – for them as well as us!’ There were a few hands raised in welcome but, not knowing that we had no alternative but to sail in, there were also 73

a few dour faces on the dock. We hardly blamed them. It was not the day to show off. ‘Boy! I’ll bet that was as good as a dose of salts!’ Paul giggled, eyeing the belligerent boat owners. The most smiling face and welcoming calls, though, were coming from a slim figure on the dock wearing navy slacks, a striped shirt and waving a bright red scarf. ‘Am I glad to see you!’ Isabella called through cupped hands. ‘That’s nothing to how glad we are to see you! We’re just going to drop the dinghy over and come stern-to with it. Isabella – wait ’til we tell you the sad story of our lives! By the way, how are you on sausages ... we’ve got a real treat to make up for being late ... real English ‘bangers’! Trade Winds across the Atlantic After finishing with the Mediterranean we headed down to Tenerife in the Canary Islands. We’d stocked up over at Ceuta, Spanish Morocco (and had two dozen rotten eggs on board to prove it). We’d paid a visit to Tangiers and stayed at the Tangier Yacht Club. (‘Free, Sir, if you have a card from another Club. Ah, I see you have no Moroccan flag? That will be £1!’) We had managed to scrub Swanhilde’s bottom there because the tide recedes dramatically from the Yacht Club wall and twice every 24 hours we’d automatically been careened in about a metre of water. The first time it happened we were perturbed. The second time, Bernie made the best of an uncomfortable situation, put his swimming trunks on and went over the side to scrub off the boat’s exposed port flank. We anticipated the third time, and when the thumping started along the keel we tied the mast over to a post on the jetty, sat ourselves along the port side and waited until she began to tilt, leaving the starboard side high and dry. Then our skipper did a sterling job of cleaning again, so that in the end it turned out to be £1 well spent! Actually, it was well spent in more ways than one. Tangiers is renowned for pilfering, and we’d been warned by others in Gibraltar to keep someone riding shotgun if we left our boat. But at the Club, two Moroccan watchmen sat all night in their dark brown, hooded shrouds like part of a sinister organisation – Ku-Klux-Klansmen or a couple of ancient witches – their sharp, lean faces and long beaked noses silhouetted against the clubhouse as they smoked, talked and sat hunched in their enveloping yardage. The club custodian was most helpful and friendly, and insisted upon guiding us from the waterfront up through the fascinating maze of narrow streets where the bazaar is located to the main square and the fresh produce market. The bazaar peddlers are very insistent and amusingly eloquent in several languages. Even small children trying to sell us leather belts and Moroccan hooked knives or silver necklaces could whip through half a dozen languages in quick succession with their wheedling ... ‘Look lovely on you, lady!’ until they found the one that brought a response. This was no gimmick. Those wiry, undernourished, black-eyed little sales-urchins had been staying alive for years on their sales to the tourists. Morocco has always been tremendously cosmopolitan. Sheer necessity had given them this higher education, though quite possibly many couldn’t write their own names. On our return to Swanhilde after one of our forays into the bazaar, two small boys, one about 9 years of age and the other possibly a thin 12, were each trying to outdo the other by selling us a plaited leather belt, one of several they had over their arms. The wares were identical. The elder boy, by dint of extra size, was dominating the bargaining. The younger one, sensing this, employed cunning. Ducking under the 74

bigger boy’s arm, he took me confidentially by the elbow ... ‘His are plastic!’ he said to me, ‘I give you bargain!’. On this first excursion into Tangiers town with our willing guide from the Club we were quite overwhelmed when, having brought us safely through the tangle of streets, explained the exchange rate and shown us the bank where we could change our money, he told us, ‘You must never pay what the sellers ask at first. If you see something that you wish to buy, you pay exactly half what they ask. It is what they expect, but first there is the bargaining!’ ... he finally looked up at a small second-storey building in the square, and said ... ‘That is where I live. I would like you to come for coffee and to meet my wife and my mother-in-law’. It was a small apartment by European standards. We entered it up a narrow winding stairway and along a hallway. In a fairly large room off to the right his wife had a fourchair hairdressing salon with modern magazine cut-outs of the latest hair styles. It was difficult to imagine just what hair styles the Moroccan women had, for most of them still retained the ancient fashion of the enveloping caftan and sheer fabric covering the lower half of the face. When our kindly guide’s wife appeared she was short and plump with lovely, luminous, pale olive skin. She was wearing slacks and her hair was dressed in a modern, soft version of a Dutch-boy cut. She had had her first baby, a son, two weeks before. More often Moroccan men and women are tall and slim. On the left were the sitting room and dining room, both very small and opening one into the other. A round table with a beautiful embroidered cloth was laid formally. The curtains and settee coverings were of shiny palest green embossed silk and most of the room’s decorative effects were things that glittered. The baby’s grandmother was crocheting a quilt for the pram in bright yellow, red and blue rosettes. Traditionally babies are carried around on the mother’s back amongst the swaths of enveloping material, but our friend was keen that we should know his wife was modern and no longer wore the long gown or the face covering which stems from religious beliefs, that his mother-in-law still retained the old style outside the house (she looked like anyone’s granny getting around in her cotton house frock), but that they were followers of the ancient religion. That same religion was better than any alarm clock in Tangiers. At 5am the weird wailing voice would start up from the mosque in the centre of town, the penetrating monotone invading every hidden corner of the countryside. ‘Good grief, they start early!’ I said, the first morning when the wailing started. Every dog in Tangiers also faced Mecca and barked in obeisance! But now our charming grandmother was bringing in coffee. For our host and hostess this time had a religious significance and apologetically they could not join us but sat watching us sip the strong black Moroccan coffee from paper-thin china cups. There were also three dainty, beautifully-cooked cakes in the shapes of small rolls, each with a sweet dried fig in the centre and rolled in confectioner’s sugar. With much laughter the wife wrote our names in Arabic characters. The next day our friend visited us on Swanhilde and wrote lengthily in Arabic in our visitor’s book, adding our names again at the end of it at our request. The morning we left Tangiers we bargained our decrepit old bicycle for one of those wonderful, long, copper-and-brass horns with a tassel. In Moroccan pictures the leading Arab horseman is invariably blowing one as he charges full pelt across the hot desert sand. Thus equipped we set off for Tenerife. Taking good advice again, we left the 75

African coast and cleared it by about 60 miles before heading south to the Canaries. Earlier in the season several boats trying to make down the African coastline had retreated back to Gibraltar from around Casablanca when westerlies and southwesterlies pounding in over the Continental Shelf had almost destroyed them. ‘Get clear of the Shelf,’ we’d been advised over and over again – ‘Get outside it altogether. You might be lucky and have nothing rotten down there at all, but every year without fail some boats get smashed up or in great strife down that coast!’ It was three days before we were due to arrive in Tenerife, but what was this? Orange dust all around. Orange powder straight off the Sahara. A phenomenon, the forewarning of an out-of-season hurricane? At first you don’t know what it is. Then you see it settling on your proud white sails and making an overlay on your cabin top. A shower, and the orange sand is turned to dripping red mud. It dries and cakes. When you walk around the deck you leave footprints like those painted imprints on a road. The sun is so hazed over it’s no more difficult to look it in the eye than it is to gaze at the moon. Our fixes are all over the place ... the meridian sight puts us heaven-knows-where. ‘Not in the right place, I’ll bet a grain of sand!’ Bernie says in disgust. Tenerife is over 12,000ft (3700m) high. You should see it from 40 miles away on a clear day. Even on a hazy day, you expect to see it sooner or later. We’d run our log distance and according to our ‘navigation’ we were heading towards the channel between Fuerteventura and Gran Canaria. After our last fix, in which we had little faith, we’d decided we’d better divert to Las Palmas since we seemed to be well to the east of our course and the evening was drawing on. Then solid land came up to the southwest out of the choking, eye-scouring orange dust – Tenerife, only 15 miles away. At first we could only see the base of its northern tip, not the towering height which should have identified it. Shortly afterwards, the first navigation light on its northern point blinked out a pattern of identification. We rounded the breakwater of Santa Cruz into calm water after pelting in, closehauled, in a south-southwesterly blowing about 30 knots (which was helping to put the sand back on the Sahara). The more we talked about the problem around Darsena Pesquera, the fishing harbour north of Santa Cruz where the yachts usually tie up, the less worried we became. ‘It’s the Sahara dust, friend*. Gives you a false horizon. And also there’s a natural magnetic phenomenon around parts of these islands. Pity you got a real bad ‘orange’ day – usually you can spot Tenerife half a day away’. Thus mollified, we set off across the Atlantic and had no more navigation problems. We’d know in future that you need a crystal ball not a sextant if the Sahara is up to its tricks. What a joy it was to be back to the wide, large rollers of the Atlantic after a year of the Mediterranean’s hotch-potch! We made out to the recommended position of 25°N 25°W to pick up the northeast trades. The easterly winds were still blowing the ‘bloody orange Sahara sand’ over us, though far less severely. Amazingly we were still seeing traces of it across the lower horizon and veiling the sun when we were 1000 miles away from Africa. * The harmattan, responsible for thousands of wrecks on both the Canaries and the Cape Verde islands before the days of electronic navigation. Its smell is also distinctive, being reminiscent of childhood visits to the camel enclosure at the zoo. 76

By 25°/25° we were bowling along at 7 knots with easterlies behind us. We ran the whole way to our target, Guadeloupe, with the main and the No 1 genoa guyed out as twins. Occasionally the wind would swing briefly into the northeast but more often it went southeast. The only sail changing ever necessary was to gybe over. There were those huge seas behind us, however, and we rolled like the son-of-a-gun. Cooking was disastrous. We were getting along at a fine old clip averaging 6½ knots. There were several days when we made 170 miles and were just a little disappointed when the tally showed only 160. Obviously we were going to arrive at Guadeloupe in plenty of time for our Christmas dinner appointment with our French friends the Robédats whom we’d first met in Tahiti. They had shown us tremendous hospitality in Toulon earlier in the year and had most conveniently been transferred to Guadeloupe a couple of months before we were due to arrive there. In Tenerife when we’d said, ‘We’re leaving on 1st December and we’re going to be at Pointe-à-Pitre for Christmas dinner’, some of the other yachtsmen had openly doubted that we’d make it in time. ‘You’ve got to allow anywhere from 21 to 28 days,’ they told us. Well, here was that old ‘Skinner luck’ again. We made the 2500 miles in 16 days and 23 hours. It was beautiful sailing, but uncomfortable. The days were clear from the halfway mark onwards though there were often small patches of rain during the night – and unlike many crews making the Atlantic crossing we saw the nights, for as usual our automatic pilot was out of commission. We’d discovered that two photo-cells were finished and we couldn’t renew them in Gibraltar where we found it difficult to get anything of that sort. While we lay in Toulon Bernie had fabricated a steering vane. There was still much to do to it as we travelled around the Mediterranean and not much steady wind to try it out. Consequently, as we hopefully attached the huge rudder designed to steer the boat in a sheltered cove on the south coast of the island of Hierro, the westernmost of the Canaries, we were only experimenting. The wretched contraption proved only semi-effective. It was a temperamental piece of equipment. It worked fairly well when the wind was on the beam but could not cope when it was aft. Then we would stay on course for a short time, shoot as much as 40° off course, correct, then shoot off on the opposite tangent. Nevertheless, for the first week we used it at night so that we could go to sleep and, amazingly enough, our fixes were not very different from our dead reckoning positions. The steering vane’s wild leaps and hare-brained excursions apparently averaged out in the overall scheme of things. On the seventh night it broke altogether, and from then on we worked constant watches between the three of us, for Paul, now almost 12, was quite capable of standing night watches. In retrospect it was a wonder that Bernie and I could handle these. Just before we left Tenerife we’d ‘suffered’ hospitality of major proportions at the hands of the captain and crew of a large Russian ocean trawler which had been ploughing up and down the African coast non-stop for five months and which was about to return to Russia for a well-earned rest. As we’d waited on the wharf for the supermarket van with our supplies, already half-an-hour overdue, we eased our boredom by watching the activity on the Russian boat. Soon we were in the middle of one of those impossible conversations, this time more hopeless than usual as Russian is not a language you can ‘pick up’, and no other you’re likely to have a smattering of bears the slightest resemblance to it. Before we could say ‘help’ we were being escorted down one of the steel passages 77

to the captain’s cabin. There, two hours later, he was still plying us mercilessly with Russian brandy, straight vodka, unfermented wine, schnapps-like liqueur that burned a second channel down to our anguished stomachs, raw fish, pungent garlic sausage, hunks of grey-coloured bread which I can only describe as ‘raw’ bread – and the most delicately flavoured sardines which he insisted upon placing in my mouth, two at a time, with a fork. I look back upon it as an evening spent with sardine oil running non-stop down my chin. Paul had his pockets stuffed with toffees and a great paper bag of them was thrust under his arm as we left. For several days after clearing Hierro we’d call for a ‘communist’ sweet! The Captain gave us two beautifully illustrated paperback books about Russia and Russian tourist attractions, travel facilities and much Lenin-oriented data – in English. It was some time after leaving the ship before we could focus well enough to read it. Thus with Russian hospitality, Sahara dust, a broken semi-steering vane and much spilled soup behind us, we sighted the island of La Desirade which lies east of Guadeloupe and were abeam of it at 0200 with a full moon. With much food and water still aboard Swanhilde the island didn’t have quite the same implications for us as it had had for Christopher Columbus when he so named it, but we were glad to have reached the West Indies just the same. Then ahead we could see Pointe des Chateaux, the eastern tip of Grande Terre, poking up out of the sea like broken black teeth. With the dawn we ran along the south coast of Grande Terre, watching the cluster of lights fade on Saint-François and Sainte-Anne and the rotating red light on the little islet of Gosier become less of a focal point as the foaming water at its base and the rocks showed up. Then we were picking our way through the buoyed passage, shoals close on either side, as the pale, shallow surrounding water turned an amazing luminous turquoise with the rising sun. We’d arrived in Pointe-à-Pitre.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. TS Eliot, from Little Gidding, Four Quartets 78

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79 A SELECTION OF THE BERTHON BLUEWATER CRUISING FLEET

EXPLORING THE GALAPAGOS Neil McCubbin (Neil, a long-term resident of Canada, first wrote for Flying Fish way back in 2009 when he described Milvina’s passage from the US to his native Scotland. In 2015 he followed this with an account of the previous summer’s voyage to Spitzbergen. Clearly that was enough of cold waters as we now rejoin them in the Pacific. Milvina is a Passoa 47 (14∙3m), an aluminium centreboard cutter. Her hull and all the aluminium work was completed in France by Garcia, but she was finished by Neil and his wife Helen in their backyard in Quebec and launched in 2004. She has a beam of 4∙3m (14ft) and draws about 1∙1m with the centreboard up and 2∙2m with it down. She had varying crew while in the Galapagos, including Helen, Heather Tyler, her husband Andre, her brother Mike, Neil and Helen’s son Michael and daughter-in-law Claire, and their two-year-old granddaughter Elise. Maximum crew at any one time was five.) Though made famous by Charles Darwin in the 1830s, the Galapagos were first

Mike and Kicker Rock

visited by Europeans in 1535 at which time they were apparently uninhabited. Largely ignored by the European colonisers, they came under Ecuador’s control without any significant conflict. Since the early days of cruising the Galapagos have been on the bucket list for most who pass through the Panama Canal, although many are put off by the excessive bureaucracy and high government fees levied. As best we could judge, rather under half the sailors who transit the Canal stop in the Galapagos. We are glad that we did, although we would probably not make a second visit if sailing west from Panama again. We also met a few yachts which had come from the west coast of North America, although the predominantly easterly winds make it a fairly tough passage. Our 900-mile run from Panama took six days, but had we not had a favourable current it would probably have taken ten. We found the winds in that area of the Pacific as light as they are reputed to be, but always favourable, and it was only so calm as to need the engine for about 24 hours. Crew for the passage were Mike and Heather Tyler, a brother and sister who first sailed with us in the Caribbean in 1979 and who have joined Milvina, mostly separately, in multiple cruises since then. On the advice of Claire Glasspool, an OCC member who preceded us by a couple of years, we arranged to arrive at the north end of Isla de San Cristóbal at daylight to enjoy the scenery along the coast and circumnavigate Kicker Rock, which lies about halfway down the island’s northwest coast. Isla de San Cristóbal Yachts are required to enter the Galapagos at Puerto Baquerizo Moreno – more commonly known as ‘Wreck Bay’ – at the southwest end of Isla de San Cristóbal, the easternmost island in the archipelago. We arrived several days ahead of our intended date and our agent was rather upset when we e-mailed him from three days out that we would arrive on a Friday. At first he wanted us to hold off until Monday to avoid upsetting the officials, but then he relented and as many officials as there were sealions on the dock steps came to inspect Milvina. They were very friendly and all the paperwork took less than an hour. Most of the questions were quite brief and our medical examination took under 30 seconds for the whole crew. A young lady in a 81

Landfall on San Cristóbal

wetsuit took a quick dive to check the cleanliness of Milvina’s bottom and pronounced us acceptable. A few boats have reportedly been sent 50 miles offshore to clean up. There are no marinas of any use to cruisers in the Galapagos, but the anchorage in Wreck Bay is good. The use of dinghies is prohibited but there are plenty of water taxis at $1 a ride. The dinghy prohibition is claimed to be to protect the sealions and turtles. It certainly inhibited the usual casual socialising between boats, and also the occasional speeding half-wits that are a problem in some anchorages. There were fewer than a dozen cruising boats in the anchorage. Sealions on the dock steps at Puerto Baquerizo Moreno (Wreck Bay) 82

The first thing we noticed on going ashore was the number of sealions lying around the waterfront, the beach and the docks. They also occupied most of the benches along the waterfront path. They were about half the size of those I have seen in San Francisco and in Chile, and were quite unworried by people – we could walk within a foot of them. The nearest we got to an ‘attack’ from one of them was when Helen was nipped gently, without breaking skin, when she came very close to hitting one with her foot. Mostly they moved out of our way, occasionally with annoyed grunts. They love to climb on the boats, and even though we kept our stern platform blocked with fenders some still tried to join the crew.

New crew coming aboard, San Cristóbal

Angel Fish at Kicker Rock Puerto Baquerizo Moreno is a pleasant town with a number of bars and restaurants and basic food shopping. As in all the islands the restaurants were good and inexpensive, although we did walk by a few small but very pricey hotels. We took a local taxi (they are all crew-cab pickup trucks) to the high point on the only cross-island road and hiked up to the flooded crater of an adjacent extinct volcano. It is the largest expanse of fresh water 83

in the Galapagos, but even so is under a kilometre (a little over half a mile) in diameter. It was popular with cormorants and frigate birds, which dived into the water to wash off dried salt. We Hammerhead also enjoyed a few sharks at Kicker Rock hikes close to town and swam from beaches within walking distance, sharing them with friendly sealions and turtles. We had a good dive to see the hammerhead sharks around Kicker Rock. The Galapagos water is quite cloudy and only about 20°–24°C (68°–75°F) due to the cold, nutrient-rich water coming up from the south which keeps the algae population healthier than divers would like. The high bio-productivity of the water was confirmed by rapid growth on the hull and a fair amount of plant life on the turtles’ backs, something we have not seen anywhere else. Isla Floreana Officially, cruising yachts can visit only the islands of San Cristóbal, Isabela and Santa Cruz, but we were permitted to stop unofficially at Isla Floreana, the archipelago’s only other inhabited island, a couple of times. It is quite undeveloped and is rarely visited by cruising yachts. We found the local people extremely friendly and particularly enjoyed the local soccer games played very enthusiastically under A penguin swims around Milvina at Isla Floreana their own intriguing rules. Floreana is home to some Galapagos penguins and we had a few swimming around our boat at anchor. Ashore we saw a number of semi-wild tortoises, which are prevented from wandering too far by a low wall. On both visits we were the only yacht or tourists on the island. The island has a bizarre history, having been settled in the 1920s and ’30s by several German families who considered the island to be a modern Eden. Initially they lived 84

Pre-European carvings on Isla Floreana in a cave, which we hiked up to, then built houses and a tiny hotel. Later ‘Satan came to Eden’, as described in a book and film* and several of the paradise-seekers died or disappeared. We found signs of pre-European work carved high up in the hillsides of Floreana, demonstrating that although the Galapagos were uninhabited when the first Europeans arrived they had, previously, been inhabited. The famous Post Office Bay is on Floreana. We could have hiked there, but were not permitted to go by boat without hiring a guide. It is clearly over-visited by tourists on day trips from Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz. Isla Isabela After a few days anchored on the west coast of Floreana, we motored, with a 5 knot following wind, to Puerto Villamil, the only town on the 80-mile long Isla Isabela. Entry to the anchorage is not too clear on the chart, but we had noted several other boats on AIS and recorded their positions, effectively creating a track. Once in, the anchorage is well protected, but it is necessary to stay about a mile from the town dock, near the Islote las Tintoreras, to avoid rocks. Fortunately dinghies are welcome. * The Galapagos Affair: Satan came to Eden, released in 2013. Watch the trailer on https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2960450/. Nil’s home-made anchorage chartlet for Puerto Villamil, Isla Isabela

The Wall of Tears, Isla Isabela

The Galapagos National Park’s policy is to avoid developing Isla Isabela, so there are only a few miles of roads and those only near the town. Even so, we ate well in local restaurants and had no problem buying fresh food. It was a prison colony until 1959 and was probably never visited by cruising yachts in that era. The only sign of the prison colony that still remains is the Wall of Tears, a huge dry stone wall built for no other purpose than to make the prisoners work, many dying in the process. Access is by a nice road/trail along the shore, with some interesting side trips, better done on a bike than on foot. We gave up on our first attempt to reach the wall because we were so dehydrated, but returned with lots of drinking water.

Tortoises cooling off Most of the island is high, with a lava plain a few miles wide between the port and the hills. The island’s main tourist attraction is to swim in Los Tuneles, a field of tunnels and shallow trenches in the lava plain several miles northwest of the port. We spent a couple of very enjoyable hours swimming amongst the tunnels and walking on the lava. The water is full of fish and turtles and a few of the iconic blue-footed boobies nest there, oblivious to the wandering humans. An extinct crater on Isla Isabela

No question here as to who has right of way... As everywhere in the Galapagos, travel outside the towns is supposed to be only under the eyes of authorised guides. The official reason is to avoid irresponsible action by tourists though cynics assume it is to preserve their income. We found the guides very knowledgeable about the environment and they also corrected anyone making a mess or picking up ‘souvenir’ rocks etc. In the past tens of thousands of giant tortoises were taken from the islands by sailors and invasive predators killed many more. They are now prospering, however, mostly in sheltered areas though with some wandering in the roads and fields. I went on an interesting 10km walking tour of a large volcanic crater above the town. It is still active and last erupted along one wall in 2018. As in most of the islands, the coastal plain is very dry but the hills get a lot of rain. I was thoroughly soaked on all three trips I took up the hills. Santa Cruz We had a nice sail northeast to Puerto Ayora on the southeast coast of Santa Cruz, by far the most developed town on the island. It has a good anchorage, though again dinghies are prohibited. The town is pleasant with good, reasonably-priced restaurants and bars. We enjoyed visiting the Charles Darwin Research Station (https://www.darwinfoundation. org/en/about/cdrs) though it is smaller than its reputation had led us to expect. 88

The island has a fair road network which we used a lot by bike, sometimes taking a taxi up into the hills to bike back down. It is pleasantly rural, with a couple of interesting lava tunnels to visit and the occasional tortoise wandering along the road and in the fields. The main beaches were reached via a pleasant, though hot and dry, path a few kilometres across the lava plain. We got very wet when we went up into the hills, while the anchorage and the beach were pleasantly sunny and dry. The small fish market in Puerto Ayora is equally popular with locals, tourists and wildlife alike. The pelicans and sealions show no fear of people and do not seem to know the rules about keeping several metres between wildlife and humans. There are many day tours, and a few longer ones, which visitors to Puerto Ayora can take. These include snorkelling and scuba diving, kayaking, hiking, sightseeing, riding and beach swimming. Many are of little interest to cruisers as we do these things frequently from our own boats, but some offer access to places in the Galapagos which are off-limits without a guide. The most ambitious tour we saw was a week living aboard a dive boat at Wolf and Darwin Islands, about 100 miles northwest of the main group. These islands have a large hammerhead shark population and reputedly offer spectacular diving. The tours are advertised online for around $8000 a week, but we found them being sold by local agencies for about half that, for more-or-less immediate departure. This was true of most of the major tours. At the other end of the price scale we went on a much-publicised ‘swim with the wildlife in a ravine’ visit to Las Grietas near Puerto Ayora. It involved a short, pleasant hike from town and cost only a few dollars, but the only wildlife was bikini-clad and there were far too many of them! Pelicans and a sealion begging in the fish market at Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz

After enjoying nearly two months in the Galapagos Milvina and her crew headed west for the 3000-mile hop to the Marquesas. PRACTICALITIES AND FORMALITIES  The reputation of the Galapagos for awkward bureaucracy and high government charges is well deserved. The total cost of all our permits, agents’ fees and government charges was about US $2600 per month (we stayed nearly two months).  An agent is essential. The only two agents we considered realistic were Galapagos Yacht Services (whom we used) and Yacht Agents Galapagos (www. yachtagentsgalapagos.com), who are OCC recommended. In retrospect, I think we might have been rather better with the latter agent.  If you wish to visit the Galapagos, start enquiries several months in advance, and certainly more than two months.  Arriving in the islands unannounced and claiming emergency is likely to be expensive and attract severe limitations. We met one American who had come in for fuel and was forced to pay $2600 for ten days, seeing only Puerto Ayora.  A certificate of hull cleanliness is required in order to enter the Galapagos. We had six-week-old bottom paint and had dried out for a quick scrub in the Las Perlas Islands before leaving Panama. We cleaned the lowest part of bottom by scuba, taking video to prove we had done it, but no questions were asked.  Although the rules on hull cleanliness are enforced, many rules, such as those covering very complex garbage segregation, are largely ignored. We followed the rules and made paper signs for each kind of garbage, but ashore it all went in together.  Boats are required to be fumigated before leaving Panama. Some skippers choose 24-hour fumigation while others pay one of the characters hanging around Flamenco Marina for a certificate, without any work being done. We had a technician from Fumiteq Inc come aboard, inspect the boat and spray key points. His certificate was accepted by the Galapagos authorities, as were the fake ones.  Navigation is mostly simple and straightforward, other than the entry to Puerto Villamil on Isla Isabela which is not obvious – see page 85.  Diesel is available in all three ports and is delivered by a small boat equipped with a pump. The fuel we bought was good and we heard no complaints from other cruisers.  Provisioning is okay, but if heading for French Polynesia it is best to max out on non-perishables in Panama.

The Ocean Cruising Club Platinum Anniversary “A year of celebrations around the world” Pot Luck Supper

... to make the parties as easy as possible to set up and run. If you are feeling adventurous, try the Sunflower Raft for a truly memorable gathering.

70th Anniversary House Flag

... available from the Club Secretary now. Fly yours throughout the year and particularly at your OCC parties.

OCC Cocktails

... we challenge you to produce a yellow and blue anniversary cocktail. Share your cocktail recipes!

Photo Competition

... capturing the spirit of the celebrations. Raft ups, cocktails, 70th anniversary flags, parties: submit your best snaps.

Share the Fun at Anchor

... and invite other yachts at the anchorage, they might not know yet what the OCC is all about.

When there’s a gathering of yachts in an anchorage there’s an excuse for an OCC 70th Platinum Anniversary Rendezvous Party! Everyone has a part to play in making 2024 a year of fun out on the water. Larger social events and cruises in company are planned in Japan, Fiji, New Zealand, Stockholm, Australia, eastern USA, Bahamas, the Mediterranean, the Macaronesia islands (Azores, Madeira, Canaries and Cabo Verde islands) and more … wherever you are cruising in 2024 the Ocean Cruising Club will be celebrating! Look out for the latest information in the OCC’s eBulletins, on the OCC Website and the OCC Members Group Facebook page.

PREPARING FOR THE 2023 CLIPPER ROUND THE WORLD YACHT RACE Laura Hampton (Laura wrote this account in August, and has promised to follow up with a much longer postrace article for Flying Fish 2024. In the meantime visit https://www.clipperroundtheworld. com/ to learn more about the race and https://www.clipperroundtheworld.com/race/standings to follow the individual yachts’ progress.) I’m delighted to be writing for Flying Fish again. After being a Youth Sponsorship recipient in 2021 and making a transatlantic passage (see VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY (55) in Flying Fish 2022/1) I was inspired to pursue more in the sailing world and set about achieving my lifelong dream – to circumnavigate. I am now thrilled to tell OCC members that that dream has become a reality, as for the past six months I have been working as a First Mate (AQP*) for the 2023 Clipper Round the World Yacht Race starting on 3rd September. Skipper Dan Bodey and I have been appointed to Team UNICEF and, over the course of the race, will be joined for the different legs by 65 people from around the world – see https://www.clipperroundtheworld.com/ team/unicef/race-crew. These six months have involved training our crew, preparing the boats and specialist training with Spinlock, Hyde Sails and Medical Support Offshore among many others. For the training phase we go offshore for six days during which we take the * An ‘Additionally Qualified Person’, second in command to the skipper. Laura adjusting checkstay tension

Calling sail trim during the 2023 Round the Island Race. Photo courtesy clipperroundtheworld.com race crews (who have already completed three other levels of training with Clipper) through the different aspects of offshore racing. We do a lot of work with spinnakers, along with racing headsail changes and understanding the different sail plans we have onboard. I’m writing this on 19th August and in the last 48 hours we have had a two-stage race with the Clipper Race fleet of 11 identical 70ft yachts. This involved a formal race start and a cross-Channel race to France. We rendezvoused as a fleet at a finish line and then prepared for a shorter sprint race back to Clipper HQ in Portsmouth. Discussing routeing and tactics in the Navigation Station 93

These races are great fun and often involve differing conditions, many sail plans and, due to the matched fleet and short race, very important tactical decisions. For the start of the sprint races we use a procedure called the ‘Le Mans start’ which involves having the mainsail up, with the staysail and Yankee hanked on but not yet hoisted. The fleet lines up and, after successive four- and one-minute guns, the crews can hoist both headsails and all 11 boats must hold course for ten minutes. This procedure was a new one for me but is used a lot in the Clipper Race, as an efficient way to start offshore races where we may not always be able to have a committee boat and a start line. Team UNICEF after winning an offshore race to France

After five successive weeks of this training we are now in our final fortnight of preparation. This involves getting 1∙2 tonnes of new Marlow rope, a full set of new sails from Hyde and chipping away at our never-ending list of jobs to prepare the boat for departure in just over two weeks’ time. This has included everything from servicing winches to victualling to what I was doing today, which was labelling all our below-decks pipework with yellow cow tags*, permanent markers and cable ties – an idea I hadn’t thought of before, but a very efficient way to identify the many pipes we have onboard. With 65 people working as a team to clean bilges and look after the boat, labelling all the pipework makes general upkeep and maintenance easier on the whole team. * Those numbered plastic tags commonly attached to the ears of cattle which farmers use to identify their animals. 94

The 2023 Clipper Round the World Yacht Race starts on 3rd September from Portsmouth, UK. I feel incredibly proud not only to be working for a company that provides a great pathway into ocean racing for many people around the world, but also to be on team UNICEF*, raising funds for their mission as part of our journey. The year ahead will be really challenging, from living with 21 other people on a 70ft yacht to the Roaring Forties and the phenomenal weather conditions we will inevitably face. To be working alongside so many driven people and have the opportunity to learn from my skipper is a real privilege. I would not be in this position had I not made my first transatlantic passage in 2021 with sponsorship from the OCC and I feel very fortunate to be setting out on a lifelong dream at 22. I know that I will learn a lot this year about sailing, people, the world and ultimately myself, and I look forward to exchanging stories with many OCC members along the way, and for years to come. * UNICEF, which stands for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, was established in 1946 and now works in more than 190 countries worldwide to protect some 110 million children from conflict, disasters and disease.

Editor’s note: At the time of going to press the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race fleet had reached Cape Town, South Africa. Their next leg, to Fremantle, Western Australia will be their most challenging yet.

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CCA ESSENTIAL PASSAGE GUIDE TO THE VIKING ROUTE: Includes Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland and Labrador – edited by William Strassberg, MD. Published in soft covers by the Cruising Club of America [https:// cruisingclub.org/] at $64.95 / £55.97. 277 216mm x 280mm pages with dozens of photographs and harbour plans. ISBN 978-1-7340-8637-9 Veteran Greenland sailor and climber Bob Shepton states in the Foreword, ‘Why another guide? Because this guide is different’. Centred on a specific route, distilling wisdom and experience from several lifetimes sailing the North Atlantic and the Arctic, this is a thoughtful guide written by a number of experts. Edited by William Strassberg MD for those considering sailing the Viking Route in either direction, it also has great value for a serious cruiser wanting to add to – or update – his or her knowledge, seamanship, leadership, preparation and fitness. After a dozen years sailing in Europe and several years of contemplating a westabout voyage, in the summer of 2022, with Norwegian and Canadian crew, I followed the Viking Route from Norway to Nova Scotia. In preparation I’d read first-hand accounts and acquired pilot books, sailing directions and cruising guides. I filled my iPads with everything I could download on North Atlantic weather, ice and harbours, Attainable Adventure Cruising accounts of Greenland, the RCC Polar Yacht Guide, as well as receiving valuable advice from veterans of the route. Had this guide been available it would have assumed a prime position in my preparation as well as during the crossing. It pulls together in one volume much of what I’d spent many months assembling and assimilating ... plus a lot more. Having sailed the Viking Route, I think the word ‘Essential’ in the title is entirely apt. It covers passage planning, weather conditions, ice and Arctic navigation, equipment recommendations, communications and special safety considerations for high-latitude sailing. The section on ‘The Cold Facts’ of hypothermia, jacklines (jackstays), flotation gear and clothing is especially important for northern waters. Though perhaps unique for a cruising guide, the section addressing leadership, crew management, teamwork and creating a ‘culture of safety’ is relevant to any cruise, not just the Viking Route. Given the limited season for sailing in the far north, options for overwintering aboard or storage in Scotland, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland are covered. (Bob Shepton’s page on overwintering in Greenland may inspire some, but make others glad they are reading it in a comfortable chair in front of a warm fire!) The Viking Route also details the various modes of communications available, including EPIRBs, VHF including Digital Selective Calling, Personal Locator Beacons, tracking devices and sat phones, plus the limitations of SSB in the Arctic and 97

protocols for a Mayday broadcast. It advises that before departure one should practice file compression or arrange for someone ashore to capture the latest satellite photos of ice conditions from the Danish Meteorological Office and resize them to e-mail to you. (In a significant advance, Starlink is now available from Norway to Iceland and in Newfoundland/Labrador, though not yet in Greenland.) The use of a routeing consultant is discussed. With no prior experience in ice conditions, I opted to hire an Iceland-based weather router who tracked our progress from Iceland to Nova Scotia and provided forecasts and advice in daily 0800 e-mails via Iridium Go! and InReach to augment my continual use of PredictWind weather and routeing apps. With that combination we avoided any weather of note. Even had The Viking Route been available I would probably have hired routeing assistance, but the book would have served as a key knowledge source. One special aspect of sailing the Viking Route is the requirement to report to Iceland SAR when entering and exiting Icelandic waters. Then, within 250 miles of Greenland, there’s the GREENPOS system. One must file an initial sailing plan with the Danish military by radio, e-mail or phone, then report position, course, speed and weather conditions (using the ‘Egg’ ice code) every six hours until leaving Greenland. If your report is overdue, they’ll start calling and potentially launch a search-andrescue operation. The guide’s checklists are invaluable (eg. what to include in the ‘Abandon Ship Bag’) as are the lists of ‘additional sources’, the CCA Fleet Surgeon guidance for medical preparation and precautions regarding polar bears. Last year in Nanortalik we were impressed by the variety of rifles for sale in the grocery store. Now in The Viking Route I have learned about ‘bear bangers’ – small explosives launched from a pen-like device that ‘create a loud noise that is unpleasant to bears’! Compared to cruising guides that cover a geographic area, this route-oriented guide provides detailed descriptions of the most likely subset of harbours in the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland/Labrador which boats might visit. Passageplanning options are presented for each leg, along with information about port services for crew and boat, formalities, climate, provisioning, culture, tourism suggestions, local and Viking history, plus chartlets and many photos. Beyond the wealth of technical detail and guidance, this guide is well written, beautifully laid-out and durably bound. A final note – between Iceland and Newfoundland we never saw another sailing vessel and only one ship. You are on your own. The CCA Essential Passage Guide to the Viking Route will be a key resource for a safe passage. JRR

LIVING THROUGH THE GALE – Tom Cunliffe. Published in soft covers by Fernhurst Books [https://fernhurstbooks.com/] at £16.99 (heavily discounted on Amazon). 144 240mm x 170mm pages, with many photographs and line drawings. ISBN 978-1-9126-2163-7 Sailors can still be caught out by rough conditions despite modern weather forecasting 98

and those who have been assaulted by heavy weather while sailing in a small boat will hold, like the author, a healthy respect for the sea. Tom Cunliffe has become a national nautical treasure, the UK’s best known yachting writer and probably the most photographed. His enormous maritime experience has been distilled into this slim volume (it is less than a centimetre thick) and not a word is wasted. Throughout this book Tom Cunliffe reminds us to beware the sea. He is forthright and tells us straight – ‘Waves can overwhelm us, roll us over and, in the end, drown us’. He implores us to plan, to anticipate and, if in trouble, to be self-reliant. Tom, if I may call him that, writes in his inimitable style, informal, light and peppered with wit like a fireside chat after a challenging voyage. He gives practical, down-toearth advice – ‘Put in another reef, mate’ – and if you fail to tie in the reef points of a big classic mainsail then, ‘I won’t come to your funeral’. The text is leavened with acute observations that we recognise as true, ‘Rice salads with raw peppers ... are just as colourful on their second viewing’. Tom is a practical man and this is a highly practical book. His explanations of complex subjects such as wind, waves and weather are transparently clear. The early sections on The Boat and The Crew give sound advice. The role of the skipper, especially a good skipper, is often underrated and the section on leadership on a small boat is welcome. The short and condensed chapter on Handling the Boat is superb and oozes authority from decades at sea. When he describes Boat Performance and Riding Out a Gale at Sea he mentions how three different types of vessel behave. It is clear that type C (flat-bottomed with a fin keel and spade rudder, like most modern boats) is not his favourite. Tom divides the techniques for riding out a gale into Passive Techniques (heaving to, lying a-hull) and Active Techniques (running with the storm, deploying a drogue). All are well described and well illustrated but he is careful not to promote one method over another. He does seem lukewarm about drogues, but then in the boats he has sailed a drogue will not be required. In his least favourite boat, the light type C vessel, a drogue can be a saviour as he readily admits. Living Through the Gale is well produced by Fernhurst with abundant photographs and line drawings to illustrate the text. Almost every point made is accompanied by an explanatory image, and scattered throughout the pages are QR codes that can be scanned and refer the reader to Tom’s website or a relevant YouTube channel. This helps to expand the range of the book. There is little to criticise. Some may wish the author had, on occasion, gone into more depth and detail but this is to misread the book. This is not a heavy reference tome but a light handbook. In the chapter Shelter from the Storm he wisely suggests that, when anchoring in heavy weather, crew should deploy a nylon warp as a snubber attached to the bight of the anchor chain with a chain hook. Although a little picky, some might consider a shackle or rolling hitch safer. Tom makes no mention of tandem anchoring. He may consider this technique overcomplicated and retrieval of the anchors too difficult. Nevertheless, tandem anchoring is popular among some long-distance sailors and certainly in North America. I have a friend who claims it is like ‘bolting the boat to the seabed’. For completeness, and rightly, Tom has included descriptions of para-anchors and the Jordan Series Drogue but one wonders how relevant these are to the majority of his readers. 99

Members of the OCC will have experienced many gales often far from shore and shelter. Experienced sailors, especially ocean sailors, will know much of what is in these pages and may consider they have no need of this book. They would be wrong. This publication is well-structured, succinct, well illustrated and affordable. All one needs to know about living through the gale is here, compressed into the pages of one slim volume. This little book deserves to be in the library of every yacht that goes to sea. I commend it. MHT

THE GOOD STUFF: Book One – John Passmore. Published in soft covers by the author and available from Amazon at £7.99. 311 127mm x 203mm pages with no illustrations of any kind (though plenty on John’s blog at https://oldmansailing. com). ISBN 979-8-4397-0549-8 In the words of its author, ‘this is the sort of book you keep in the heads’, and he’s absolutely right. Not because it’s printed on low-grade paper (it isn’t, and would certainly wreak havoc with the plumbing) but because, consisting of 53 short pieces published in various magazines and newspapers over a period of some 18 years, it’s the epitome of a ‘dip into’ book. All the tales have appeared previously, some of them twice. A growing feeling of déjà vu crept over me as I read and, not having been a frequent purchaser of sailing magazines or daily newspapers during the 1980s and ’90s, I was driven to do a little research in the Flying Fish files. Yes indeed! I reviewed John’s Yachting World’s DOGWATCH way back in 1999/1, and if John can recycle his material so can I. Back then I wrote: ‘For those not already familiar with John, Tamsin, Blue the dog and the rest of the cast – including of course, Lottie Watten, an 8m Heavenly Twins catamaran – a little background may be in order. Until a few years ago John was (we all thought) a convinced singlehander, fond of long races and with aspirations to circumnavigate (probably solo). It was all part of a Five Year Plan. Just to complicate matters he also had a full time career as Chief Correspondent of the London Evening Standard. It seems we were wrong. From these pages it appears that what he really wanted, having found the right companion, was to chuck it all in and go cruising – real poking-about-up-muddy-creeks type cruising. Dogwatch chronicles this change in lifestyle, from the trauma of parting with Largo, his faithful Rival 32, through trying to fit the possessions of two independent adults into 8m by 4m, and keeping said adults – soon to be joined by young Owen – supplied with the basic necessities of life such as water and electricity. Between times we learn how to tack a medium-sized dog (one good reason for buying a catamaran), all about Passmore’s First Law of Lost Hats (try string, John!), the pros and cons of sharing a small boat with a growing baby, and the courageous research behind that indispensable tome, the Good Shower Guide to the Ports and Harbours of Great Britain.’ 100

It should be pointed out, however, that THE GOOD STUFF – Book One contains a great deal of material not included in its predecessor – 53 individual pieces as against 28 – including John’s regular column written for the Daily Mail, and ends before the arrival of Owen. For that you will need to buy Book Two. While their format tends to be similar in terms of length and tone, John has the professional reporter’s eye for detail and their subject matter varies from frustration with onboard electronics to an appreciation of the Grade 2 Listed toilets on Mumbles pier. (Well deserved – there’s a photo of them at https://www.geoffbrookes.co.uk/mumbles-pier-public-conveniences/.) Any downsides? Well older readers may find the small and rather lightweight typeface challenging, particularly if their batteries are getting a little flat (boat, not readers, that is) but there’s always the option to buy the audiobook instead. I honestly can’t think of any others, except for the lack of illustrations. Yachting World’s DOGWATCH carried cartoons drawn by Bill Stott, but these are sadly missing from its successor. Neither can I find them on John’s website at https://oldmansailing.com and though there are plenty of photos they’re nearly all of Samsara, his current Rival 32. Assuming you don’t already have Yachting World’s DOGWATCH on your bookshelf, and even if you do (really, at £7.99 it’s hard to go wrong) THE GOOD STUFF is highly recommended. As Mae West memorably remarked, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful’! AOMH

THE LIFERAFT SURVIVAL GUIDE: How to Prepare for the Worst – Frances and Michael Howorth, 2nd edition. Published in soft covers by Adlard Coles [www. bloomsbury.com] at £14.99. 128 149mm x 210mm pages, most with at least one full-colour photograph or diagram. ISBN 978-1-3994-0150-0 Frances and Michael Howorth’s The Liferaft Survival Guide: How to prepare for the worst is a little book containing a lot of information. It is certainly not a beach book (if you find yourself reading this book after being washed up on some lonely beach it will be too late) but in it there are a number of things that we who go to sea, whether inshore or on the world’s great oceans, should, and may well not, know. I defy anybody to read this book’s 128 pages and honestly say ‘I knew all that before’. I am going to start with the end. The first aid section is the best and clearest guide I have yet read on coping with the nightmare situation of somebody taken critically ill a long way from professional help. One doesn’t have to go to sea and end up in a liferaft to find this extremely educational and potentially lifesaving. Although the book is not actually divided into two parts, planning for an emergency at sea is one part and dealing with the emergency when it happens is the other part. The sheer array of communication options described, which can be bought and installed in a boat today, is daunting. Presumably those large, expensive racing yachts that take paying crews around the world have the lot, but I doubt if many individual, privately-owned yachts do and certainly not the small, low-budget ones. Call me oldfashioned, but I crewed aboard a fine ocean racer in the 1967 Fastnet Race and we had neither liferaft nor any kind of transmitting radio device. I think there was an Avon 101

inflatable for the crew of seven. WH Tilman and the Smeetons used to cross oceans on the understanding that if they sank and drowned they would have nobody to blame but themselves and they wouldn’t want to bother people anyway. I suppose that is one reason why there were so few bluewater sailors in the 1950s and why there are so many now, because today’s sailor is able to call on everybody for assistance, from passing ships and overflying Boeings to global MRCC facilities, via every kind of satellite device. After reading the book’s recommendations, I felt chastened by the quality of my own grab bag (or ‘panic bag’ as I usually describe it), but panic is something the Howorths are dead against. In fact, careful planning and doing things calmly without panic is a wise and central theme of this book). The recommended contents of the grab bag are so comprehensive that it would end up more like a grab sack. Even board games for any children in the raft are suggested. There is a lot of good advice on the whole procedure of leaving ship and boarding the raft, which of course we all hope we will never have to do but which it would be good to memorise. The authors make the initial assumption that all those EPIRBs (one in the boat – one in the raft), personal locator beacons, sat phones, transmitting radios, mobile phones, flares and mayday calls will result in being rescued in no time at all. However, should none of those remedies get a result, the book moves doggedly on to help the reader and any companions survive long-term in a tiny raft. At this point The Liferaft Survival Guide changes from being a hi-tech handbook into a grown-up version of Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys, learning how to survive in the wild. Which bit of a shark should you avoid eating? I’m not going to memorise this part because I’m pretty sure I am never going to succeed in harpooning a shark using a vertical thrust of the boat hook with my knife (which doesn’t have a point to avoid damaging the raft) lashed to the end of it. But enough flippancy. This is a very serious, comprehensive, clear, well-put-together book illustrated with excellent diagrams and photographs throughout. While not cheery, it is definitely worth owning, reading and sharing with fellow voyagers. BH

THE DEEP OCEAN: Life in the Abyss – Michael Vecchione, Louise Allcock, Imants Priede and Hans van Haren. Published in hard covers by Princeton University Press at $45.00 / £38.00. 288 210mm x 273mm pages bearing more than 200 colour photographs and illustrations. ISBN 978-0-6912-2681-1 As distance sailors we are well aware of the sea creatures that inhabit the surface waters, like dolphins, whales and sunfish, but the depths of the ocean have hardly been explored. I always wonder what’s down there and will it rise on occasion to our world above? (The answer is no, it would die from the pressure and temperature changes.) Once, when we were becalmed mid Atlantic, I remember jumping into the water and having the strange sensation that I was going to fall into the abyss. I flew back out yelling, “Oh my God, it’s high up here”. I didn’t fall, but it gave me a sense of eternity, much like the heavens are infinite. Scientists have not had the opportunity to visit the deep ocean to study its inhabitants 102

until very recently. Only in the past decade or so has technology enabled deep sea exploration and even then with potentially deadly risks. If you think that the average depth of the oceans is just under 2∙5 miles (4000m) and the deepest trench is almost 6∙8 miles (11,000m) deep, the pressures and absence of light and heat make life there almost impossible to imagine and very challenging to explore. There are no plants on deep ocean floor because there is no light to support photosynthesis. The creatures that do live down there are accustomed to pressurised dark and cold as their normal conditions. Many microbes thrive in such conditions and the other life forms encountered do not resemble those we know on the surface, appearing alien and surprising in many respects. After all, we are viewing them through the lens of imagination not of experience. Many of the creatures are artistically sophisticated, as though their creator had a limitless imagination. Deep sea corals for example, may assemble in spiral colonies or form forests of treelike structures. They can also form solid masses thousands of years old. Snails and cucumbers that swim, deep diving whales and vampire squid fuel our imaginations. In recent years extreme HOVs (human-occupied vehicles), ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) and AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles) have explored some of the deepest parts of the deepest trenches, giving us a glimpse of a foreign world beneath the sea. Jules Verne, beware! I could not possibly summarise the 288 pages of information and stunning photography in The Deep Ocean: Life in the Abyss. If you have an interest in the creatures of the deep, I am certain you will find it in this elegant coffee table book. It covers oceanography, organisms, habitats and global patterns. It also explores humanity’s relationship with the deep ocean. DOB

REEDS ASTRO NAVIGATION TABLES – Kendall Carter. Published in soft covers by Reeds [www.bloomsbury.com] at £27.00. 80 A4 (210mm x 297mm) pages. In mono only, with no illustrations other than two star charts. ISBN 9781-3994-0177-7 I was slightly surprised but very pleased, on being invited aboard General Committee member Joerg Esdorn’s Amel 55 Kincsem recently, to see a sextant box stowed securely on a shelf. On mentioning that I still kept my sextant aboard, fellow guests Nicky and Rear Commodore Reg Barker chimed in to say that Blue Velvet of Sark also carries a sextant. How many other OCC yachts this is true of I don’t know, but not only does having a sextant on board free one from being wholly reliant on electronics, it can also be a source of considerable enjoyment and satisfaction. A sextant is of little use without the tables to go with it, and as a lightning strike or other disaster could wipe out digitally-stored tables it is wise to carry these in printed format. That is the function of Reeds Astro Navigation Tables, as it replaces both the Nautical Almanac and the three-volume Sight Reduction Tables for Air Navigation or six-volume Sight Reduction Tables for Marine Navigation, albeit requiring considerably more calculation and interpolation on the navigator’s part. 103

Much of Reeds Astro Navigation Tables – pages 4 to 39 – is taken up by columns giving the two-hourly ground positions of the Sun, Aries, the Moon, the planets Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn, as well as the Declination and Sidereal Hour Angle of 60 stars (generous, as only 57 are normally used for navigation) throughout 2024. The tables for the Sun and stars will also work in 2025 if additional corrections are applied. These 36 pages of tables are followed by more pages of tables – there are an awful lot of numbers in this book! – this time for the altitude of Polaris (the North Star), for conversion of arc to time, Greenwich Hour Angle correction tables for the Sun etc, and Declination tables for the Moon and planets. Then come ten pages of Versines and Log Cosines, and finally three pages of ABC tables, useful if checking the compass at sea (another piece of essential equipment likely to be affected by a lightning strike). The final pages contain examples of how to apply the necessary corrections and, for those without a scientific calculator, how to use the Versine formula to find Calculated Altitude, as well as dates of eclipses during 2024, where in the sky to look for the brighter planets and templates for recording and working out sights. All in all, Reeds Astro Navigation Tables contain pretty well everything needed to find your position at sea using astro. It even opens out flat for ease of use! It’s relatively expensive per page, but a drop in the bucket when equipping a yacht for an ocean passage. And unlike flares or a liferaft, astro navigation is not something to be deferred until the yacht is in extremis! It must be said, however, that while Reeds Astro Navigation Tables does contain instructions on how to take and work out a sight using the tables and other information it contains, it would be hard going for the beginner. Fortunately there are plenty of other books which cover sight reduction in a more accessible way, including Mary Blewitt’s immortal Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen, now in its 13th edition, Phil Somerville’s Practical Guide To Celestial Navigation (reviewed in Flying Fish 2021/2) and my own personal favourite, John P Budlong’s Sky and Sextant, no longer in print but with used copies available on Amazon. In summary, if you carry a sextant and don’t wish to invest in the heavy volumes mentioned in the second paragraph, Reeds Astro Navigation Tables makes a very workable substitute. You may never use it, but it’ll be there ‘just in case’. AOMH

NB: The phrases ‘Discounted on Amazon’ and ‘Also available for Kindle’ apply to such a high proportion of the books reviewed on the previous pages that it no longer seems necessary to include them in the introductory paragraphs.

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AN ATLANTIC CIRCUIT IN IRON BARK, Part 2: Icebergs and Chimpanzees Trevor Robertson (Trevor left Western Australia in 1975 and has wandered the world’s oceans ever since. This is his third vessel named Iron Bark, despite being GRP – an Alajuela 38, a double-ender of 1977 vintage. Previous owners had used her purely for coastal sailing, but since buying her in 2019 Trevor has been working to make her capable of longer passages, a task he continued over the winter in Stornoway on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis. The first part of this Atlantic circuit by Iron Bark III was described in Flying Fish 2022/2, and by the time this issue is published he hopes to have reached New Zealand after taking the trade wind route across the Pacific from Panama. Visit http://iron-bark.blogspot.com/p/ iron-barks-travels.html to learn more.) In April 2022 it was time to move on – harbour dues in Stornoway would soon revert to summer rates and my UK visa had expired. A voyage north to the Faroes, Iceland and perhaps the east coast of Greenland seemed attractive. The spring weather was unsettled, so after leaving Stornoway I lurked in some of the Minch’s less-frequented lochs, ending up in Loch a’ Chadh-Fi in the northern Minch. This was a fine place to wait before heading north, well protected with good holding and sufficiently isolated that it was unlikely Border Force would appear demanding to see my papers. On 20th May, with an apparently fair wind (the hills around Loch a’ Chadh-Fi make it hard to tell what the wind is doing), I sailed for the Faroes. The wind was indeed fair and carried me north in rain and poor visibility for 200 miles to the southernmost Faroese island of Suðuroy. It was still raining when I got there at midnight, but I could Waiting for a fair wind in Loch a’ Chadh-fi, northern Minch

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The coast of the Faroes is dominated by basalt cliffs

see the lights leading into Tvøroyi so motored in to anchor off the town at 0200. In the morning I found the harbour master who rang customs for me. The customs officer took the boat’s name over the phone, enquired how much alcohol I had on board and that was the end of formalities. The Faroes are a large pile of lava thinly covered by soil, with almost no trees, so I expected most of the older houses would be built of stone as they are in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Instead, imported wood is the preferred material. The hillsides are dotted with sheep (Faroe means ‘islands of sheep’), but most of the mutton on sale is from New Zealand. The open countryside makes for pleasant, sometimes vigorous walking with superb views from the sea cliffs.

Faroe means Island of Sheep

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The Troll’s wife’s finger, Vágar I had reached Suðuroy without meeting the ferocious tidal streams and overfalls for which the Faroes are infamous, but got the full treatment on the next move, a 40-mile sail to Miðvágur on the island of Vágar, where breakwaters make the harbour a safe, comfortable anchorage. Like most villages in the Faroes, Miðvágur has a rowing club with traditional Faroese pulling boats, much used by crews of all ages from 12 upwards. These boats look like miniature longships and the Faroese row like Vikings. From Miðvágur I made bus trips to Tórshavn and Vestmanhavn on

Faroese pulling boats

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The Faroese row like Vikings the adjacent island of Stremoy, to see those towns but more interestingly to see the countryside and the network of road tunnels that go under the sounds and join the islands together. I sailed for Iceland on 13th June with a forecast of southwest winds for several days to be followed by a northwesterly gale. It is about 300 miles and I hoped the southwest wind would get me to an Icelandic port before the gale-force headwinds arrived. Norðfjörður, about halfway up the east coast, has an easy entrance and a well-protected small-boat harbour so I headed there. The wind held fair and early in the morning of the third day Iceland’s snow-streaked hills appeared through rents in the fog. By early afternoon I was tied up in Norðfjörður.

The Faroe islands are connected by a network of tunnels 111

Approaching Iceland Customs and immigration were friendly but punctilious. Immigration was perturbed that I had entered the Schengen zone in the Faroes without having my passport stamped – how was anyone to know when my 90 days were up? The customs/quarantine officer used the old International Maritime Declaration of Health, which has six standard questions including ‘Has there been an abnormal mortality amongst your rats?’ I assured him my rats were healthy. Two days later the promised gale arrived, followed a couple of days later by another one, so I was content to remain in harbour but the delights of the local village, Neskaupstaður, were quickly exhausted. There was another yacht in the small-craft harbour, the 30ft Elena sailed by Björn Tegetmeyer, an interesting young German scientist. We scrambled up the hill above the town to look at the banks built as avalanche defences for the village and drove to Seyðisfjörður in a rented car. Another interesting yacht arrived a few days later, Teddy from Ireland, owned by Nicolas Kats. Teddy is a stout 39ft steel ketch and Björn and I were invited aboard for a meal and yarn. Several large yachts stopped in Norðfjörður while I was there but, true to their type, ignored the small yachts as being too insignificant to merit notice.

The head of Norðfjörður with avalanche barriers in the foreground 112

Sailing in the Westfjords

Iceland would be a much more interesting place if the voyage from Europe was a couple of thousand miles rather than just a couple of hundred, allowing large ‘expedition’ yachts to motor there without meeting bad weather. On 28th June I set off around the north coast of Iceland bound for the Westfjords region, a distance of about 350 miles. I started with a fair wind but two days out, north of the island of Grímsey, fog rolled in and the wind died and never returned. We were north of the Arctic Circle and it was cold and clammy with enough fishing boats around to make getting sleep difficult. Drifting in those conditions held little appeal, so I started the engine and for the next two days motored when it was calm and sailed (slowly) when there was any wind at all. By the time I got to the Westfjords I was very tired. In the Westfjords I anchored near the head of Veiðileysufjörður, an uninhabited fjord surrounded by steep hills. It is the sort of place that I like, but it is open to the southwest and the holding is indifferent so I did not venture far from the boat. Two

Veiðileysufjörður

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days later I sailed 33 miles to Ísafjörður, the biggest settlement in the Westfjords. Its harbour is tucked in behind an eyri (the Icelandic name for an old glacial terminal moraine) and is well protected. A dozen or so yachts were rafted together in the small-craft harbour, but rather than join them I anchored a few hundred metres off in a clean, quiet spot with good holding. I topped off my water and diesel and did a bit of shopping, but Iceland is expensive so my shopping was limited. I do not understand how the local economy works – Icelandic salt cod is cheaper in the Caribbean than in Iceland, alcohol prices are too high for an honest sailor to consider and even a coffee stretched my budget. The ice reports still showed too much ice along the Greenland coast for a small yacht to negotiate so I went off to look at more of the Westfjords. I sailed 30 miles to anchor behind a small eyri near the head of Hrafnsfjörður. The fjord is uninhabited and the surrounding hills were snow-streaked although it was now past midsummer, the melting snow feeding numerous roaring waterfalls. For two days the weather was windy, cold and bleak and I huddled by the cabin heater. When it eased, I went walking. The streams rushing down the hillside were still snow-bridged but the bridges looked too fragile to trust. The birdlife was prolific. Ringed plovers did their broken wing act to draw me away from their nests and there were many wheatears. On the fjord eider ducks cooed and gabbled and two whooper swans whooped. There were Icelandic/glaucous gulls (I can seldom tell the difference), a few greater black-backed gulls and guillemots, both black and Brünich’s. Next day the wind picked up to force 7, funnelling down the fjord and swinging us close to the eyri, but rather than shift berths I got the anchor and ran back to Isafjörður. I left at 1930 and arrived at 0330, all in good light – that close to the Arctic circle there is no darkness in July. Hrafnsfjörður. The spit is an eyri

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Bergy bits and fog

Back in Isafjörður the ice charts showed that the pack-ice off East Greenland was still not navigable for a yacht. However, a week later the ice looked as if it might be passable and the weather forecast was for six days of moderate weather followed by a nasty low-pressure system. I cleared customs, paid my harbour dues and sailed from Isafjörður on 22nd July, hoping to make the 400 miles across the Greenland Strait and through the ice into Tasiilaq on Ammassalik Island before the low arrived. The breeze was initially northwest giving a comfortable reach, but it died before midnight and as I wanted to be clear of these waters before the forecast gale arrived I started the engine. When the breeze returned it was a headwind, puffy and variable. We were now in the Irminger Current, a warm offshoot of the North Atlantic Drift that sets north and east up the west coast of Iceland. It kicked up a small, irregular sea that slowed us down and, despite using the engine intermittently, our average speed was below 3 knots. At 1510 on 24th July, the third day out, the first iceberg appeared, looming through the fog about two miles away. We were 90 miles off the Greenland coast and 200 miles from the nearest possible anchorage. I had hoped to be much closer to the coast before encountering ice and that the visibility would be good enough for me to find an ice-free area to heave to and get some sleep before tackling the close pack along the coast. Meeting ice so far out and in fog dashed that hope. Visibility varied from 100m to 5 miles and we passed a steady stream of bergs and bergy bits, some getting very close before they appeared through rents in the fog. Although there was not enough ice to impede progress, a close watch was necessary. Heaving to for sleep in poor visibility with that much ice about was riskier than I liked, so I turned back out of the cold East Greenland Current into the relatively warm Irminger Current where there was little ice. Once back in open water, I hove to and considered the matter. Getting to the Greenland coast was going to require a continuous watch for at least two days and, without someone to share the watch keeping, I was going to be very tired by the time I got there. The last part, threading through close pack near the coast, was going to be the most difficult and I would have to tackle that when I was my most tired. One option was to heave to for a day or two and hope the visibility improved, then try again, but the gale was forecast to arrive in four days which limited how long I could hang about. I have dealt with the combination of gale, fog and ice in the past. It is a frightening affair that I did not want to repeat. 115

At this point I discovered that the bracket holding the alternator was broken beyond easy repair. I could do without the alternator, but its belt also drives the engine’s fresh water circulation pump. With the loss of the alternator the pump’s drive belt was slack and I could only run the engine for short periods before it overheated. The prospect of attempting to penetrate pack-ice without an engine convinced me to abandon my attempt to get to Greenland. I tried to persuade myself it was a prudent decision but it seemed more like an ignominious retreat. The redoubtable Tilman tried to close the coast near here in the pilot cutter Seabreeze with a full crew but without a functioning engine and lost his vessel in the process. His warning after losing Seabreeze that ‘...the lesson of this sad story is not to mess about in Greenland fjords without an engine’ is undoubtedly correct, but quoting it sounds like an attempt to justify not making a more serious attempt to get through the ice. A perfect record of achievement is merely evidence of never having tried anything challenging, but in recent years I have become more cautious in marginal situations and so achieve less. But recriminations could wait – the current situation needed attention. I was 40 miles from the Arctic Circle in poor visibility with ice about and a gale forecast. The lack of an engine precluded ice navigation and thus a Greenland port so, with no reason to return to Iceland, I set a course for Ireland, about 1300 miles distant. The 400-mile leg south down the Greenland Strait would get me out of narrow waters and clear of ice. I could then alter course towards Bantry Bay, 900 miles further on. That leg might be rough at times but there would be no ice and plenty of sea room to deal with bad weather. Initially I sailed south with a light, fair breeze and made slow but steady progress in fog and drizzle. The last ice disappeared into the haze at 2000 on 24th July, though of course I did not know it at the time. Two days later and 200 miles further south a front brought an abrupt wind shift to southwest force 3, which put us close-hauled on starboard tack. The wind increased and by 0200 next morning had reached force 6, and we were crashing along close-hauled and close-reefed, cold, wet and uncomfortable. To my delight the wind then veered into the west, giving a fast reach. This fine, fair wind carried us south to 60°N, the latitude of the southern tip of Greenland, before it died. Four days after turning away from Greenland we were 400 miles from Greenland, 250 miles from Iceland and probably 250 miles from the nearest ice and I could alter course towards Ireland. I expected the rest of the passage to be straightforward, though not necessarily easy. Initially the breeze was light though generally fair, which was reflected in the next two days’ runs of 86 and 84 miles. A southwesterly force 4 then gave us a 106-mile run before the wind backed to southeast force 6 gusting 7, a dead noser. With plenty of sea room there was no reason to knock the gear or myself about so I hove to and that day’s run was only 23 miles. This was followed by a brief calm then southwest force 7, a fair wind but stronger than one would wish. I ran before it under staysail only. As the barometer began to rise the wind veered to northwest 8, later easing to force 4 and giving us 74 miles noon to noon. The next night, 4th August, was clear and I saw stars for the first time in two months. They had been invisible in the Arctic’s 24-hour daylight and then it had been cloudy. It was only when they reappeared that I realised how much I had missed them. Two days of moderate northwest wind and runs of 105 and 111 miles took us to within 200 miles of the Irish coast and back amongst fishing boats. There a high settled 116

over us bringing clear, sunny weather. We lay becalmed, rolling heavily. Normally I would douse the mainsail in these conditions but with no motor and many fishing boats about I kept it up in the hope of making steerage way. The slatting was more than the mainsail’s gooseneck could stand and it disintegrated (it was an example of the sort of thing all too common on yachts – attractive, highly-polished and only suitable for fair-weather sailing). I had already replaced numerous bits of shiny, totally inadequate yachty nonsense (bow rollers, rudder head and so on) but, although it was on the list, had not yet made a new gooseneck. I lashed the boom as best I could but the fix looked insecure. The light airs and calms persisted and it took us three days to make 120 miles, then a light breeze carried us the final 20 miles into Bantry Bay. I anchored behind Castletownbere on 9th August, 16 days after turning away from Greenland and 19 days from Iceland, having sailed 1696 miles to make good about 1550. I did not go ashore as I had not yet cleared customs, but spent two days making a new bracket for the alternator which, once fitted, allowed me to motor 20 miles in the continuing calm to Bantry to clear in. When the entry formalities had been dealt with I set about fabricating a new gooseneck. I had enough material aboard and the necessary tools, but grinding, cutting and drilling 6mm metal plate in the cockpit is messy. I cannot generate enough power to weld aboard, so I took the kit of parts to a friend’s place on Whiddy Island and welded it up there. The result is strong and functional if a bit agricultural, the antithesis of its predecessor. Drifting into Bantry Bay, Ireland

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In light of my poor showing trying to get to Greenland, I decided to follow it with something less strenuous and on 12th September sailed from Ireland towards the Caribbean, intending to take whatever interesting warm-water diversions I could find along the way. The forecast was for north and east winds force 6–7, a bit stronger than I would choose but fair for my next destination, the Guadiana River which forms the southern border between Portugal and Spain. Three days’ running under deep-reefed sails (staysail only at times) got me clear of the Celtic Sea and around Ushant with 300 miles of sea room. Southbound from Ireland or Britain, unless heading for a port in the Bay of Biscay or northern Spain, I think it is wise to make as much westing as possible early in the passage. Once out to 12°30’W I turned south, still with generally strong, fair winds that increased to near-gale in the latitude of Cape Finisterre. East winds are often accelerated around Cape Finisterre and I felt this even though I was 200 miles offshore. I expected the wind would moderate and back to the north as I sailed down the Iberian Peninsula, which it did to the extent that I was becalmed at times. Shipping became a problem again as I closed Cape St Vincent at the southwest corner of Portugal, and I got little sleep. I had kept well offshore prior to this, in part to avoid shipping and in part to avoid orcas. There have been several hundred ‘interactions’ with yachts, a few have been sunk and dozens towed in after having their rudders damaged or torn off. I rounded Cape St Vincent with my rudder unchewed and anchored behind the cape in Sagres Bay, 11 days from Ireland.

The Guadiana River is bucolic

Sagres Bay was windy and unattractive so, after a day’s rest, I sailed overnight to anchor in the mouth of the Guadiana River on 25th September. Next morning I took the flood tide 20 miles up the river to meet with friends anchored near the village of Alcoutim. The Guadiana River winds between rocky, scrub-covered hills with a small village every 10 miles or so, attractive, uncrowded and relatively undeveloped. My friends, Miki Knoll and Karl Bitz, had been on the Guadiana for over a year in their Nicholson 32 Faï Tira and knew the area well. With Karl as a guide (Miki was 118

Walking along the old railway tracks near the Guadiana River

visiting family in Germany), I had some fine walks and met an interesting group of expats living along the river. There is a network of narrow-gauge railway lines, long disused, that serviced small mines in the hinterland. The railbeds and their tunnels wind around and through the steep hillsides making for interesting walks, and Karl knew them all. The tide runs hard in the river, something to plan around if rowing a couple of miles to the village for a loaf of bread. The north wind that carried Iron Bark so quickly and comfortably to the Guadiana River was followed by a protracted period of southwest winds – headwinds for a passage to Madeira or the Canaries – so I was content to stay there and potter on with small carpentry jobs. After a pleasant six weeks I left the Guadiana for the Canaries on 2nd November with a forecast for fresh north winds for several days. Faï Tira sailed for the Canaries the same day. The forecast wind never appeared and we made the passage in light airs and headwinds – nothing difficult, but slow. My first day’s run was a modest 102 miles, and that was the best I did for the entire passage. A couple of small striped pilot fish tagged along, as they often do – they did not need to work hard to keep up with Iron Bark. It took me nine days to make the 580 miles from the Guadiana to the Canaries. I anchored at Playa del Risco on the north coast of Lanzarote near Faï Tira, which had arrived a couple of hours earlier despite being several feet shorter than Iron Bark. They were not dragging a propeller (Faï Tira has an outboard) which helped, but the fact that Karl and Miki are about half my age and very spry is probably relevant too. The Canaries are overrun with tourists, crowded, expensive and tacky – all things that I went to sea to avoid. However, they are such an obvious stop when bound south 119

The passage between the Guadiana River and the Canaries was a slow, light airs drift or west from Europe that it is difficult to avoid them and there is always the chance of meeting interesting vessels there. Thus it was this time. Amongst the usual collection of bland white GRP sloops with inflatable dinghies that make the anchorage loud with the noise of their outboards, there was a purple junk schooner with a proper rowing dinghy. I rowed over and found it was Kokachin, Pete Hill and Linda Crew-Gee’s new boat. A happy reunion followed. I first met Pete in the Canaries in 1986 aboard Badger, also a junk schooner. Pete has sailed an eclectic selection of vessels, mostly self-built, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. He is a superlative seaman but is unassuming to the point of being nearly invisible except to his friends. A few days later the authorities evicted us from Playa del Risco for no apparent reason so our little flotilla of Kokachin, Faï Tira and Iron Bark moved to the south coast of Lanzarote and anchored off the town of Playa Blanca. Playa Blanca is entirely given over to restaurants, bars and tourist tat with little in the way of provisions available, but I bought some onions and wine in town and later rowed into the marina with a few jerry cans to buy some water. I was immediately ejected – only vessels under power are allowed in the marina – jet skis are welcome, sailors rowing are not. I did manage to fill my 30 litres of cans, however, for which I was charged €15. Having had enough of this style of yachting I decided to leave the Canaries and will make whatever diversion is necessary to avoid returning. That evening Pete and Linda invited Faï Tira and Iron Bark to dinner on Kokachin and we agreed to meet in the Eastern Caribbean in the New Year. 120

The next morning, I sailed for The Gambia in West Africa. The Gambia is one of the smallest countries in Africa, consisting of a narrow strip of land on either side of the Gambia River, and is entirely surrounded by Senegal. The river is navigable for about 200 miles and the people along it have a reputation for being friendly. It is about 1000 miles from Lanzarote to the mouth of the Gambia River, which I expected to be an easy, trade-wind passage. It took me a day of dodging ships, yachts and fishing boats to work through the alternating wind shadows and acceleration zones around the Canary Islands, but then I found a steady, fair breeze and uncrowded water. Four days of this wind carried us into the tropics and a haze of Sahara dust, though I kept about 100 miles off the African coast to avoid the numerous fishing boats in shallower water. There was a steady stream of merchant vessels out where I was, but they have AIS to wake a singlehander up, unlike the fishing boats. Nine days out from the Canaries I hauled on to the wind and closed the coast, with visibility reduced to two miles by Sahara dust. Despite the poor visibility there were numerous signs that land was near – butterflies, flies and a whiff of wood smoke. As we crossed onto the continental shelf the first of numerous fishing boats appeared through the haze. Closer inshore there was a plethora of fishing canoes which signalled their presence in the evening with an eclectic array of flashing lights. At midnight I hove to to wait on daylight to enter the river, and at dawn commenced beating in against a fresh trade wind and a strong ebb tide. Low land and slightly higher buildings appeared, then the incipient sea breeze killed the remnants of the trade wind leaving me drifting between some derelict-looking anchored merchant ships. I started the engine and motored the final 5 miles to anchor off the port of Half Die. It had been an easy passage of 10 days. Half Die is the port for Gambia’s capital, Banjul, and was so named following a cholera epidemic in the 19th century. I rowed ashore and had not walked far down the dusty road towards the port offices when a small, active man approached, introduced himself as Bailo and offered to act as my guide. I accepted and was soon grateful for his assistance. I needed some local currency for port fees but the ATMs at the first two banks were out of order and the banks would not change money over the counter. Bailo found me an ATM that worked, then led me to get photocopies of my passport and ship’s papers which he (correctly) said would be needed to clear in. As about half the town is without electricity at any time, finding a working photocopier required local knowledge. Then the actual business of clearing in meant attending customs, immigration, quarantine and the port captain in the right order, each lurking in an unmarked office scattered around the port area. Without someone to show me the way I would have taken most of the day to sort things out. As it was we were done by 1300. Bailo asked the price of a sack of rice (€25) for his efforts, which I thought fair. The anchorage off Half Die is convenient to town but has little other attraction so I moved 7 miles up a mangrove creek to Lamin Lodge, Gambia’s yachting centre*. * Trevor sent additional notes about navigating the Gambia River which will be found in the Cruising Information area of the OCC website. Go to https://cruisinginfo. oceancruisingclub.org/, select Africa W on the Region dropdown menu, then either click on Cruising Information – Specific Places (1) and Gambia River, or on the red place marker on the map. 121

Lamin Lodge, The Gambia

There were about 20 yachts anchored there, about half inhabited and about half more or less derelict, with considerable overlap between the two. The lodge overhangs the water, imposing from a distance and ramshackle close up. The owners of Lamin Lodge are Muslim but are quite happy to sell itinerant yachtsmen cold beer. They graciously accept a drink if you offer to buy them one, but of fruit juice only. Muslims, Christians and animists seem to rub along together in The Gambia with little friction. I stayed at Lamin Lodge for two days then took the flood tide upstream, sailing if there was any wind at all, motoring if it was calm and anchoring when the tide turned. The river is navigable and tidal for more than 200 miles and it pays to work the tides. Motoring at 4 knots a yacht will make about 40 miles per day, but under sail I usually covered 35 to 40 miles to make good about 25 miles. The river is so muddy that eye-ball navigation is of limited use. The mouth of the river is charted to modern standards, but from 6 miles upriver from Banjul/Half Die the chart depends on a 19th century lead-line survey. The digital Navionics chart that I used has apparently picked up the co-ordinates of the river banks from a modern source that corresponds closely to WGS84 and then superimposed the soundings from the old survey. The result is that

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A street scene in Lamin

soundings do not align exactly to either the river banks or to WGS84. The combination of muddy water and offset soundings make the occasional grounding likely but, as the bottom is soft mud, this is seldom serious. Going upriver with the flood, the tide will soon lift you off. A grounding coming downstream with the ebb means waiting for the tide to turn unless you are quick to go astern. The few rocks and upriver wrecks seem to be charted with fair accuracy. The Gambia River is crossed by the Senegambia Bridge about 70 miles from its mouth and it was here that we first touched bottom. It was late in the day and I was nosing along near midstream under motor about a mile or so downstream from the bridge, preparing to anchor for the night, when Iron Bark ceased responding to the rudder. The mud was so soft that I had not felt her touch. We were doing less than 2 knots and, although the tide was falling, we came off readily by going hard astern. The chart showed 15m there and even allowing for a datum offset, there should have been plenty of water. The bridge pontoons have apparently altered the river flow so that a mud bank has built out from the north shore and the deep channel downstream from the bridge is now close to the south shore. A fishing canoe on the Gambia River

The bridge has a charted clearance of 16∙5m (54ft) and even though Iron Bark’s mast height is only 16m (52∙5ft) I decided to wait until near low water to pass under it. It is always hard to judge, but looking up there appeared to be plenty of clearance and I later heard that it is possible to get 18m (60ft) under at low water. About 5 miles above the bridge is an uncharted overhead power cable with considerable sag in the middle. I went under it close to the shore but, looking back, the lowest part appeared to be at least as high as the bridge. The river had been getting fresher with each mile upstream and was barely brackish at the bridge, even on the flood. With the change in salinity we left behind the dolphins, flamingos and mangroves of the lower river. Above the bridge there were fishing canoes everywhere and numerous nets to dodge. Two days and about 52 miles above the bridge, I was anchored for the night as usual when I was disturbed by loud explosions at irregular intervals. There was no village or even a hut in sight and I was at loss to explain the noise. Later I learned they were air gun blasts to scare hippopotamuses from the rice fields. 123

A hippopotamus relaxes in the shade of the riverbank On 11th December I anchored at the small town of Kuntaur, having taken 5 days to make 135 miles from Lamin Lodge. Just above Kuntaur is the Baboon Islands National Park, which has chimpanzees (re-introduced in the 1970s after being hunted to extinction) and, allegedly, hippopotamuses. I thought there was little chance of seeing either from the deck of Iron Bark so paid for a tour in a canoe and saw both. Iron Bark’s raw water pump did not like the silty water and was leaking and had broken a drive belt just below the bridge. I had spare belts, bearings, seals and impellers but was worried that the drive shaft was scored. There was a good chance that I would do more harm than good attempting a rebuild so I decided to live with it and do as little motoring as possible. With this in mind, I turned back at Kuntaur, although the river is navigable for another 50 or 60 miles. As expected, the trip downriver was faster due to the stronger ebb but the period of favourable tide was shorter. Two days after heading downstream from Kuntaur I anchored just above the bridge and next morning motored under it at low water, then made sail and shut down the engine. The wind was light and I was at the mast tidying up halyards when we went aground mid-river, two miles below the bridge – I had not allowed enough for the extension of the mud bank below the bridge. By the time I had scrambled aft and put the tiller over the tide had fallen too far for us to get off, but the keel sank into the soft mud as the tide fell and we remained upright. At low water there was only 70cm of water around the boat but the waterline was barely 20cm lower than usual. The incoming tide floated us off in the evening and I motored a mile to the south (deep) side of the river and anchored for the night. It took another two days to reach Half Die, where I spent two days buying provisions and water for the Atlantic crossing. The piped water is untreated and there is a fair chance of getting something nasty like cholera from it so, given the background of the name Half Die, I filled the tank with bottled water. It was cheaper than the piped water in the Canaries. By this time the raw water pump was leaking so badly that I decided not to use the engine again until I could do a proper job on it. By now it was 124

19th December and rebuilding the raw water pump would probably take two days, with no guarantee of success. That would take me into the Christmas holidays and complicate getting customs clearance. There is plenty of room to work out of Half Die under sail and I was bound for Carriacou in the eastern Caribbean, which is easy to approach under sail, so I did not need the engine for manoeuvring. I have a solar panel to run the AIS receiver while I sleep and there is nothing else on Iron Bark that depends on electricity. There was no reason to delay my departure so I got customs clearance and sailed early the next morning. The northeast trades, reinforced by the morning land breeze, carried us quickly out to sea and by sunset we had left the small fishing canoes astern. At dawn we were off the continental shelf, beyond most of the larger fishing boats, and I was able to get a few hours’ sleep. Offshore, the trade wind was fresh to strong and the sky completely cloudless, but once again the horizon was hazy with Sahara dust. Three days out and 400 miles offshore the first wispy clouds appeared and the dust started to decrease. We continued to run downwind in fresh conditions, generally with a reef or two in the mainsail and just a corner of the jib unrolled and backed for balance. More mainsail and/or booming out a headsail would have given us an extra 10 or 12 miles per day, but scarcely seemed worth the wear on the gear and the loss of sleep entailed by having to tumble out of bed on every slight increase in wind. I long ago concluded chasing the last 10% of speed causes a disproportionate amount of wear to both gear and crew and is seldom worthwhile. The passage across the Atlantic was an easy one, with the wind dead aft, never less than force 3 or more than force 6, and we averaged about 140 miles a day. Most A chimpanzee family in the mangroves

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A night’s collection of flying fish in mid Atlantic days a tropic bird or two came by and inspected us, but there were few other birds until we were close to the West Indies. The days ran into one another as they do on such a passage and Christmas passed with no notice other than a record collection of 56 flying fish on deck in the morning. At dawn on 8th January 2023 the conical peak of Petite Martinique showed above the horizon. We ran on, gybed around the south end of Carriacou and beat up the leeward coast to anchor in Tyrell Bay at noon – a fast and easy passage of 2650 miles in 19 days. So ended another North Atlantic circuit, a pleasant 16-month voyage of 12,100 miles – 5300 miles outward from Carriacou to Scotland and 6800 miles back to Carriacou. The outward voyage met a severe storm off Bermuda and the return part got far enough north to dodge ice and far enough east to see a chimpanzee – enough incidents for the voyage to be memorable without having been intimidating.

Conch Shell Can you hear the sea? Beached in my bathroom, A dollar at a yard sale years ago. Before that, a Caribbean cove? Now, lips still pink Guard a murmured memory Of a sigh on sand. Can you hear the sea? Always. Kate Crosby 126

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ST LUCIA TO THE MARQUESAS: A first-time sailor goes for a Walkabout Tom Lawson My name is Tom Lawson, I’m 21 years old and I’m from Northamptonshire in the UK’s Midlands. I hadn’t had much sailing experience before this adventure – just a few weekend sails in dinghies and I’d learned a little about the points of sail, but nothing more. I grew up around the water, however, and spent time kayaking, canoeing and surfing on lots of family adventure holidays. Then, in early 2022, I got a call from a family friend saying that they had contacts who were looking for crew to sail across the Pacific. During Zoom calls with owners Andrew and Traci and some in person meetings in the UK, they told me about how the OCC sponsors young people to make ocean crossings like the ones that I had coming up. I got in touch with the OCC and Fi and Rachelle were really helpful and kind with getting my sponsorship arranged. They kept in touch with my progress and have been so supportive along the way. I booked my RYA Competent Crew course and a flight to St Lucia. The course went well and there wasn’t anything that put me off! February 5th arrived and I flew to St Lucia to board Walkabout, a Beneteau Oceanis 45 owned by OCC members Andrew and Traci Roantree. They showed me around the boat and shortly afterwards we sailed from St Lucia to Martinique and back for some practice and to help me get used to life at sea. On 18th February we left St Lucia as part of the World ARC Pacific Rally heading towards Australia and my first proper experience of sailing began. My first passages were to Santa Marta, Colombia and then on to the San Blas Islands off Panama. It was quite an introduction, as on those first two passages we had winds gusting to more than 30 knots and 3–4m seas. Next we sailed to Shelter Bay in Panama, transited the Panama Canal, sailed to the Las Perlas islands (where I did my first skydive, from 13,000ft / 3960m), and then on to Transiting the first set of locks on the Panama Canal 129

Meeting up with Elsie 1 midway to the Galapagos Islands the Galapagos, crossing the Equator just before we got there. Crossing the Equator was an amazing occasion as we graduated from pollywogs into shellbacks. The ARC ran a photo competition for crossing the Equator in which every boat took part. We managed to get all the props for our photo when we found a massive mooring line wrapped around the keel! Soon we began the big crossing to the Marquesas. We expected it to take around three weeks to cover the nearly 3000 miles. This had been one of my main reasons for crewing on Walkabout and it was already here. Time really does fly! We had provisioned in Martinique, in Santa Marta and in every other place where we had found a big shop in preparation for the longest passage of the Pacific. Our means of communication would be the satellite phone which we used Just before crossing the Equator we found a big mooring line with a bamboo pole attached. They became an excellent ‘costume’ and trident! 130

Flying our big blue gennaker into the sunset for weather updates. We also had SSB, with which we would have morning and evening radio nets with all the other ARC boats, catching up on positions, weather conditions, weather routeing, who had caught the biggest fish that day and how life onboard was going. The wind was predicted to be too light to sail for the first three to five days as we passed through the Doldrums (the Intertropical Convergence Zone or ITCZ), but was then forecast to pick up as we sailed through the squall-risk zone. After that we should have a steady trade wind the whole way to the Marquesas ... hopefully. The start to the crossing was delayed by an hour as the immigration checks out of the Galapagos were running late and a few boats weren’t going to be ready in time, but eventually all the checks were completed and everyone started raising anchor to head out into the bay ready for the start. We had all anticipated that we would be motoring across the start line, but as we headed towards it we came into sufficient wind to be worth hoisting the sails. We soon had the full main and genoa up and were off, and with a wind strength of no more than 12 knots were able to pull out our big blue gennaker. We had a great start and were able to overtake a lot of other rally boats, but obviously always kept in mind that it’s a rally, not a race! Over the next few days we switched between motoring and trying to sail in the light winds. Stronger wind did come but brought with it lots of squalls that had us reefing the sails and trying to escape some of the big ones. We were able to get ahead of the odd squall, but the majority had us hiding under the sprayhood and waiting for the wind and rain to calm down. Once we were out of the squall zone we had much brighter days and steadier winds. By this point we were pretty slick at reefing and could now focus on getting some bigger downwind sails up. We had a normal mainsail and genoa, a big blue gennaker and a ‘Blue Water Runner’*. * A light, symmetrical downwind sail made by Elvstrøm Sails, which resembles highcut twin genoas attached down the luff, hoisted and unfurled/furled together. 131

Finishing dropping a light wind sail at dusk. We only used the lightweight sails in daylight when we could see what weather was coming our way Our plan was to use our Hydrovane self-steering gear for most of the passage. The upside was that it used no power at all, the downside was that if the wind shifted we ended up off course, but for the majority of the time it was amazing. Our watch pattern between the three of us was four hours on watch during the day and three hours at night. That meant you were able to get a six-hour block of sleep in the night as long as you weren’t woken up to make a sail change! Even though the night watches sometimes dragged a little, they weren’t too bad at all and our three-hour watch pattern seemed to work really well. It was mind-blowing to be able to look out of the cockpit and stare into the Milky Way on a dark, clear night. On other nights a brilliant moon lit up the sky and you could see the whole ocean incredibly clearly by its light. The bioluminescence was amazing too, and I spent hours sitting at the stern watching all of these little ‘sparks’ flying off. If you spent your time looking around you would nearly always see a shooting star or two. It’s incredible what you can see when you actually spend time looking into the night sky. The best shooting star that I saw was on the night before we crossed the 1000-miles-to-go milestone. I had finished reading my book and, as I was looking out at the ocean, this brilliant streak appeared, as the brightest star I had ever seen shot through the sky. It seemed to explode as it hit the atmosphere and burnt up, making the sky light up green. It was definitely one of the best and most memorable moments of my entire time onboard. 132

On the day that we crossed the halfway point we had a large pod of dolphins come and swim with us on the bow for 20 minutes. They seemed to love playing and just coming along to join us for some of the ride. We celebrated our halfway point with a tube of Pringles and a cold beer – it tasted so good after ten days at sea! We kept ourselves entertained with card games, music, cooking, fishing, lots of sleeping and keeping a lookout for wildlife. During the passage we saw whales, dolphins, sealions and thousands of flying fish. Once a day there would be a deck walk when someone (usually Andrew) went round checking that everything looked as it should. He would also pick any flying fish and squid off the deck which had landed on board during the rougher nights. We were keen to catch fish on passage and being able to eat fresh fish throughout was pretty good. We caught three mahi-mahi (dolphinfish), one wahoo and two yellowfin tunas. We had fish for many meals, cooked in every way we could think of. It was great to be able to have such fresh meat, though it did get to the point where we didn’t have enough freezer space to fit any more in! The crossing wasn’t all fun and games, however. The squalls, rough seas, seasickness and feeling a long way from family and friends made it hard at times. We also had some fridge and freezer problems which didn’t help, but compared with the issues some boats had during the crossing our problems didn’t seem very significant. After three weeks at sea we reached the Marquesas. We were so pleased to see land it was hard to believe. We had spent the last few weeks looking far into the distance and now land appeared out of the dark only a mile away. When we got to Hiva Oa the feeling of stepping onto land again was incredible and a moment I’ll never forget. It felt so A 12kg (26½lb) skipjack tuna which we caught as we left Nuku Hiva

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Up the mast to check the rigging in Daniel’s Bay, Nuku Hiva good to be able to walk more than 14m! After the Marquesas we visited Tahiti, where my sister joined us, then Bora Bora, Niue and Tonga, from which we both left to fly home. Traci, Andrew and Walkabout were joined by a family of five for the passage from Tonga to Fiji, before continuing towards Australia where Traci comes from. This adventure has inspired me to follow up my sailing on my return to the UK and work towards the RYA Day Skipper and Coastal Skipper qualifications, as with these I’ll be able to charter boats abroad and have some great holidays. Sailing across the Pacific was the most amazing experience and one that I will treasure for the rest of my life. It’s not an opportunity that comes up often and I am so grateful to have been able to do it. Having reached Tonga I have now sailed 8239 miles through seven time zones, across the dateline and the Equator, visiting eight different countries and four continents. It’s been a truly memorable experience and I’m so grateful to the people who helped make it so positive. Thank you to the OCC for supporting me to undertake my first ocean passages and enjoy such an incredible experience of ocean cruising. And massive thanks to Andy and Traci on Walkabout for making the whole voyage possible and for being such great company and mentors. It’s been the journey of a lifetime.

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Hallberg Rassy 48 “DREAMCATCHER” en route to Lanzarote

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MEMORIES OF SAILING TO UKRAINE Marjorie Robfogel (Marjorie grew up racing small boats on the Chesapeake and met Jim when she joined the Rochester Yacht Club while at graduate school. They raced their first Ping*, a Heritage One Tonner, on the Great Lakes and crewed on deliveries including a passage from Antigua to Newport. Having got a taste for ocean passagemaking they bought their fourth Ping, a Freedom 44 and, following a couple of shakedown races to Bermuda, set off in 1985 to explore Europe. During the 1980s and ’90s they visited the Mediterranean, Black, North and Baltic Seas. They currently own their sixth Ping, a Legacy 40.) In early March 2022, public media news organisation PBS Newshour featured a report about the Russian invasion of Ukraine filmed in the Black Sea harbour of Odessa. My husband Jim and I were flooded with memories of the summer of 1989 when we were able to visit that harbour with Ping, our Freedom 44. The irony of the make of our boat was not lost on anyone we met during that hopeful summer and would be even less likely today. In the news report the harbour looked very much unchanged. The cementblock perimeter still appeared to be lined with old ships used for public housing, but the beach outside the wall that we remembered being crowded with sunbathers was now packed with citizens filling sandbags to be used as protection against the anticipated shelling from the Russian warships offshore. We spent a month in the thenSoviet harbour, able to explore the city of Odessa unsupervised but not permitted to sail to any other Soviet ports around the Black Sea. It was a time of glasnost, the Iron Curtain was starting to part and Marjorie and Jim Robfogel the Berlin Wall would soon fall. The Soviets allowed about a dozen western yachts to visit Odessa that summer, while several Soviet boats sailed out into the Mediterranean. Until then the words Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian had been synonyms to me, but the Ukrainians we met showed us otherwise. Sailors flew the Ukrainian flag as well as the Soviet. They identified themselves as Ukrainians and spoke their own language, not Russian. Street signs were bilingual (though being printed in the Cyrillic alphabet they looked the same to us). Ukrainian national pride was obvious. * The Story about Ping is a children’s book by American author Marjorie Flack, illustrated by Kurt Wiese. First published in 1933, it tells the story of a domesticated Chinese duck lost on the Yangtze River and is still available via Amazon 90 years on. 137

In the entrance to the Odessa Yacht Harbour basin We were moored in the only harbour that permitted visiting yachts, a few miles southwest of the city centre. It was man-made, constructed of cement walls jutting off the sandy shore near the Bolshoi Fontana Park. Like the Port of Odessa, which connects to the elevated city via the iconic Potemkin Steps, our harbour sat at the bottom of a wide staircase – 220 steps as I recall. The long climb to street level was a small price to pay to explore this beautiful city. We never saw a loose baby carriage careening down the stairs as one does in The Battleship Potemkin, the classic 1925 movie about the Russian Revolution, but warships off that shore are a reality now. Our original plan had been to cruise the Black Sea, visiting Bulgaria, Romania, the USSR and the north coast of Turkey. Jim had grown up hearing his

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Jim climbs the steps from the harbour to the street grandmother’s stories about her youth along the Dnieper River in Moldova, which separates Moldova from Ukraine. After two summers cruising the eastern Mediterranean we hoped to see some of Grandma Finn’s storied heritage. We’d had no problems obtaining visas to enter Bulgaria, where we’d visit Varna on the way north to Odessa, and Romania, where we’d stop in Constanta on the way south. Obtaining a Soviet visa for independent travel, however, had been the biggest challenge of the trip. We’d heard of various ways to travel to the USSR. IBM president Thomas J Watson Jr gave a talk about sailing Palawan to Leningrad, in which he advocated ‘just go’, but boats that ‘just went’ in 1989 were escorted away by the Soviet navy without being able to take on fuel or water. Richard Branson’s Virgin Airlines was flying to the USSR and advertising tours. Susan Eisenhower, who was a member of our Rochester Yacht Club, often travelled there. We’d contacted these people, but no one could tell us how to get a visa. A chance meeting in Turkey with Reese Palley*, the inveterate skipper of Unlikely VII, the first western yacht to enter Odessa in that era, gave us the key – we needed to be invited by a Soviet organisation. Reese happened to have a form from the Odessa Yacht Club that could be replicated and used again and, with that copied paper, magic occurred at the Soviet consulate in Istanbul – we got visas. At the time we did not understand that they didn’t give us permission to travel throughout the Soviet Union, just permission to be in a certain place and that place was Odessa. We would not be able to visit Yalta, Sochi and other ports, as we’d planned. Armed with those visas we had set out from Istanbul. After motoring up the Bosphorus we anchored in Poyraz, a lovely Turkish harbour at the northeast end of the Straits. The next morning we set off into the Black Sea. There were two US DMA charts available, one showing the eastern half of the Black Sea, the other the western half. The British Admiralty published a few more, but no real detail of the harbours. * See Flying Fish 2015/2 for an account of Reese Palley’s fascinating life and achievements. 139

There was no RCC Pilotage Foundation cruising guide then, although there is a good one available now1. We had a lat/long position for the yacht harbour at Odessa and vague instructions about keeping our distance off a military island near the entrance to the area. Never had we cruised without redundant charts, harbour guides and solid information about where we were going and what we would find there. This was the Satnav/Loran era – one plotted one’s position faithfully on a paper chart. We also had little weather information. With ham radio we were able to copy various Englishlanguage weather forecasts from France and Greece, but they only covered specific local areas. The US airbase in Rota, Spain broadcast a forecast for the entire European basin but in very fast Morse code. One long-range forecast was all we took with us at each departure. Looking back it seems adventurous, this lack of information. During our time in Istanbul dealing with consulates and visas, we thought we had heard about all the yachts planning to visit the USSR that summer. Two other US yachts were on the list – Reese Palley’s Unlikely VII and Katie II skippered by Alan Logan2, a retired US State Department official who spoke fluent Russian. So imagine our surprise when we sailed into the harbour at Odessa and were directed to moor alongside 1. The Black Sea by David Read Barker and Lisa Borre, published by the RCCPF/Imray in 2012. Latest supplement, downloadable from https://www.imray.com/product/ The-Black-Sea/IB0191/, dated 2017. Reviewed in Flying Fish 2012/2. 2. Alan Logan was a frequent contributor to Flying Fish in the 1990s, writing To Odessa and Back for 1990/1 and Return to the Black Sea for 1991/1, then Exploring the Eastern Baltic (1992/2), A Little More about the Baltic (1993/1), Access to Russian Waters (1995/2) and finally Sailing through Russia in ‘96 for 1997/1. All will be found in the Flying Fish Archive at https://oceancruisingclub.org/Flying-Fish-Archive. Ping and Astraea moored on the Odessa Yacht Harbour wall

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Astraea, a large motor yacht from Palm Beach, Florida, with television newscaster Hugh Downs aboard. He was travelling with a friend from New York, whose mother had been born in Odessa in the late 19th century during the glory days of the free port. Like Jim, they had made the trip to revisit that heritage. Hugh Downs was a sailor himself, having crossed the Pacific on his own yacht, and was very interested in us and the other American boats. When a diesel truck came to the harbour to refuel his yacht he arranged for Jim and Marjorie at the entrance to the other boats to take on the Black Sea Yacht Club, founded in 1875 the truck’s remaining fuel, which saved us many dollars and many trips carrying jerry cans. So, what did we do for a month moored on the wall in Odessa? Even filtered through the fog of 33 years I have some specific memories, such as boiling a lot of drinking water for the two sailing teams from St Mary’s College of Maryland who had come to the Odessa Yacht Club to race quarter tonners in the Black Sea Regatta (a third American team, skippered by Ted Turner Jr, also raced). Their participation was part of a reciprocal arrangement that had found a Soviet crew sailing in New York’s Liberty Cup races in June. We had learned that bottled drinks, including water, were not available locally when we offered a Coke to a man who had helped us take on fuel. It seemed he had never seen a canned drink as he refused to take it. All our water came from the one tap on the quay, but no one could attest to its safety so I always boiled it. When the St Mary’s crews were about to go on an overnight race I offered to make them jugs of iced tea made with boiled water. They were very grateful, but this started a daily routine of supplying them with water for each day’s racing. During the regatta it became clear that the Black Sea Yacht Club, who were hosting the event, wanted some of the visiting yachts to participate. Having been racers before we reformed and became cruisers we did not like the odds – we were heavily laden with gear after several years of Med cruising, there was no handicap system, the Soviets wanted to place local sailors aboard our boat, the race might be overnight, etc. But the club had welcomed us enthusiastically so we decided to participate by joining some of the other foreign cruising yachts in a day race, a 30-mile triangle that sounded good for our cat-ketch rig. We took on a couple of young guys who were eager to sail with the Americans. 141

The race, however, was a big surprise. Our class became a match race with just two boats on our start – a 40ft trimaran and us. The 30-mile course turned out to be six laps around a triangle of 1½mile legs, not the long reaches we’d looked forward to. We led off the start and to the first weather mark, but the trimaran soon zoomed past. Our biggest challenge became counting off the laps. It turned out that the ‘rating’ consisted of overall length rather than any calculated or predicted speed projection (my assertion that they had 120ft of hull length was not appreciated). Jim and Marjorie with their Black Sea Regatta But it was a racing crew aboard Ping lovely day and we enjoyed our local crew. Participating earned us an invitation to the regatta party and friendships with the collegiate and Odessa sailors. Sometimes while cruising, we felt more like ambassadors than adventurers. I fondly remember a day spent sailing with a group of women who had been invited to race in the September 1989 Rolex International Women’s Keelboat Championship in Newport, Rhode Island. The regatta was to be sailed in J/24s and they had never seen one, much less sailed one. I showed them a photo of our J/24, a previous Ping, and they 142

invited me to go out with them to practise. They were sailing Polish-built imitations of the 25ft Peterson Quarter Tonner, which sailed differently from a J but were analogous in rig and crew positions. I am not sure how much they learned about J/24s from me, but I was able to solve one of their big problems. Boats were available in Newport but they would have to bring their own sails. Finding a suit of J/24 sails was not going to be possible in the USSR, so I contacted a friend on the Rolex committee, explained their situation and sails were found. After that the crew thought I was able to pull strings, so they came to me with a request for top-of-the-line foulweather gear. I sadly informed them that I had no connections in the sailing gear industry. The experience was informative, and characteristic of the situation in the USSR at the time. Nothing was advertised for sale but everything was up for finding, bartering and negotiating. Asking directly was the only way to find out how to get something. Ping was moored stern to a large cement wall that was part of a park area. A constant stream of seaside pedestrians stopped to comment on our American ensign and to photograph themselves standing next to it. Anyone who spoke English would pepper us with questions about where we were from and why and how we’d got there. They’d often offer us something – food, drink, or maybe an invitation to their summer cottage or dacha. Our best contact was a woman who taught English and helped translate when necessary. Her son was a merchant seaman for the Black Sea Shipping Company, which ran the yacht harbour as a recreational facility for its employees. He had access to western currencies while he was in foreign ports and thus could buy items like cameras, video cassette recorders and blue jeans. Western goods, and information about them, were highly valued. The books and magazines we had aboard made great gifts. Marjorie in the cockpit of Ping with the Soviet team headed to the Rolex International Women’s Keelboat Championship

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For about a penny it was possible to take a trolley car (tram) into downtown Odessa. The most famous sight, the replica of the La Scala opera house, is featured on current news footage as a sign that Odessa has not yet been demolished. In perfect condition with abundant gleaming gold leaf, it reminds us that Odessa was an international city in the pre-Soviet era when free trade with the Mediterranean and Near East thrived. The city was built with Italianate architecture, wide boulevards and an elegant marketplace. We tried to see and do everything we could, attending the opera, ballet, circus and dinner cabarets, visiting several museums and often shopping in Privoz, the large covered market. I had provisioned for the entire summer, believing there would be nothing available to buy that we would want to eat. I was wrong. Odessa is in the centre of a rich agricultural area and bread, eggs, fruit and vegetables – not to mention smetana, an ultra-rich crème fraiche to be slathered on everything savoury or sweet – were delicious and plentiful. However, cheese was limited to one type of white cheese, similar to Greece’s feta, and meat was unappealing. An order of beef would be ‘butchered’ from an unrefrigerated hanging side of beef, not in any defined cut but next off the carcass in a hunk the size you ordered. Chickens were sold feathered and warm just after having had their necks wrung. We received many wonderful invitations to people’s homes and dachas. Most would tell us that they had never imagined speaking to an American, let alone having one in their home. We were not authorised to venture outside Odessa, but a couple we had befriended in the harbour invited us on an illicit daytrip to Kishinev in Moldova. They wanted to show us the area where Jim had imagined his grandmother living. To go off travelling with them was foolish on our part and certainly on theirs, but it made for a very memorable day of driving through the countryside, eating a picnic lunch on a collective farm near the Dnieper River and seeing life outside the city. We struggled with how to pay all these people back. Eventually Jim’s birthday came around and we hosted a party on board Ping. We served American foods such as hamburgers, potato salad and brownies. Our big mistake was in letting it be known that it was a birthday party. Our friends came laden with gifts, so we hardly felt as though we had reciprocated their kindnesses. But we could tell that, for many of them, an all-day, all-night affair on board an American yacht was a much-appreciated first. While cruising I often find one souvenir from each place we visit that will evoke memories later. Living aboard means that it must be small and durable. Late in our stay in Odessa we came upon a market where I found a collection of Russian and Ukrainian folktales for children, published in English with exquisite illustrations. I wondered who bought those books other than me. Perhaps they were meant to teach English to the young? Now I think of the children who read those stories and of their children, and wonder where they are during this war and whether they will survive it. And where are our sailing friends? We have lost track of the people we met there. The fact that there is now war between Russia and Ukraine is tragic. Our voyage to the USSR today seems like fantasy. It wasn’t about exploration, an epic voyage or conquering new seas, which begs the question – why? Why ‘cruise’ to the Soviet Union? Not for the scenery, although I believe that every place wants to be 144

seen. Not for a sailing challenge, although the sailing was pleasant, with nice winds and passages to and from Odessa. Not for high adventure – the only truly adventurous part of the trip was motoring up the Bosporus through Istanbul into the Black Sea. That passage pits you against several knots of current, a 20 knot breeze, supertankers, cargo ships, naval vessels, a steady stream of car ferries crossing between Asia and Europe, fishing trawlers and small rowing dories, all with no evident traffic control. In 1989 the buzz in the cruising community was that visiting the USSR could be done, and so it was. There was a sense that our world was opening to new vistas and that people would be in easier circumstances, have a better understanding of each other and have more communication. We were just one American couple experiencing this new freedom to cruise to places and meet people previously closed off to us. Reprinted by kind permission of the Cruising Club of America, in whose journal Voyages it previously appeared. An article about this Black Sea cruise was also published in Cruising World in September 1991.

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing; Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn

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FINDING OUR WAY IN GREENLAND with an ice chart web service* and up-to-date satellite imagery Alex Mansfield and Angie Garz (Alex and Angie are new OCC members although they have been following the club for some years. They have been cruising aboard Twoflower, their Moody 376, since 2017 and since making an Atlantic circuit in 2020 have been based in the Azores. This summer they joined Atlas, a 13m (43ft) ketch, for a voyage to southwest Greenland. The vessel is made available through the Atlas Expeditions association as a platform for research and exploratory expeditions. Visit https:// www.saltytoes.ch to read about their adventures – and learn how Twoflower got her name. Photos by Alex Mansfield and Angie Garz – Atlas Expeditions unless otherwise credited.) Weaving through the sea-ice Our first iceberg appeared as a diffuse whitish smear on the horizon, just about visible against the somewhat greyer fog. It was the harbinger of nearby ice ahead of our bow, which formed increasingly numerous green spots on our radar screen but remained unseen through the fog. This ice from the Arctic Ocean had been carried down and around Cape Farewell by the East Greenland Current. Melted into organic-looking sculptures by the erosive forces of the sun, wind and sea, each piece is unique in colour, shape, size and texture. Sparse at first, the ice grew denser – as we had expected from the ice charts – and we reduced engine revs to give ourselves time to pick our way through. Taking turns on the helm and as lookouts on deck, we steered through narrow leads, pushing away small pieces of ice with our bow wave with growing confidence. Here and there we spied a shy seal peeking out of the water or resting on an ice-floe, and growlers dotted black with guillemots. * A web service is software on the web that runs on request and provides the results via an internet address.

Atlas in the Arctic ice

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Passing aweinspiring icebergs in southwest Greenland As the eventful day faded into evening, we closed with the land and the fog began to lift. It revealed the wild, hilly shore of a fjord filled with sea-ice and bergs – our first glimpse of Greenland. Off the bow and bathed in the warm glow of the low sun, the brightly-coloured houses of Qaqortoq nestled against the slopes that surround its harbour like an amphitheatre. We Sea-ice sculptures in the fog as we close with the unseen coast

had reached Qaqortoq, the largest town in southwest Greenland and formerly known as Julianehåb, on 19th June 2023, earlier than expected. Until recently this stretch of the Greenland coast was often blocked by ice in June, making it nearly impossible to reach in a small vessel early in the season as Bill Tilman discovered during his voyage to the region in 1970. We had A harp seal hauled out on the ice. Being hunted, they are wary of boats and people 147

Automated sea-ice concentration mosaic retrieved from the latest available Sentinel-1 radar imagery. Date: 2 October 2023. Courtesy the Danish Meteorological Institute Opposite: Part of the Cape Farewell Iceberg Map on the day of our arrival, showing composite data from 12–16 June 2023. The maps are automatically generated from Sentinel-1 radar satellite data. Pure white areas are sea-ice, where iceberg detection is not carried out. Courtesy the Danish Meteorological Institute

Part of the Cape Farewell Ice Chart of the day of our arrival, 19 June 2023. Egg and colour codes indicate the concentration, stages of development (age) and form (floe size) of the ice. Courtesy the Danish Meteorological Institute 148

two advantages over Tilman, however – several decades of a warming climate and the ability to receive detailed weather forecasts and ice charts while underway. We were aboard the sailing vessel Atlas, a steel pilothouse ketch with a long keel, designed by Koopmans and built in the Netherlands. Through the Atlas Expeditions association she is made available as a microplatform for scientific and exploratory expeditions. This year Atlas was to sail from northern Brittany to the Kujalleq region of southwest Greenland to explore, research and shoot footage for a documentary film. On board were owner/skipper/photographer Arnaud Conne, photographer/film-maker Richard Mardens and the two of us as crew. Later in the season Atlas would host a group of speleologists* to explore ice caves under the glaciers, before sailing through Prins Christian Sund to Greenland’s east coast. From there she would continue her journey to Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Scotland before ending the season in the Netherlands. Ice information for Greenland As we prepared for the voyage we knew that we would need access to the latest ice information as we progressed. Of the many forms of ice information provided for Greenland by the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), we particularly wanted the colour versions of the classic ice chart and the iceberg map. The former would allow us to identify areas where we could (or could not) navigate safely, at sea as well as in the fjords, while the latter would reveal in more detail the distribution of larger icebergs. * Speleology is the scientific study of caves and cave systems. 149

The harbour at the heart of Qaqortoq, with Atlas tied up to the furthest pontoon As an additional source of information, we also wanted to get extracts from their new ‘automated sea-ice concentration mosaic’, which is created from Sentinel-1 radar and microwave satellite data. As with all auto-generated content these must be treated with caution as they can contain errors and biases, although on the plus side they offer more complete coverage of the coastline, allowing us to fill in the gaps between the ice charts. All these resources are readily available from the DMI’s website, but we were not able to find a satisfactory way to retrieve them with Saildocs and Iridium Go! while at sea. There are no direct fixed URLs (permalinks) to the latest charts, and the sizes of the files are relatively large, making for potentially long and frustrating downloads. The DMI’s Ice Service (Istjeneste) generously offers to e-mail the latest blackand-white ice charts as soon as they are issued. However, we found those harder to interpret, particularly within the fjords, as the ice codes are indicated by hatching instead of colours and details can get lost. Furthermore, while the ice charts are the most valuable ice information in the high latitudes, we did not want to miss out on the additional resources mentioned previously. We considered asking a friend for help, but we didn’t want to burden them with checking the website daily and manually downsizing the files to send to us. Web service for retrieving the latest ice information With a background in programming, we wrote a small web service that allowed us to access small versions of the various ice resources. This web service is a piece of code that runs every few hours and checks the DMI website for the latest information, which it downloads, compresses to make the files smaller and uploads to fixed URLs on the web. In this way, using these permalinks, Saildocs and Iridium Go!, we were able to retrieve the latest charts quickly and easily. 150

Having access to the latest ice information gave us the confidence to head into Qaqortoq rather than continue further north. This had looked uncertain a few days earlier when the ice concentration had been much denser. That evening, after a glorious day navigating through the majestic ice seascape that we had been imagining for weeks, conjured up from the ice charts, we tied up in the harbour. We had only just shut down the engine and settled in the cockpit to take in the scene when we were greeted by a member of the local boat club. He told us that we were the first sailing yacht to make it through the ice to Qaqortoq this year. Off the charts, towards the glaciers and into the silt Peeking through the mist ahead was a small islet, no higher than our mast. As we passed we spotted a pair of white-tailed eagle chicks in their nest on the island’s summit. We watched as they tentatively spread their wings in the emerging sun. How long until they fledge and leave the nest? In the distance, two long tongues of the tremendous inland ice sheet reached down towards sea level. This was our destination – the land reborn from beneath the glaciers, released by the retreat of the ice. Bedrock and glacial flood plains criss-crossed by an intricate web of meandering, milky streams laden with glacial flour, rocks crushed and ground into fine powder by the passage of the ice. On the chart the soundings were becoming few and far between. Before long we passed off the chart and cautiously proceeded, navigating by eye, depth-sounder and satellite imagery. Still in deep water, in the middle of a wide fjord, we had some more miles to cover before reaching the end of the fjord and our intended anchorage. The flood plains and moraine landscape revealed by the retreating glaciers fascinated us

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Heading up the fjord to the retreated glaciers. Note the reindeer in the foreground As we continued up the fjord the water colour began to change, becoming increasingly cloudy and silty – a shift we had already seen in the recent satellite images. Our depthsounder reported a steadily shelving bottom until we had only a little left under the keel. We stopped the boat and looked around. We were still in the middle of this wide fjord, where minutes ago we had had more than 50m below the keel. Was it really so shallow, or was the depth-sounder simply reflecting from sediment suspended in the water? An improvised lead line with a dive weight quickly confirmed the depth-sounder’s accuracy! Copernicus Browser showing the glacial plains a few of days before our visit. In the panel on the left one can select the date, acceptable cloud coverage, the satellite (Sentinel-2 L2A) and the visualisation (Layer). After login, the data can be downloaded with a button on the right of the screen. The platform has many more features, including contrast enhancement, 3D view and time lapse, which can be useful for observing changes. Courtesy the European Union, contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2023

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Up-to-date satellite images from Copernicus Sentinel-2 A couple of weeks earlier this fjord had caught our eye as we scoured southwest Greenland via satellite imagery for inspiration about where to explore. We were drawn to the land uncovered by the retreating glaciers with its landscape of rock, tundra and water. We had no chart for the upper reaches of this fjord, however, and looking at different satellite images we could see that it was an area of rapid change, especially in terms of the influx of sediment into the fjord from the meltwater rivers. While searching for the most recent satellite data available to complement the highresolution Microsoft Bing Maps we had, we came across the brand-new Copernicus Browser which had been launched only a few days earlier. This platform allows easy access to the very latest Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite images – the newest often being only a few hours old – as well as an archive of the past images. Sentinel-2 are twin European polar-orbiting satellites that capture high-resolution multi-spectral images to monitor variability in land surface conditions. Both satellites fly in the same orbit but are phased at 180° so they are always on opposite sides of the planet, shortening the time between overflights. At the Equator new data is available approximately every five days but, due to their orbits, the satellites pass over the mid-latitudes every two to three days and the high latitudes even more frequently. This makes them a particularly interesting source of satellite imagery for high-latitude sailing. Following a free registration, it is possible to filter out imagery with a high percentage of cloud cover and download the geo-referenced images. With the help of the free command-line tool GDAL on Mac we converted those images into the MBTiles format to display as chart overlays in OpenCPN. We haven’t tested if the same could be achieved with SAT2Chart or other software. For comparison, a Sentinel-2 image of the same area on 3rd June 2022, a year before we arrived and before the melting started. The glaciers are covered in snow and, without the additional silt suspended in the water, channels and silt banks are clearly visible. Courtesy the European Union, contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2022

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Download geo-referenced TIFF images for conversion to MBTiles for overlaying in OpenCPN using the button highlighted in green on the right. Make sure to select ‘TIFF (8-bit)’ and high resolution

Comparing the resolutions of Sentinel-2 data (right) and Microsoft Bing Maps (below). The details of the latter are far superior for seeing the lie of the land, but are composites of many images of unknown date

Courtesy the European Union, contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2023. Microsoft product screenshot(s) reprinted with the permission of Microsoft Corporation 154

A Sentinel-2 satellite image showing ice in the waters around Qaqortoq on 18th June 2023, the day before we arrived. Courtesy the European Union, contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2023 The excellent article Using Satellite Imagery with OpenCPN by Sherry and Dave McCampbell on page 47 of this Flying Fish describes using Google Earth, Microsoft Bing Maps and other sources in a similar way. Satellite images from these sources are composites, created every few years by combining many images taken over time to create clean, cloud-free and highly detailed imagery. In contrast the Copernicus Sentinel-2 images are lower resolution, but only a few hours or days old. They are captured at a single instant in time like a photograph and allow you to look at an area in the present. Using the archive of past images you can also look backwards in time to see how the area has changed. In practical terms, satellite imagery from Google Earth and co is best at showing semi-permanent features such as coastlines, reefs and patches of sand or weeds in an anchorage, and as such is akin to nautical charts. The satellite images from Copernicus are more like ice or weather analysis charts – they provide information that is most relevant right now, such as the positions of glacial ice fronts and shifting sandbanks and silt. Indeed, they can also be used to see sea-ice concentrations, providing an interesting complement to the ice charts. Both types of satellite images must be used with due caution, as stressed by the McCampbells in their article. Further up the fjord We quickly learned to identify the navigable water by comparing the water colour in the Sentinel-2 images with the depth-sounder readings. This would not have been possible 155

Sentinel-2 satellite images of a retreating ice front in southwest Greenland, June 2020 and September 2023. Courtesy the European Union, contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2020 and 2023

with the Bing imagery. We realised we could not reach the end of the fjord with Atlas as we had intended, but could make our way around a bar of sediment and anchor behind it. From there we launched the dinghy to continue towards the glaciers. As we passed between two islands we were astonished to see a small group of reindeer sharing the fjord with us, the water barely reaching halfway up their legs. They were clearly as surprised and curious as we were and came splashing towards us for a closer look at three figures in a rubber dinghy. Close to low tide, this part of the fjord was so silted up that it allowed the reindeer to walk between the mainland and the various islands. While the reindeer made for the next island we continued on our way. Soon we, like the reindeer, had to walk, water lapping at our rubber boots as we pulled the dinghy behind us. 156

Next steps Our voyage to Greenland and the specific challenges of navigation there compelled us to seek out and use the additional sources of information we have described. We are convinced that both the web service we developed and the use of up-to-date satellite imagery could have great potential for cruising in many areas of the world. We are very happy to share more details about what we did with other members and to receive feedback and ideas. Would making our web service more widely available, providing ice charts, satellite images and other information in small file sizes, be useful to you? Do you know of other information that is currently hard to access via satellite connection which you would like to see included? Would you like to work together with us, to contribute ideas, resources and code? Look us up in the Members Handbook, on the OCC app or in the online Membership Directory and get in touch. We look forward to hearing from you. Links Atlas Expeditions – https://atlasexpeditions.org DMI Ice Service (Istjeneste) – https://www.dmi.dk/gronland/is/kontaktoplysninger/ DMI ice charts – https://www.dmi.dk/gronland/is/ DMI iceberg maps – http://polarportal.dk/en/sea-ice-and-icebergs/icebergs/ DMI automatic ice concentration mosaic – https://ocean.dmi.dk/asip/ Copernicus Browser – https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/browser/ GDAL – https://gdal.org/ Saildocs – http://www.saildocs.com

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Curious reindeer splashing towards us through knee-deep water

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CORNELLS’ OCEAN ATLAS – Jimmy and Ivan Cornell, 3rd edition. Published in spiral-bound format between soft covers by Cornell Sailing Ltd [www.cornellsailing. com] at £99.00. 156 A3-sized pages, all in full colour. ISNB 978-1-9160910-4-7 The OCC is at the forefront of reviewing and reporting on climate change for longdistance cruisers and the recently-published OCC Guide to Climate Change for Cruisers* brings together evidence and expert views about the changes to the long-established currents and winds. Predictable winds and currents have been the key factors in the traditional seasonal passage routes for generations of sailors. However, the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that global warming is having a severe impact on weather conditions. The oceans are getting warmer, the tropical seasons are less clearly defined, tropical storms are becoming more frequent, the Gulf Stream is slowing down and the Arctic ice cap and Antarctic ice shelf are both melting at the fastest rate since records began. So, if you are planning an ocean passage, how do you access the latest information about what is happening to the traditional passage routes? That’s where Cornells’ Ocean Atlas comes in. Jimmy and his son Ivan first published their Ocean Atlas 12 years ago, and what has always set it apart from other similar products is that the Cornells have specifically focused on data gathered from weather buoys and satellite observations over the previous 25 years. Equivalent publications don’t capture the changes so clearly because their averages are affected by long-term data, sometimes recorded more than 150 years ago. This fully-revised edition shows the changes that have occurred over the past 24 years by analysis of global wind, weather and current data gathered between 1998 and 2022. It even includes some data from early 2023. The Cornells’ information demonstrates that the regularity and reliability of the trade winds is decreasing and that changes in the global climate are accelerating. Now, more than ever, additional safety factors must be incorporated into sailors’ long-distance planning. For example, arriving in the tropics too close to the start of the traditional cyclone-free season should be avoided. With careful planning, however, and by being aware of the consequences of climate change, the risk of encountering hazards such as tropical storms can still be mitigated. Nevertheless, atmospheric and oceanic systems are hugely complex and there are many uncertainties. Changes to winds and currents are gradual, but one example shows that the predominant winds north of the Galapagos Islands have veered by more than 45° between data printed in 1980 and the new data incorporated in Cornells’ Ocean Atlas. * Downloadable gratis at https://www.oceancruisingclub.org/home/news/2356. 159

One of the improvements in this edition is that the ocean areas affected by tropical storms, the number of which are increasing almost annually, are shown in red on the monthly charts making it easier to see which areas to avoid during critical seasons. Another feature of this atlas compared to others is the ‘Windgram’, which summarises the wind direction and strength along the great circle routes of popular ocean passages. In addition, the seasonal migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone is represented, the mean location of high pressure cells for each hemisphere are clearly marked and sidebars giving tactical routeing suggestions for the months when most passages are undertaken in a specific area are now included. Together, these all simplify the task of interpreting the expected wind conditions and currents on a long ocean passage. All this is included in the monthly charts for each area, the ‘meat’ of this Ocean Atlas. However, if the title led you to believe that it would only cover the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans you would be wrong, as there are also detailed monthly charts for the Mediterranean, the Baltic and the Caribbean Seas. Further, the Atlantic is represented by North Atlantic charts as well as separate, detailed, high-latitude charts, and the South Atlantic and Pacific are similarly represented with northern and southern area charts. There are also detailed charts showing the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Each section includes an introduction highlighting region-specific weather, winds and passage-planning information. Although this book’s sub-title is Pilot charts for all the oceans of the world it is far more than a pilot book. At the beginning is a 17-page introduction guiding the reader through the interpretation of information such as wind roses and also detailing the key factors influencing world weather and the hazards and the impact of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena. The impact of climate change, including the slowing of the Gulf Stream and the change in behaviour of the jet streams, is discussed before moving on to show detailed tracks of tropical cyclones and hurricanes. The narrative highlights why traditionally-accepted safe times for passage-making are affected by changes to the climate. There’s a huge amount of background information in this Introduction alone and it bears reading and rereading several times. Overall this is an excellent publication and an invaluable resource for any crew making an ocean passage. The narrative is well-written and easy to understand, the diagrams are clear and the full-colour satellite imagery and charts combine to make this both an informative publication and an easy one with which to work. If you are intending to undertake an ocean passage and want to understand the likely wind and current conditions you will experience, then you should regard Cornells’ Ocean Atlas as an essential passage planning aid. MHRB

NORTH AFRICA – Graham Hutt and Di Stoddard, 5th edition. Published in hard covers by Imray Laurie Norie & Wilson [www.imray.com] and the RCC Pilotage Foundation at £47.50. 300 A4 pages, in full colour throughout with many harbour plans, chartlets and photographs. ISBN 978-1-8462-3281-7 160

This well-written pilot book covers the coasts of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Tunisia) together with adjacent islands and enclaves. The Maghreb offers an unspoilt and challenging cruising ground, with miles of deserted beaches, quiet anchorages, sheer green mountainous coasts and occasional ports. A cruise along any part of this coast gives an insight into a totally different culture, albeit with a history closely linked to that of Europe. Lead author Graham Hutt has spent more than 50 years cruising in and around the Mediterranean, including the coastlines covered in this pilot book, and speaks many of the local languages. He initially updated the 2nd edition of North Africa for the RCC Pilotage Foundation in 2000 and was the author of the 3rd and 4th editions and, together with his long-term assistant Di Stoddard, continues to work on RCC PF projects. It is now nearly 14 years since the 4th edition of North Africa was published in 2010. Much has happened in the area during that time, both politically and in terms of the development of sailing facilities. Supplements to that edition have been available on the RCC PF website at https://rccpf.org.uk/Updates-and-Supplements, the most recent dated 2019, but there was a real need for this complete update. As the author makes clear, this 5th edition is not the work of one individual and could not have been produced without the input of his co-author, many skippers and contacts who contributed photographs and information and of the editorial staff at the RCC PF itself. North Africa provides clear, simple navigational information on almost all the marinas, harbours and anchorages along the entire 2300 miles of coastline between Tobruk in Libya and the southernmost Moroccan Atlantic ports bordering Mauritania. The introduction covers specifics to both the area as a whole and a summary of each country within it. Although only a short distance from Europe, the Maghreb presents a huge leap in cultures. The author clearly states that his aim has not only been to present accurate pilotage information to assist navigation, but also to enable yachtsmen visiting for the first time to feel informed, to know what to expect and therefore to adjust quickly in order to fully enjoy and appreciate the culture and history of the area. He makes no apology for including more (in my view helpful) historic and sight-seeing information than would normally be the case in a pilot book. The area remains, however, best suited to the more adventurous cruiser. Tunisia offers by far the most varied and established cruising grounds on this coast. Morocco continues to develop, particularly along its Atlantic coast. Algeria may now be safe, but political turmoil has resulted in endless bureaucracy, while Libya, since the death of Gaddafi, has been overtaken by strife and warring between rival factions. While cruising and charter flights had been increasing in parts of the Maghreb pre-Covid, they reduced dramatically in 2020 and numbers have not yet recovered. Even so, individual cruisers, particularly French and Italian, have and still are visiting the Maghreb countries, almost invariably with the assistance of visas obtained (albeit with difficulty, no doubt) from the relevant embassies in their home countries. Visiting yachtsmen have, however, always been welcomed by the coastal populations in each country*, personal security is good and there have been few serious incidents involving foreign cruisers. All in all, the author clearly believes that the situation will continue to improve going forward. * See page 75 of this issue for an account of Moroccan hospitality in the early 1970s! 161

In summary, North Africa is a most interesting and enjoyable read even if one has no plans to cruise the Maghreb coast. If one has, it is indispensable. MVN

BLUE MACHINE: How the Ocean Shapes our World – Helen Czerski. Published in both hard and soft covers by Transworld Publishers [https://www.penguin.co.uk/ company/publishers/transworld] at £15.99 and £14.31 respectively. 464 pages measuring 162mm x 240mm and 154mm x 232 mm, with five black-and-white diagrams plus four photographs of the world taken from space on the front and back inside covers. ISBNs 978-1-9117-0910-7 and 978-1-9117-0911-4 Blue Machine is a fascinating and wide-ranging discourse about the ocean and the way in which it influences all life on Earth. In the words of the author, ‘This book will take you on a voyage through the global ocean, hopping between stories of history and culture, natural history and geography, animals and people, to reveal the basic shape of the blue machine. Our adventure will traverse the ocean’s innards, both the physical mechanisms and the life that is woven into the liquid engine. We will see how the ocean events we observe ... are actually just the surface expressions of the deep engine which is turning beneath’. All this is underpinned by the science, particularly physics, which explains the concepts and the mechanics of ocean geography. There is a lot of science in Blue Machine, but Czerski writes of the scientific concepts so clearly, and provides such excellent examples to illustrate them, that it is easy to see why she is a regular presenter of podcasts and TV science documentaries. Though she is first and foremost a physicist, her style is not scientific. Instead she writes descriptively, almost poetically, resulting in Blue Machine being a rather chunky book. In the nearly 400 pages of text there is a vast amount of information, all laid out in just seven, 60page chapters. The first three deal with the nature of the ocean – the physics and the geography that define it and make it the ‘blue machine’ moving heat, nutrients and living creatures around our planet and thus enabling life on Earth. The next three chapters look at travel in or through the ocean; travel by parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (light and sound) and how this affects the creatures that live in the ocean or visit it; travel by ‘passengers’ – ions, cells and multi-cellular organisms that have no choice but to go where the bit of the ocean they are in takes them; and finally travel by ‘voyagers’ – active travellers, including man. The book ends with a chapter entitled ‘Future’, of which more later. The first six chapters are lyrical narratives on their particular subjects. In reading them you feel immersed in the grandeur of the ocean and gain a vision of its size and space, even whilst learning of tiny details. The science of the ocean – for example why it is stratified, the differences between the layers, and why stratification is important but too much stratification would be disastrous – is clearly explained and then illustrated by anecdotes about weird and wonderful creatures (as befits any self-respecting book about the sea!), descriptions of extraordinary physical features, such as upside-down waterfalls, and tales of historical exploration or scientific research. 162

Helen Czerski has a clear love of the ocean and many of the anecdotes are personal ones from her own professional research, the research she undertook in preparing this book and her leisure time paddling outrigger canoes. Unfortunately I found her frequent use of the present tense in these stories irritating, though I know that many people feel it provides a sense of immediacy and intimacy. It took me a good 60 pages to get into the author’s writing style and really start to enjoy the book. Helen Czerski’s aim in writing Blue Machine is to ‘draw the outlines of the Earth’s wonderful ocean engine, to show how it works, ... how it all fits together and why it matters’. In the final chapter, ‘Future’, she moves away from her generally positive and passionate description of the ocean and takes a long, hard look at the damage that humans are inflicting on it and what that means for the ocean’s systems and inhabitants and, ultimately, for us. In my view it’s a truly depressing picture, though Czerski tries to put a more optimistic spin on it. Nevertheless, as she says, ‘We don’t have long to work all of this out. Ocean systems, both physical and biological, are changing now’. Astronauts have described our blue planet as a spaceship on which we are all crew. Czerski, with her love of paddling, prefers to look at the Earth as a canoe. Either way, we all need to pull together to reverse the changes that are so clearly happening (and I write this as sea ice in the Antarctic winter is reported as being at a historic low). On a slightly critical note, as mentioned previously I struggled to get into this book initially because of the style of Czerski’s writing, and I feel that the text would also benefit from being a bit pithier. Better sign-posting within the layout might also help, perhaps by including the chapter sub-headings on the contents page. More importantly, the addition of more diagrams and illustrations (there are only five in total, and the two most useful aren’t even referenced in the text) would help with the explanation of some of the principles of physical oceanography. A few photographs would add to the human interest, too. Overall, however, this is an excellent book, one that bears reading and re-reading and then passing on to your friends. The human race as a whole tends to see the ocean as a huge ‘nothingness’, an emptiness, and/or an inexhaustible supplier of food and other resources and/or a place in which to get rid of waste. None of these are true – the ocean is a delicately-balanced system, the most vital part of Earth and what makes our planet habitable. Blue Machine explains how it does this in a way that we can all understand. NSB

THE ADLARD COLES BOOK OF BALTIC CRUISING – various authors. Published in soft covers by Adlard Coles [www.bloomsbury.com] at £25.00. 236 184 x 248 mm pages profusely illustrated with colour photographs. Originally published in Germany by Delius Klasing in 2019 as Sehnsuchtsrevier Ostsee. ISBN 978-1-3994-0126-5. The Baltic Sea used to be sailing’s best-kept secret but that secret is now out and The 163

Adlard Coles Book of Baltic Cruising serves as great inspiration for anyone considering a visit to this region (and you definitely should!). The 19 chapters, contributed by ten German boating journalists, cover areas stretching from Germany’s Baltic coast across Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Poland, Bornholm and back to Germany. They also include some rivers, canals and deltas adjacent to the Baltic. The text, while not quite as practical as the publisher asserts, resembles – and most probably is – articles that could easily find a home in a boating magazine. Personally I quite like it when a book adopts a magazine-like style, featuring good-sized photographs, informative fact boxes and concise yet engaging reading. Each chapter provides enticing and occasionally pragmatic tips on destinations and expectations, though it falls short of being a comprehensive sailing guide. That said, the well-written and highly appealing text, complemented by numerous vivid and captivating photographs, undeniably sparks a desire to sail (or motor-boat) in Baltic waters. One major drawback is that the book’s coverage is limited to only a few disparate Baltic areas – some expansive archipelagos in both Sweden and Finland which offer excellent cruising are notably absent. The initial two-page map suggests coverage beyond the book’s contents, so it’s possible that one or two chapters were omitted in the English translation. The map for each chapter suffers somewhat from poor translation with occasional remnants of the original German text, and in places the overall quality of translation leaves something to be desired with lingering German words and occasional misspellings of local names. While this doesn’t significantly diminish the book’s inspirational value, it’s noticeable to a local sailor reading the text. Speaking as a local, however, I should say this is more amusing than frustrating... Having myself been a cruising guide writer, I understand the challenge of ensuring absolute accuracy. This book does contain a few errors, so once you’ve made the decision to explore the Baltic I do recommend obtaining a thoroughly updated cruising guide for practical, up-to-date information*. Read this book to ignite your enthusiasm for exploring this appealing region, which promises many summers of splendid cruising. You can spend decades sailing the Baltic and never have to anchor twice in the same protected cove. The summer season may be short but is very sweet indeed! MW * The current edition of the RCC Pilotage Foundation’s The Baltic Sea and Approaches (4th edition reviewed in Flying Fish 2017/2), plus the latest Supplement downloaded from https://rccpf.org.uk/Updates-and-Supplements, would meet this need.

THE HUNTER AND THE GATHERER: Cooking and Provisioning for Sailing Adventures – Catherine Lawson & David Bristow. Published in Australia between flexible but robust covers by Exploring Eden Media [https://exploringedenbooks. com/] at AU $49, or £27.45. 196 173mm x 236mm pages, in full colour throughout with hundreds of high-quality photographs. ISBN 978-0-6455-2263-1 164

David Bristow, the hunter, and Catherine Lawson, the gatherer, have spent the last 20 years afloat, cruising the coast of Australia and further afield with their young daughter Maya in their 12∙5m (41ft) catamaran Wild One. In her introduction, Catherine describes this book as ‘for ocean-loving foodies striving for better health, greater self-sufficiency, while leaving a tiny footprint on the sea. The food we cook in this book is the food we catch, forage for, grow onboard, buy in local markets, or trade off the back of our yacht’. Until recently the author was a strict vegetarian. Now she and her family enjoy the fish and seafood they have caught or gathered themselves, but they are not meateaters so this book may be less relevant if burgers and steak are an important part of your diet. For anyone who enjoys a variety of fish, vegetables, salads, sprouted seeds, herbs, spices and home-baked bread, however, the 160 recipes should provide plenty of inspiration. The Hunter and the Gatherer has excellent photos on almost every page, including shots of herbs and salad greens growing in troughs on Wild One’s stern. Not quite so practical in a monohull – heel over and the ‘garden’ goes flying! – but a plant in a hanging basket will survive quite well. All in all, my first impression was that it’s very well-produced and that many of the recipes look delicious! Some of the suggestions seem unlikely – eg. apparently most seaweeds are edible – so this book could really open new doors for cruisers on a budget or for those simply wanting to try something different. For anyone sailing in Australian waters it should be essential reading. Several pages on coconuts cover these in great detail, with all their varied uses. The same goes for seeds and grains, while cakes and desserts are covered in the last section of the book, with more mouth-watering photographs. Preserving food, including eggs, is discussed, though with a fridge and a freezer, storing perishables on Wild One is relatively simple. With an ethos of protecting the ocean, plastic wrappings are totally avoided. An important reminder is to keep an inventory of the food on board, crossing off items as they are used. For cruisers in the northern hemisphere, gathering (apart from fishing) may be more restricted – most fruit trees are owned by local people and taking fallen limes or oranges isn’t always popular. Many years ago when we couldn’t find corn on the cob (sweetcorn) in Spanish markets we helped ourselves to some from a farmer’s field, but it was too tough to eat even after lengthy boiling. Served us right – it had been grown for animal feed. But I did have success with making marmalade from (bought) grapefruit in Grenada and with mango chutney. Plums from the market in Horta, Azores made lovely jam, while back in the UK foraging for blackberries in September/October is a yearly ritual, resulting in many pots of delicious jelly. Apple trees often produce a bountiful harvest in autumn and fallen fruit that isn’t on private land is there for the taking. Hunting and gathering is an ancient human activity, and this colourful and inspiring book will surely motivate many present-day cruisers – and others – to shop less and enjoy the satisfaction and health benefits of ‘food for free’. EHMH

BENGT IN THE SOUTH SEAS ~ TOWARDS CHILE Wim and Elisabeth van Blaricum (Wim and Elisabeth come from Göteborg in Sweden. They bought Bengt in 2012, moved aboard the following year and have been active cruisers since 2016. Bengt is a steel Bruce Roberts Offshore 44, named for Bengt Matzén who built her in his garden in Stockholm between 1987 and 2003. All photographs are by the authors.) After two previous attempts, and to our great delight, we were finally able to set sail for Chile. In October 2018, on our way to Uruguay, we had changed course towards Martinique after leaks, electrical problems and an encounter with the birth of a hurricane. We have never seen so much lightning in all our sailing years – it looked like an illuminated city. Then in November 2021 Valdivia, the only open port in Chile at that time, closed its maritime borders again due to the Omicron outbreak just as we were about to leave French Polynesia. Third time lucky, they say, so on 1st December 2022 at 1000 on a beautiful morning Bengt left Huahine. Clearance at the Gendarmerie had gone smoothly and the last Polynesian francs used to buy bananas and pamplemousse (grapefruit). It was just a matter of dropping the newly-installed mooring, rolling out the genoa, sailing out of the pass and setting a course south. The engine was switched off after no more than ten minutes. We had engaged MetBob (www.metbob.com) as a router, something we had never done before but which was, as it turned out later, a good choice. Compared to what an Iridium Go! and a subscription to PredictWind costs it is great value for Bengt's route in the Pacific

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Downloading the weatherfax from the Chilean Armada. We used the SSB radio for all our communications money and, in addition, you have daily contact with an experienced meteorologist and not with a computer program. The high-pressure system had moved and a nice easterly breeze meant that we quickly left Huahine behind us. In front of Bengt were the 4300 miles to Valdivia in Chile. Bob had given us a south-southeasterly course as a starter, so we also rolled out the mainsail off the southern tip of Huahine and avoided some squalls. It was not without some melancholy that we saw the island with its loveable people and beautiful anchorages disappear over the horizon. Huahine is the island in the Society Islands that we liked the most, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever return. We had comfortable sailing for the first few days. Bob sent updates as needed or in case of weather changes. They might look like: ‘Finally, OK conditions for sailing south. ENE 20 gust 30kt turning ESE 10kt. 2m swells. Continue SSE on 170-160 True maybe as far as 38S’. Not having Iridium we received e-mails via the SSB radio, which worked fine. For a while we used our old INMARSAT phone, but it didn’t want to connect to the satellite south of 41°S although support claimed we had coverage down to the South Pole. We also used our SSB radio to download GRIB files, text weather from the Chilean Armada and weatherfax, as well as for e-mails and blog updates. The destroyed SailMail station in Chile was never rebuilt but now there is a new station at Ushuaia in Argentina with the same callsign and frequencies which, after some tweaking, worked well. On the crossing we used the stations at Honolulu, San Diego (CA), Rock Hill (SC), Friday Harbor (WA), Manihi (Tuamotus), Niue and Panama. Sometimes we even got a good connection with Darawank (NSW, Australia). At 0400 UTC each day we checked into the PolyMag-net on 8173kHz to give a position report, something we did until we reached Puerto Corral at the entrance to Valdivia. We got our first front south of Rapa Iti at 29°S and it turned out to be, in Bob’s words, ‘ugly’. The wind was northeast 35–45 knots for almost three days, so we hove 167

Life goes on, so does the washing to under a bit of mainsail and waited. We usually do this when there is too much wind from the wrong direction as it is quite comfortable and we can rest, eat or, if necessary, work on changing our tactics. Heaving to is our first choice in bad weather but we can also run before the wind, possibly with a Jordan Series Drogue or other brake device if the sea state requires it – we have some choices here. The second night was the worst with gusts of 53 knots and a 5m swell, but Bengt behaved wonderfully. Life on board continued as usual as the boat’s movements were relatively comfortable. When the wind had weakened and the swell moderated we went back to sailing south. The wind was stubbornly blowing from east-southeast so we continued sailing south and, for a while, even southwest – which felt strange considering that our destination was to the east – but we trusted Bob who was regularly sending updates. After 16 days we were able to change course to the northeast, but we had a lot of headwinds. Two days later we were hove to again as a front passed with violent squalls. Then followed a couple of nice days and we made good some easting. On one windless day we switched the engine on, but otherwise we slowly sailed on or let the boat drift in calms. The swell was sometimes troublesome, causing the sails to lose the wind even when it was blowing 20 knots. After 27 days we had another frontal passage and we hove to for almost two days. Then two days later the same low pressure made us heave to again. It had multiple centres (complex, according to Bob), so it was difficult to decide how to avoid it. At first Bob wanted us to sail northeast, but the wind was blowing at We had a few days of calms

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Luckily, Father Christmas managed to squeeze himself through our little chimney more than 40 knots from that direction (the GRIB files were completely wrong) so we hove to. After a couple of hours the wind decreased to 30 knots and we continued south, away from the deep low pressure. Only two ships passed us during the entire voyage, but since the end of December we had been in e-mail contact with two other boats, Ribouldingue and La Marguerita, which were also on their way to Chile. We had already met JC from La Marguerita in the Azores in 2018 and in Polynesia in 2021 and later, in Valdivia, we became good friends with Emuline and Francois from Ribouldingue. La Marguerita had headed for Puerto Montt instead. Both boats had left from Ile Gambier and had enjoyed a very pleasant, fast sail until they got down to 40°S, where we ended up in a high-pressure system together. It was nice to get e-mails from them because they were sailing a similar route at about the same speed and we could share weather information. As we approached Chile we started getting e-mails from MRCC Chile, who wanted a position report twice a day at 0800 and at 2000 – they had ‘seen’ our AIS. We had had our gas bottles filled in Polynesia by the gravity method, but it turned The crews of Ribouldingue (Francois and Emuline) and Bengt (Wim and Elisabeth) in Chile

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Cooking was not always easy...

out they were not as full as we had thought and we had to change to our last 5kg bottle after just a week’s sailing. In order not to end up without gas we started using the electric rice cooker for cooking and for boiling water for tea, soup and coffee. It worked fine and the electricity (the rice cooker rates at 300 watts) came from the sun, wind and water. On arrival in Valdivia, where you can fill any bottle, we found we still had quite a lot of gas left. On day 38 we changed course to the southeast to get south of the huge high pressure system. After that we made good progress east, although our latitude varied and we got down to 42°30’S before changing course towards Valdivia. The high pressure system gave a day or two of calms, but otherwise we had several days of wonderful downwind sailing

We baked bread every three days

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Bengt enjoyed some wonderful days of gennaker sailing under our big white-grey-pink gennaker. We saw no fish, dolphins or whales during the entire crossing, though we were accompanied by boobies during the last few weeks. Bengt suffered no serious gear failures. Wim had to splice a new endless furling line for the mainsail Furlex because the old one broke. The AquaAir trailing generator stopped working halfway through the passage due to a damaged bearing. We discovered an annoying leak because the ‘hole’ at the foot of the mast support, where we have the transducer for the log, was constantly filled with salt water when Bengt sailed closehauled on starboard tack, something she had to do more than we liked. We had to empty it several times a day and also had to pump the bilges more often than we usually need to do. The leak, we found, came from the anchor locker, which probably had a blocked outlet as well as poor construction. When we removed everything under the Elisabeth enjoying the sunshine at 40°S

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Always something to repair! forward berths on reaching Valdivia it turned out that salt water had sloshed around everywhere in the bow with some mildew and rotten plywood as a result. We are currently in the process of renovating and manufacturing a new, watertight bulkhead for the anchor locker. Otherwise we had only small leaks from one or two portholes and the occasional leaking hatch gasket. On 23rd January 2023, after 53 days at sea, we sighted land. The gennaker had to be dropped as the wind swung into the north and northeast and increased to 25 knots, which made Bengt heel and race at 7 knots towards land. Bob had warned us that a front was on the way which, combined with the expected high swell, made us hurry to get to Puerto Corral at the entrance to the Río Valdivia before dark. The front, and rain, came upon us at 1900, just as we were sailing into the bay. The rain meant that we didn’t see much, but luckily it was only a short shower, though very heavy. At 2000 we dropped anchor in 7m of water over mud in Baie Corral. After contact with the authorities by VHF we lit the wood stove to dry the boat out and warm our sun-starved bodies. Then we treated ourselves to a glass of Tahitian rum before going to bed. At last, after 53 days, Chile!

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Bengt at the Club de Yates Valdivia

That night there were very strong southwesterly winds and lots of rain but Bengt was safely at anchor. Next morning we woke up to a beautiful summer’s day, so after breakfast the anchor came up and we motored the 5 miles upriver to Marina Estancilla at the Club de Yates Valdivia, where we were warmly welcomed by manager Jorge and his staff. In the afternoon we were cleared in by the authorities. Bengt had sailed 5426 miles in 53 days and we were finally in Chile.

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CARIBBEAN ODYSSEY Richard Freeborn (After leaving Italy in June 2019 and taking the trade wind route across the Atlantic, Hawkeye, a Lagoon 450 catamaran sailed by Richard Freeborn and Alexandra Blakeman, reached St Lucia in December 2019. After three years in the Eastern Caribbean, on 13th January 2023 she left Antigua in company with Sotto Vento, an Oyster 655 sailed by Richard Smith and Claire Firman, for a 3000-mile, two-month Caribbean Odyssey, kicking off with a three-day, 500-mile sail south to explore the Venezuelan islands of Los Roques. Follow Hawkeye’s progress at https://my.yb.tl/RFreeborn.) Our first day has been one of huge contrasts – from the peace and calm when we woke up in our adopted home port of Falmouth Harbour, Antigua to first tropical sun with lots of wind, followed by torrential tropical rain and zero wind. We sailed close to Montserrat, nicknamed ‘The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean’ because of the Irish ancestry of many of its inhabitants and also known for the massive volcanic eruption in 1992 which left the top of the island missing. Venezuela – Los Roques Two nights after setting off from Antigua we arrived safely in Los Roques and anchored off the main town at Gran Roque. Clearing into Venezuela is a long and tedious process which requires visiting six different sets of officials – coastguard, customs, port, health, immigration and National Parks – and which can take an entire day, or stretch into two days if you can’t get hold of some of them. Perhaps even worse is that when you want to leave Los Roques, which isn’t an official entry port for Venezuela, you have to come back to Gran Roque and spend part of another day to clear out. We dinghied to the bar by the tiny airport and sat drinking some excellent mojitos while Alejandro Bonares, the local yacht agent, sorted everything with the officials. We’d sent our documents by e-mail in advance, so he had already pre-cleared us and was back within an hour. He even booked us dinner that evening at one of the few local beach restaurants and, for the icing on top, cleared us out for a week later so we didn’t have to come back. All this on a Sunday afternoon! Next day we set off on the 10-mile sail down to Sebastopol. This involved some tricky pilotage as, although Richard, Alexandra and Claire at Gran Roque, Venezuela 175

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Hawkeye at Crasqui in Los Roques

Hawkeye only draws 1∙3m, Sotto Vento needs nearly 3m. Hawkeye always went first to check that there was enough water for Sotto Vento to follow. In other words, Hawkeye would crash into any rocks first. We stuck rigidly to Alejandro’s advice, which was only to sail between 1000 and 1400 when the sun would light up the reefs, and not to trust the charts too much. Alexandra had been complaining that Hawkeye’s steering was a bit stiff, so once we were safely at anchor I set about investigating the cause, with the autopilot coming under very heavy suspicion. How wrong I was. After pulling the steering and autopilot system apart but finding nothing wrong I changed tack entirely, put on my snorkel and mask, and discovered that Hawkeye had picked up some unwelcome hitchhikers. Jammed between the top of the port rudder and the hull were some pretty solid crustaceans that seemed very keen indeed on impeding Alexandra’s helming activities. A quick poke with a screwdriver saw them return to a more suitable abode on the seabed, and normal service was resumed. To be fair to molluscs generally, although Hawkeye had been antifouled only a month previously, the shipyard workers Sotto Vento hadn’t bothered to paint the tops of the rudders, which therefore provided an excellent perch for our unwelcome guests. Next day we decided to head for Francisqui, but it proved too shallow for Sotto Vento so we aborted our plans 177

Sotto Vento and Hawkeye at Cayo Agua in Los Roques and instead enjoyed a quiet downwind sail to Crasqui, where we anchored in an awesomely lovely spot with almost no one around. Pulling up our anchors we headed for the next islands, Dos Mosquises (Two Mosquitoes), not the most inviting place name but it did promise a visit to a turtle sanctuary. Sadly both the weather and the inaccurate charts intervened, as the wind was by then over 20 knots and we discovered that the entrance to Dos Mosquises only had 3m rather than the 5m promised on the chart – fine for Hawkeye, but Sotto Vento would have been bouncing on the bottom. Instead we turned west for the 3 miles to Cayo De Agua. This beach is a dream destination for many Venezuelan tourists, with a narrow sandbar linking two islands with, unusually, waves coming from both directions at once. We had planned to overnight there and have a beach barbecue, but the weather gods intervened and the anchorage was a bit rolly, so we decided to leave the wonders of Los Roques and press on to Bonaire overnight. Bonaire and the Cayman Islands We reached the Dutch island of Bonaire feeling quite tired after a windy downwind sail. No sipping margaritas while someone else checked us in here! After berthing in the marina we took the dinghy a mile into the port to visit customs Alexandra and immigration where diving in the bureaucracy, with Bonaire forms in duplicate and the need to see all the crew in person, was as far away as it is possible to be from the easygoing ‘we trust folks on yachts, so don’t care that much’ approach in the French Caribbean 178

islands like St Barts and Martinique. With a huge oil refinery at one end of the island and a massive industrial salt works at the other there is not a lot of interest in Bonaire other than the amazing snorkelling and diving. Alexandra, Richard and I dived from the dinghies, with Claire seeing quite a lot of wildlife with just a snorkel and mask. In town there is one quite short street with some token Dutch-style buildings which took less than two minutes to inspect, so we fuelled and stored up and set sail for the Cayman Islands.

A turtle at Bonaire

During the rather windy six-day, 800-mile passage to Grand Cayman, with the trade winds firmly on our starboard quarter, a new phrase of ‘like being in a washing machine’ was soon coined. Both yachts slip-slided down the 3m waves, often arriving with a bump at the bottom which was not that pleasant. It would be hard to find two more different designs than Sotto Vento, a 65ft monohull and Hawkeye, a 46ft catamaran, which became evident when trying to sail alongside each other in such conditions. Hawkeye loves going straight down the waves because her twin hulls keep her upright no matter what the wind direction, whereas Sotto Vento, which Claire and Richard have already sailed around the world, likes to have the wind on the beam to keep her steady. The two yachts reached Grand Cayman an hour apart, largely because Richard and Claire kept slowing down to wait for us. We were called on the radio by the highly efficient Cayman Coastguard as we approached, given a very friendly welcome and directed to buoys on which to moor for the rest of the night. Inward clearance was relatively straightforward. Although Cayman shares Bonaire’s excellent diving the island has an entirely different atmosphere, being more like Florida with a huge American influence including international hotel chains, American Wild West-themed restaurants, pick-up trucks and shopping malls, none of which were of much interest to us. Alexandra and I spent some time with her old friend Marco, who gave us a lot of background about Cayman, and hired a car to explore part of the island leaving Hawkeye in the marina. We also stored up as we knew that Cayman would be our last chance to buy food for some weeks. Ahead of us was Cuba, where we’d been told that we’d be lucky to find much in the way of shops. 179

Hawkeye berthed at Cayo Largo marina Cuba – Cayo Largo We waited for the best weather window we could see, then both yachts sprinted overnight, motor-sailing, to reach the stunningly pretty island of Cayo Largo, Cuba’s southernmost port. We had been in contact with the marina in advance to smooth our arrival with officials, especially the military. It’s a legal requirement in Cuba to call ahead before arriving, but when I called the marina on VHF with still 14 miles to go, which is at the limit of its range, I was very surprised to hear a crystal-clear voice welcoming both yachts and saying that everything was prepared for us. Entry through the reefs and the channels was quite easy and the charts were reasonably accurate. The Cubans were true to their word – as soon as we were tied up we had the military, customs, immigration and port officials on board, as well as a doctor who asked us lots of questions – and we were cleared in quickly. They boxed up and sealed our Iridium satellite phones, as communications are highly restricted in Cuba, and also sealed up our drones. They didn’t seem to notice our two Dishys, however, which were sitting prominently on the decks of both yachts and very quietly providing what might be the best internet service in the whole of Cuba! I rather suspect Hawkeye and Sotto Vento at Cayo Iguana Del Este

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that they didn’t know what a Dishy was, but either way, we weren’t saying and they weren’t asking... A word of explanation here and a rather unexpected tribute to Elon Musk or, to be more specific, to his new Starlink satellite communications technology (called Dishy) which gives up to 250 megabits per second. It seems odd that we now have a better internet connection in the middle of the ocean than many people sitting in offices and homes in Europe and the US. Hawkeye’s Dishy had arrived in Antigua in time for me to make up a stainless-steel bracket to mount it on Hawkeye’s deck, but Richard’s only arrived two days before we left. With classic yachtie inventiveness he put in a lash-up for his Dishy, which is held down to Sotto Vento’s aft deck with string. Although we were in the ‘capital’ of Cayo Largo almost no one lives there. They just travel in to work in the hotels and then go back to the mainland, so there were almost no shops etc. Next day I planned a dinghy excursion to see the giant iguanas on neighbouring Cayo Iguana. There was not a breath of wind as our two dinghies zipped along the channels through the mangroves, guided by the Navionics app on our phones backed up by our depth sounders. All started well, but as we went further around the island it appeared that the charts might not be as correct as we’d have liked. This was rather odd, as there were photos of local tourist motor catamarans going this way in online reviews so, with the sea mirror-calm, we pressed on. Eventually we reached the landing place but, sadly, there was not one giant iguana in sight – perhaps, like some of the locals, they were on vacation in Havana. Later the Port Captain told me that the tourists’ photos of the iguanas were a few years old, as a hurricane had wiped out the wildlife and silted up the whole area with sand. Our time in Cayo Largo was unexpectedly cut short because of an adverse weather forecast, which was a matter of great Claire and Alexandra in front of the regret, so the next day we left elegant Cienfuegos Yacht Club building and headed for Cienfuegos on mainland Cuba. We stopped for the night at Cayo Guano, a tiny island with a huge lighthouse, which is a halfway point. The wind got up overnight so we left early, bashing our way under motor into heavy seas, an unpleasant contrast with the day before. We reached Cienfuegos before dark and, once again, they were fully prepared for our arrival and couldn’t have been more helpful or welcoming. Cuba – Cienfuegos and Havana On arrival in Cienfuegos, Cuba’s third largest city, we turned our back on the yachts and became land-based tourists. Cienfuegos was once a grand city with boulevards, art 181

A drone’s eye view of Hawkeye berthed in Cienfuegos marina deco buildings and a proud heritage, but sadly those are now distant memories. We took a taxi for the 3½ hour journey to Havana, booked into hotels for four days and set about exploring. One of the features of Havana is the many large American cars, all dating back to before the 1959 revolution. Most are owned by the Government, with people having to pay to rent and maintain them. As the home of Bacardi rum, the world’s largest privately owned spirits company, our first stop had to be El Floridita bar/restaurant where it is claimed that the daiquiri was invented. A favourite haunt of Ernest Hemingway and frequented by Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and John Wayne, it has been serving drinks for over 200 years. We also visited the Tropicana Club, which has been operating since

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Richard, Claire, Alexandra and Richard enjoying daiquiris at El Floridita 1939, as well as the Havana Cigar Factory, where we watched them roll Cohibas and other brands. It is owned and operated, as with almost everything else, by the Cuban

The Havana Cigar Factory shop Cigar ladies at work in the Havana Cigar Factory Government, which meant that wages are just US $1 a day and there have been few if any changes in the way cigars are made. 183

Havana’s impressive Capitolio building Much of Havana’s most impressive architecture dates from the 1920s, when it was a very wealthy city although the majority of the rural population were poor. Since the 1959 revolution most of the buildings have been left to rot and there is decay everywhere. There are some exceptions, including the Capitolio building, a near replica of the US Capitol, and the building that housed the original headquarters of Bacardi, although the company relocated after the revolution. Alexandra and I were privileged to meet Commodore Escrich and his colleagues when we visited the Hemingway International Yacht Club of Cuba, where we were entertained with many tales of a nautical nature as well as being given advice about sailing in their waters. My enduring memory of Cuba is that the people weren’t just friendly, they were genuinely pleased to see us visit their country and wanted us to have fun – which we did! We thoroughly enjoyed Cuba and would recommend a visit. A 1950s Ford Crestline convertible in Havana Haiti After waiting four days in Cienfuegos for a suitable weather window, both yachts left full of Cienfuegos fuel and headed southeast along the coast ready to cross the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. This is one of the main shipping routes between the US and the Panama Canal, as well as being the location of Guantanamo Bay. It was long feared by sailors and until boats had engines no one tried to sail northeast through the Windward Passage. Even today it is not wise for yachts to cross it from west 184

Port Morgan on Haiti’s Île à Vache to east, against the trade winds, except in rare calm conditions. As we rounded Cabo Cruz, the southernmost point of Cuba, our plan was to turn left and head up the coast to Santiago, the country’s second city, but the wind was against us so instead we headed straight for the southwest corner of Haiti. Tired after an overnight pasting, we decided to head closer to the Haitian shore when we noticed on the AIS that there were several yachts anchored in Port Morgan at Île à Vache. There is no record of safety issues with yachts stopping at Port Morgan, and the yachting fraternity these days would flag up incidents immediately. We didn’t trust the charts, however, so both yachts placed spotters on the bow, but it turned out that they were surprisingly accurate. Port Morgan is so named because the notorious Welsh pirate Henry Morgan chose it as his base from which to harry French and Spanish shipping – for which, bizarrely, he was later rewarded with the appointment of Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica. The nearest thing to pirates that we encountered were flocks of dug-out canoes full of people trying to sell us things. Without exception they were polite and respectful, and most spoke perfect English as well as Spanish and French. Port Morgan is as pretty as anywhere we have seen in the Caribbean and the harbour was once a successful and major tourist resort, though little is left to show for it. The Dominican Republic We slept through the evening and left in the dark at 0400, headed for the Dominican Republic. We hugged the Haitian coast to keep out of the worst of the raging headwinds, dodging fishing gear in the shallows all day but still bouncing up and down with green water over the decks. Eventually we were able to turn southeast and head for the border. It was pitch dark by then with no moon to help us, so it was with some relief that, safely over the border into the Dominican Republic, we dropped anchor at Bahía de las Aquilas. Next day we awoke to find we had chosen a picture-perfect spot! As in Cuba, you need the consent of the navy to go anywhere in a yacht in the Dominican Republic. Lieutenant Commander Torres, the local Port Captain, could not have been more helpful and came out next day bringing officials from the navy, immigration and customs. They were quick and efficient and we were soon ashore for lunch at the stunningly lovely beach resort. We liked it so much that we stayed a few days to wait for better weather. Having obtained a despatcho (written consent to leave) from a navy official on the beach carrying a menacing-looking M16 rifle, both yachts headed down the coast intending to anchor for the night near Cabo Beata, the island’s southerly point, 185

Eating al fresco at Restaurant Cueva de Las Aquilas in the Dominican Republic before dashing round at first light. Sadly, like so many such plans, the weather wasn’t co-operating and there was nowhere comfortable to anchor, so we decided to press on around the cape as dusk fell and head to the next port, Las Salinas. It was a very nasty passage! Not just wind and waves, but also fishing pots and nets to be avoided. We crawled out into deeper water, motor-sailing, and crashed through the waves into the night, at times making just 3 knots, before finally the wind and waves eased. Despite being a major naval port with large ships, there were no facilities to refuel small vessels at Las Salinas so, as Hawkeye was running a bit short of diesel, we put six fuel cans in a car belonging to a friend of a local yacht captain and made the hour-long round trip to a fuel station. Hotel Salinas at Punta Salinas – note the diesel cans!

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There was nothing of interest in Las Salinas so next day we set sail, or rather motor-sail, for Boca Chica where we were assured fuel would be available. On arrival Sotto Vento took the lead, but we soon discovered that there was not enough water for her to enter the marina so she had to anchor off, which meant that she could not take on fuel. Hawkeye filled with diesel from the fuel dock, but this time it was Sotto Vento’s turn to get topped up from the six cans. We obtained our despatcho and left. For once the winds and waves were not so bad, but we decided to play it safe and stop overnight at Isla Saona, the last of our four stops in the Dominican Republic. A SpaceX rocket launch, seen from We were rewarded with a very calm Isla Saona in the Dominican Republic night off a truly tropical beach with the amazing spectacle of the launch of SpaceX’s latest rocket with its new V2 Starlink satellites on board – a reminder that we were still relatively close to Cape Canaveral on the Florida coast. Of all the places we visited, perhaps it was the Dominican Republic that we should have spent much longer exploring. Back to Antigua We set off next day to cross the Mona Passage which, like the Windward Passage, has a fearsome reputation. Luckily there was little wind and that from ahead, so we made quick progress under engine. We continued through the evening and into the night along the south side of Puerto Rico, heading for St Thomas in the US St Thomas, US Virgin Islands Virgin Islands. From there it was a short hop up to the British Virgin Islands, after which an overnight sail saw us safely back in Antigua at the end of more than 3000 miles of our Caribbean Odyssey. 187

Three Chesapeake Bay Loca ons x Deltaville, VA x Hampton, VA x Edgewater, MD

www.latellsails.com 804-776-6151

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Charleston, SC USA Chicago, IL USA Cleveland, OH USA Sandusky, OH USA Auckland, New Zealand Queensland, Australia Sydney, Australia Toronto Canada Quebec, Canada Vancouver, Canada Palma de Mallorca, ESP Izmir, Turkey La na, Italy

OBITUARIES & APPRECIATIONS Maureen Tetley Maureen ‘Mor’ Tetley died peacefully this summer aged 89. She and her husband Jem were fortunate to lead very full lives and held a multitude of interests, including dogs, farming and gardening, country sports and sailing. This last interest was, I think, the most defining of their lives and they spent many happy seasons on various adventures together on the water, mostly in their Swan 36 Carte Blanche which they loved very much. It was Mor who chose Carte. She looked around a Swan 36 at the London Boat Show in 1970 when they were the hottest thing in yachting technology (Carte had won every race at Cowes Week in 1968). However, ever practical, it was the breadboard that caught Mor’s attention, sliding out from the galley to capture the crumbs under the grating. ‘They’ve thought this boat out properly’, and so Carte came into their lives. She loved sailing in Carte Blanche and together with Jem competed in many RORC

races and local events in Cornwall from the 1970s onwards. They were a respected and well-loved partnership on the South Coast sailing scene. Mor had an extraordinary constitution, cooking meals, delivering gins and repacking spinnakers in even the heaviest seas. On deck she was mistress of the spinnaker sheet. Like many a great naval officer Jem delegated much of the navigation to Mor, Mor and Jem in 1986 189

Carte Blanche finishing the first leg of AZAB 1995 under trysail, her broken boom lashed on deck. Even so, she went on to win her class on aggregate who also had a knack for conjuring order from chaos and feasts from a force 6 that kept her crews’ spirits high. Most notable was her inventive delivery of G&Ts in a large communal baby feeder cup to ensure that nothing was tragically spilled or diluted by heavy seas. She was obviously an excellent sailor as Jem, who never suffered incompetence gladly, sailed with her on four AZABs (they won the twohanded class in 1995) and a

Two-Handed Transatlantic Race. These long passages qualified Mor to join the OCC in 1983, a membership of which she was very proud. Her journals of these races are fascinating, colourful depictions of determination and old-fashioned resolve, interspersed with horrors, ‘happy hours’ and amusement. She writes frankly of the physical and emotional highs and lows she experienced and which few of us, I am sure, would want to endure. They show what a tough and resilient character Mor was. Mor could not be kept out of the galley, even after two knee ops and several rounds of chemo 190

Mor pilots her son Mark around Carrick Roads at the age of 86 For married sailors thinking this is all too good to be true, it is well remembered that Mor had a formidable manner that could bring the most high and mighty crashing back to earth – often her husband. One friend remembers how, moments before starting a race in Cowes, Mor was prepping something to eat later during the race when Jem, who was on the helm, shouted down through the hatch, ‘I need a brandy!’. Mor retorted that he could come down and get his own bloody brandy, to which came the reply, ‘I can’t, I’m not totally in control!’. However, emergency arrangements were rapidly made and down went Jem to get his drink! Amongst all this excitement Mor and Jem’s ability to enjoy life shone through, whether enjoying champagne and caviar mid Atlantic during a storm (at least they were together on this anniversary!), or simply mooching about the UK, France or Ireland with friends. The many entries in visitors books (often unrepeatable) trace their warm hospitality over some of the golden decades of pleasure boating. They encountered whales, mid Atlantic pigeons, sharks, icebergs, polar bears, survived (thrived) on a largely liquid diet and handled many a hairy situation on the high seas. These Mor would occasionally document in limericks: Statistically in the Azores Winds seldom exceed force fours Except on the date That me and my mate Arrive on these glorious shores. Mor and Jem settled in Cornwall in the 1960s. As Jem was at sea with the Fleet Air Arm it was Mor who bid for their final home, Garlenick, seeing off the auctioneer who unsuccessfully tried to bid her up. Garlenick was in a very poor state but Mor and Jem restored and transformed it into a beautiful and hospitable home for themselves 191

Carte in Ile d'Yeu off Brittany in August 2023, her ensign at half mast following Mor’s death and their three children. They slowed down little as time passed, later encouraging their ten grandchildren in sharing their fun and enjoyments in life. After Jem died, Mor continued sailing Carte well into her 80s. Knowing that she would be coming aboard was perhaps the only thing that could panic a boisterous young crew into furiously cleaning Carte though even so, like Sgt Majors immemorial, she would inevitably find much to be desired and expect it to be fixed in an instant! She died at Garlenick, where her family still live, in the beloved company of two of her great Labrador dynasty. I have been lucky enough to take on Carte Blanche, who still holds so many memories of Mor and Jem. If you see Carte, do please come aboard to share them. George Tetley

Captain William Ferguson Story, USN (Retd) Will died on Monday 8th May 2023, one day before his 83rd birthday. Born in Philadelphia he spent his youth in rural northern New Jersey. He began sailing on the New Jersey Shore when he was a young teenager, then on Lake Kaag and on the Dutch canals when his family moved to Holland. From 1954 to 1958 he attended Harrow School in England, ‘the only American among 600 brutal Englishmen’. At Harrow School he sailed with schoolmates on the Norfolk Broads and on friends’ boats on the south coast of England. He was an excellent swimmer and earned his school scarf as a member of the swimming team. Will entered the United States Naval Academy in 1958 and graduated in 1962, marrying his lifelong friend Martha van Beuren the following year. For several years after graduation he and Martha sailed Storyville, a 22ft 6in (6∙85m) Pearson Electra, in New England. Will had a distinguished Naval career during which he was awarded 192

Will aboard Spirit of Norfolk on a party cruise in the 1980s two Legions of Merit, a Bronze Star (with Combat V), two Meritorious Service Medals, two Navy Commendation Medals (with Combat V), Expert Pistol Shot Medal and multiple other medals and ribbons. Early in his career Will served as Deck Officer aboard USS Boston before becoming Weapons Officer aboard USS Barry when the ship deployed to Vietnam. On his return he attended the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, graduating in 1968 with a Masters degree in Operations Research. At the age of 29, he took command of USS Monmouth County for his second tour in Vietnam. His next appointment was as Commissioning Executive Officer of USS Aylwin, in which he served until July 1973. Between 1973 and 1977 he had several Pentagon assignments in the Offices of the Chief of Naval Operations, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Navy. In July 1977 Will took command of USS Bowen, an assignment in which he was particularly happy, with the ship deployed to the Mediterranean and South America. This was followed by several shoreside assignments until in 1984 he took command of Destroyer Will posing for a formal US Navy portrait in 1990, two years before he retired 193

Breakfast aboard on the way to Ireland in 1996 Squadron 36, deployed to South America, the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, another busy, challenging, and fun assignment. Will became Chief of Staff of Aircraft Carrier Group 2 deploying to the Mediterranean, before becoming Commanding Officer of the Tactical Training Group Atlantic. He completed his 30-year career serving as the Chief of Staff of the Atlantic Fleet Training Command. A few years before his retirement in 1992, Will and Martha began exploring the creeks of the Chesapeake, looking for where they might retire and keep their next boat. In 1987 they found and bought Holly Cove in Mathews County, Virginia, and four years later bought Fabula, a 32ft (9.75m) Morgan 323. Her name was inspired by the Story family motto, Fabula, sed vera – ‘Story but true’. During his final year in the Navy Will lived aboard during the week in Norfolk, Virginia, and following retirement he and Martha cruised the Chesapeake in her. This was their favourite thing to do in their favourite place to sail. In 1994 Will sailed as navigator aboard the 45ft Strella from the Canary Islands to Recife, Brazil. Again on Strella, he made a 1240 mile passage from Bermuda to Grenada, choosing the latter as his qualifying voyage when he joined the OCC in 1995. In 1996 he sailed as watch captain on a friend’s boat from Newport, Rhode Island, to Kinsale, Ireland, ‘just to prove I could do it again.’ Martha and Will celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary aboard Fabula, 19th October 2013

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Martha and Will aboard Fabula on their 50th wedding anniversary, joined by daughters Jessica and Alexandra, and grandchildren Sarah Jane and William Will was Commodore of the Mathews Yacht Club for four terms, during which he established the close links between the MYC and the OCC which exist to this day. He was a long-time member of the Retired Officers of Mathews County Association, the Army and Navy Club and the New York Yacht Club, and for several years during the 1990s would charter a friend’s boat for $1.00 to sail with the NYYC on their summer rallies in Maine. In November 2012 Will and Martha were appointed the first OCC Port Officers for Deltaville/Mathews, a post they held until December 2018. Together they formalised the OCC Southern Chesapeake Bay Dinner, held every October at the Mathews Yacht Club for OCC boats heading south to the Caribbean and beyond. This remains a fun and crowded affair, attracting many OCC and MYC members and their guests. Martha and Will attending a formal dinner at the Mathews Yacht Club in 2021 195

Throughout his life Will lived by his personal motto, ‘No job too difficult, no task too onerous’. He had a special knack and love for talking with and learning from people from all places and all backgrounds. His greatest gift was his mentorship of others. He is survived by Martha van Beuren Story, his wife of 59 years, by his two daughters, Jessica Story and Alexandra Story Scarlett, and by his grandchildren, William Story Scarlett and Sarah Jane Scarlett as well as by his sister, Sarah Benson and several nieces and nephews. Martha van Beuren Story, Jessica Story and John van-Schalkwyk

Prue Farrington Prue was born in August 1947 and grew up in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, far from the sea – so far that when an enthusiastic teacher decided to start a sailing club his only recruits were Prue and her two elder siblings. She learned to sail larger boats at the Island Cruising Club in Salcombe, later becoming a Yachtmaster and then a Yachtmaster Instructor. Prue was an inveterate traveller and always ready for an adventure. In 1967 she went to Paris to work as an au pair, next heading south to pick grapes during the wine harvest. While in the south of France she heard of a yacht looking for crew for a transatlantic passage and immediately signed on. When that passage terminated in Madeira following rigging failure Prue joined a singlehander aboard his 27 footer for the passage from Madeira via the Cape Verde islands to Barbados, the first of her three Atlantic crossings. In no hurry to return home, she followed up by working on charter yachts in the Caribbean for 18 months. On returning to the UK Prue moved to London to train as a social worker, later buying a quarter share in a clinker-built wooden Folkboat. Aiming high as always, she decided to enter for the 1979 Azores and Back Race. A mutual acquaintance introduced her to Anne Hammick and together they sailed the 300-mile qualifying passage, pumping regularly. When they were turned down (very wisely) by the Royal Prue in the early 1980s while working as a charter skipper in Greece 196

Cornwall Yacht Club’s organising committee on a technicality, it was doubtless to the considerable relief of their respective parents. Even so, Prue was persuaded to join the OCC. Again finding life in England somewhat boring, in the early 1980s Prue applied to Falcon Sailing for a position skippering flotilla charters in Greece. While there she met Vicky Hancock, who became a lifelong friend, and on their return they set up a sailing school, Falsail, in Vicky’s home town of Falmouth. Prue fell in love with Cornwall and considered it her home for the rest of her life. She could never resist a bargain and, though most of Falsail’s yachts were around 30ft LOA, when she heard of an 18ft gaff-rigged Tosher for sale cheap she had to buy it and Easily Led joined the Falsail fleet to take families out day sailing. Prue loved to travel, whether by boat or plane. Prue christening her Tosher 18, In the later 1980s she joined Liz and Anne for a Easily Led couple of weeks’ sailing in the Caribbean and later flew to Antigua to attend the wedding of her old friends Rod and Lucinda Heikell. After Falsail closed she took Blue Air, one of its Moody 29s, through the Canal du Midi to the Mediterranean, crossing to Majorca where she stayed for two years. She travelled South Africa’s Garden Route with Christine Fairhurst, with whom she made her second Atlantic crossing during the 1990s aboard the latter’s S&S 50 St Christopher, spent three months in New Zealand tracing her mother’s early life and meeting relatives, and accompanied Vicky on a trip to China. Many of us wish we could be more spontaneous and better at seizing the moment – Prue was expert at it. Prue was a very caring and compassionate person as well as that rare thing, an excellent listener. She was also very sociable, though timekeeping was not her strongest suit and over the years she missed many flights, trains and ferries and gained Prue on her 70th birthday in August 2017 197

Enjoying a cup of tea at a nearby National Trust property in 2021 a reputation for arriving up to an hour late for dinner invitations! She moved home frequently and lived in at least seven different houses in and around Falmouth, each time demonstrating her flair for turning four walls into a home as well as her practical skills at interior decorating. She was also a keen gardener, which quite literally fed into another of her passions, for cookery, with creative recipes often influenced by her travels or by her hundreds of cookery books. Prue’s last decade was spent with John Worth, with whom she had been friends for nearly 40 years and who sadly passed away just a few months after she did. They crossed the Atlantic together aboard Dusty and John later bought a neglected 42ft ketch called Freedom II, then lying ashore on the east coast of Canada. They spent two summers living and working aboard her before Covid intervened. Sadly, by the time returning to her was again possible, neither Prue nor John were well enough to do so. Prue was fun, loyal, non-judgemental, wise, caring and compassionate. She was unselfish and extremely generous, and always saw the positives in people and situations. She was very brave and showed great courage and strength during her final illness. She will always be missed by her friends in Cornwall and beyond. Prue’s many friends

Freedom II, the last of the many boats in which Prue sailed

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Duncan Lougee Duncan was lost at sea from his 25ft Folkboat Minke at the end of June, while on passage from Plymouth UK to Baltimore, Ireland during the 2023 Jester Challenge. A lifelong sailor, Duncan trained as a boatbuilder before heading for the Caribbean to work for a charter company. On his return to the UK he worked for a short while in the motor trade before joining East Coast yacht brokers Clarke & Carter, where he was eventually made a director. In his leisure time he volunteered as a motorcycle ‘blood runner’ and was also an accomplished pianist. Duncan joined the OCC in 2016, citing the 2008 Jester Challenge from Plymouth to the Azores in his Rustler 31 Vaquero del Sur as his qualifying passage. He went on to enter the 2010 Atlantic Challenge in the same boat but, having got three-quarters of the way across, Vaquero developed mast problems and Duncan decided it would be safer to turn round and head downwind for the Azores to make repairs than to risk losing his mast while beating into heavy seas. By 2021 he had downsized to Minke, in which he entered that year’s Jester Challenge from Plymouth to the Azores. On 1st July the boat was lying to a drogue in gale-force conditions 380 miles northeast of Terceira when her rudder became detached from the trailing edge of her keel, leaving her helpless. Fellow Jester singlehander George Arnison aboard Good Report came to his aid, and they shared the OCC Seamanship Award for 2021 in recognition of their exemplary seamanship, which saw both yachts reach the Azores nine days later without having required outside assistance. See Flying Fish 2022/1 for the full story. Duncan Lougee aboard Minke Jester Challenge Founder Trevor Leek adds: Duncan was a much-loved and highly respected member of the Jester Challenge community, having sailed in five Challenges over a 15-year period. He sailed in our first ever Jester Azores Challenge in 2008 and our second full Jester Challenge to Newport, Rhode Island, in 2010, skippering his Rustler 31 Vaquero, although in the latter event he was forced to retire with mast problems. In 2015 he sailed his Val 31 trimaran Aerodrama to Baltimore. A yacht broker by profession, Duncan lived and breathed boats and it seemed that with his final vessel, the Varne Folkboat Minke, it was a case of love at first sight. In 2021 he sailed her in the Jester Azores Challenge and it was during this voyage that he demonstrated his unflinching fortitude and seamanship. Minke lost her rudder in heavy weather with over 400 miles still to sail. Incredibly, he managed to sail the boat 199

for several hundred miles with no rudder before accepting a tow under sail from fellow Jester Challenger George Arnison. In total, Minke and Good Report covered over 600 miles effecting this extraordinary self-rescue, of which 232 were under tow. There is therefore an extra poignancy in the loss of Duncan on a relatively short passage in benign weather. We can never know exactly what happened and speculation is pointless. All we know is that we have lost a fine sailor, a good friend and a real gentleman. All the Jester Challengers salute Duncan on his final voyage.

Susan Dracott Sue’s was the smiley face you always saw aboard Darramy wherever we were anchored. She was born in Liverpool in 1948, attended school there and her first job was in banking with the then Martin’s Bank. She married and had two daughters, who were brought up firstly in the Wirral and then in Chester. After returning to work she had various jobs in retail, which she thoroughly enjoyed, attaining management positions with several retailers. Her children were starting to find their own way in the world, however, and Sue’s marriage ended. She set up house on her own, enjoying any social events that were taking place in her neighbourhood. Together with some friends she attended a barn dance, where we met – little did she know how her life would change. I played it cool and kept my cards close to my chest, only introducing Sue to Darramy, my Beneteau First 405, once I had got to know her better.

Sue at ANSI Bateau, Tobago in 2007

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Enjoying Christmas at Cholón, Colombia in 2009 Sue took to sailing very quickly, becoming a capable and reliable crew. Longer passages were taken in her stride. It was after we did a 750-mile non-stop passage from North Wales to Northern Spain that the relationship between the two of us was truly cemented. Spending more and more time together, she was able to join me on sailing adventures ranging from offshore racing to RYA Blind Sailing Week in Falmouth every two years, as well as cruising in Brittany, Scotland and Ireland. Early retirement in 2005 enabled us to set off to explore many distant shores. Longer passages were always undertaken with just the two of us on board, which meant no deadlines to meet and more than once a change of destination. We followed a policy of leaving our options open by never buying return tickets unless we absolutely had to. Sue never had a problem with not being sure of when or where we would end up! In 2007 our adventures took us across the Atlantic to spend four years in the Caribbean where, as ever, Sue made friends with everyone she met. The Atlantic crossing qualified both of us for OCC membership. I joined but, as so often is the case, the second membership for which Sue was eligible was not taken up for another decade, even though she was always in the thick of any OCC event that we attended. At the end of 2011 we transited the Panama Canal, but it was four years before we reached Australia. Two seasons in Polynesia enabled us to take a slow tour of many of the islands before heading further west to Fiji via the many islands en route. During the cyclone season we took time out for land travel. Trips to China (a country Sue had always wanted to visit), Australia and New Zealand were favourites, we loved discovering much of South America and the Antarctic was magnificent. Brian and Sue in 2015 201

Darramy sailing well reefed in the Pacific Whereever we went Sue was always keen to interact with the local population, try local food and sample local wines. She enjoyed drawing as well as sewing and cooking and the theatre was always high on her agenda. Local markets were always an adventure as, at less than 5ft tall, she would be lost from sight amongst the busy stalls! In the San Blas Islands she was delighted to be one of the tallest ladies amongst the Kuna people, the second shortest race in the world. She was very proud to have been able to do aid work in Vanuatu after Cyclone Pam in 2015, interacting with the local ladies and children, and to have shared the OCC Award of Merit with the other OCC members involved with the aid work. Sue aboard Darramy in Siracusa, Sicily in 2018 Returning closer to home we explored the Mediterranean but due to Brexit restrictions our time aboard Darramy each year was limited. We had a rethink about what adventures we could get up to and bought a narrowboat, Chateau Darramy, in which to explore the UK canals. We were all stocked up and ready to cast off following our planned return from Darramy in Greece at the end of June, but at the beginning of April, feeling a bit under the weather, Sue saw a doctor and was admitted to hospital for a routine operation. Although the operation was successful she suffered a cardiac arrest and was admitted to the intensive care unit, where the care was excellent. Sadly she did not make it and passed away peacefully but with dignity on 8th April. Sue was a wonderful lady whose love of life was enviable. She was a fantastic soulmate, always positive even in the face of adversity and extremely capable. ‘Full of smiles with a great sense of humour’, ‘not a bad word for anybody’, ‘generous’ and ‘kind-hearted’ are just a few of the accolades she deserved. Sue is sadly missed by her family and friends, but we all have wonderful memories of her. She truly lived up to one of her nicknames, ‘Happy Sue’. I was an extremely lucky fellow to have been able to spend 30 years with her. Brian C Wallace 202

ADVERTISERS IN FLYING FISH Adlard Coles Nautical (nautical almanacs, books and guides) ............................. 105 Admiral Marine (flexible yacht & boat insurance for offshore cruising) ............... 32 Alcaidesa Marina (full service marina & boatyard at the gateway to the Med) .... OBC Astilleros Lagos (full service boatyard in NW Spain) ............................................... 4 Berthon International (international yacht brokers) .............................................. 79 Bruntons Propellers (feathering propellers for sailing yachts) .............................. 106 Epifanes Yacht Coatings (manufacturer of yacht paints & varnishes) ......................... IFC Evolution Sails Chesapeake Bay (sailmakers) ......................................................... 188 Fox’s Marina (boatyard (refit and repair) and marina in Suffolk, UK) ................. 174 Howden Fastnet (specialist boat insurance) .......................................................... 158 Hydrovane Self Steering (wind vane self-steering systems) .................................... 96 Konpira Consulting (supports cruisers & organises yacht charters in Japan) .......... 135 Mactra Marine Equipment (watermakers, Superwind turbines and solar panels) ...... 31 MailASail (e-mail and satellite communications) .................................................. 70 Marion to Bermuda Race (an ocean race exclusively for cruising yachts) ............. 56 Mid Atlantic Yacht Services (services & chandlery for yachts in the Azores) ..... 173 OCC Platinum Anniversay ..................................................................................... 91 OCC Regalia (UK) ................................................................................................ 127 OCC Trust (promoting ocean sailing & conservation of the marine environment) .... 95 PredictWind (detailed worldwide forecasts, weather routeing & GRIBs) .............. 46 RCN Portosín (yacht club and marina in Galicia, Spain) ...................................... 32 Royal Newfoundland Yacht Club (50 ton lift, clubhouse, gasoline, dockage etc) ..... 135 Sailors for the Sea (ocean conservation organisation) ............................................ 45 Sanders Sails (sailmakers, upholstery and covers) ............................................... 136 Sevenstar Yacht Transport (yacht transport by sea) ............................................ IBC SHIP Insurance International (yacht insurance specialists) ................................... 28 Sillette Sonic (marine propulsion specialists, custom engineering) ........................ 55 St Katharine Docks Marina (moorings in central London) .................................... 16 World Cruising Club (sailing rally specialists, inc ARC, ARC+, World ARC) ... 145 We appreciate our advertisers and encourage you to give consideration to their products or services. Please mention the OCC and Flying Fish when replying to advertisements. Note, however, that the printing of an advertisement in Flying Fish does not imply endorsement by the Club. Also that while our membership is global, some companies may only be licensed to operate in certain jurisdictions and/or offer limited products or services. Details of advertising rates and deadlines will be found overleaf. 203

ADVERTISING OPPORTUNITIES WITH THE OCEAN CRUISING CLUB We invite businesses, clubs and individuals to advertise with us in one or more of our three printed publications:  Flying Fish (annual)  Members’ Handbook (annual)  Newsletter (quarterly) These publications reach over 3500 of our international members, the majority of whom are boat owners and actively cruising around the world or aspiring to do so. We distribute all publications both in printed format and electronically. Opportunities periodically arise to sponsor OCC gatherings, rallies, speakers, seminars or boat show stands at key international locations where ocean sailors meet up. Businesses and clubs can also offer special deals or discounts to our members. These are listed free of charge on the OCC website and are searchable by category. Submissions may include links to websites, a description of the business and the business logo. To discuss advertising opportunities, contact advertising@oceancruisingclub.org.

FLYING FISH ADVERTISING RATES    

Full page: £300* Half page: £200* Cover (inside front/back cover and outside cover): Price on Application (subject to availability, priority is given to existing advertisers who are invited to renew) * A 10% discount is available to OCC members

FLYING FISH ADVERTISEMENT FORMAT Advertisements should be supplied as PDF, JPEG or EPS files at a resolution of 300 dpi (118 dpcm) at finished size. Advertisers should expect the file size to be approx 2MB.  Full page (portrait): bleed 240mm x 160mm (with an additional 2mm bleed on all sides); non-bleed 216mm x 135mm  Half page (landscape): bleed 115mm x 160mm (with an additional 2mm bleed on all sides); non-bleed 103mm x 135mm Adobe inDesign templates can be supplied on request.

FLYING FISH ADVERTISEMENT DEADLINE – 1st October 2024 Printed by Hobbs the Printers Ltd Totton, Hants SO40 3WX, UK. www.hobbs.uk.com

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