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| Our helpers in Brava, Cha and John, with the kid goat |
So, in addition to the normal final
provisioning of fresh vegetables and protein we needed to fill one of our tanks
completely with fresh water from ashore, by jerry can. We also bought 70l of
mineral water as a backup, and decided to have only saltwater showers until we
were well over halfway (in fact we did so the whole way … saltwater showers are fine). We do have a small handheld emergency
watermaker in our abandon-ship barrels, but it takes one hour of hand pumping
to make 1 liter of water: fine in a liferaft but not my idea of entertainment
on a normal passage.
Our final provisioning of protein
came in the form of a kid goat we bought, which was slaughtered and butchered
for us the night before we departed.
Definitely fresh meat.
We set off just after midday on
Saturday 10th May, and knew it would be a slow passage. The wind should gradually reduce from normal NE
trade winds in the Cape Verdes to flat calm in the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone
(ITCZ, the doldrums), then SE trade winds after crossing the equator. Currents make the passage a little more
complicated, and our chosen route after much poring over pilot charts and
sailing directions was to head almost straight south to cross the ITCZ at 26W,
then turn SW on a close reach to 7S 30W, then ease off onto a reach (probably a
beam reach because of the current) to go W to our chosen landfall of
Cabedelo, Brazil. That was the theory.
We had a few hours of lovely trade
wind sailing before the wind started to moderate. And moderate, and moderate, and
moderate. By dawn the next morning we
were in a flat calm in gentle seas.
Day 3
We are moving along at between 1.5
and 2.5kts, with a true wind speed of 5-6kts and our gennaker and full main poled
out wing on wing. This is the equivalent
of travelling across the Atlantic Ocean at walking speed. The air temperature is getting warm and humid. The sea is fairly flat, with a swell of
perhaps 50cm, but with so little wind even this small swell rolls Otra Vida enough
to be disrupting.
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| North Atlantic sunset |
Our towed water turbine doesn’t produce any electricity
below about 3kts, so that is now out of the water, and obviously our windgen is
producing nothing either. That leaves
our solar panel array, which doesn’t produce enough alone to keep up with our
usage, therefore the engine is on at present for a couple of hours to charge the batteries and to
give us the sense of at least a little progress.
Because we have potentially several hundred miles of flat
calms in the ITCZ area we don’t want to use the engine more than a minimum at
this stage. We have enough fuel for
600nm, so have a buffer of maybe 200nm beyond the ITCZ – moderate but not huge.
In preparation for possible thunderstorms in the ITCZ we got
out our Faraday cage today (a simply constructed aluminium box with a ground
wire) and put a two handheld GPS units, a PLB, a personal AIS and a handheld
VHF in it. Hopefully this is an
unnecessary precaution.
We finished the goat today.
Boned legs stuffed with the loin, with garlic and Herbes de Provence,
vacuum packed and slow cooked at about 68C for a few hours, then seared in
butter. Served with Otra Vida passage demi-glace,
boiled potatoes and the last of our fresh green beans. Nice.
Otra Vida Passage Demi-Glace
This isn’t even close to a real demi-glace (in fact it is
technically a veloute) but when you are on passage and don’t have a convenient
supply of veal bones and 8+ hours of spare gas to make a reduced veal stock this delivers
a sauce that is acceptable for passage food.
-
Rough chop one onion and one carrot. Add dried thyme, white pepper, parsley, and 1 bay leaf. Sweat in butter.
- Deglaze with cognac. At this point add whatever alcohol you need for the final sauce, e.g. red wine, madeira, port. Pedro Ximinez is a favourite of ours for lamb/goat/duck and gives a rich sweetness to the sauce.
- Boil off the alcohol, then add a cup of water and one Doble Caldo stock cube.
- If you have any meat juices e.g. from roasting you can also add them. Be careful about adding fat – pour the juices into a beaker and skim off the fat first.
- Simmer for 10 minutes.
- Mix in some xanthan to get the desired consistency and simmer a little more. You could use other thickeners instead, e.g. roux, cornflour. I prefer the texture of xanthan.
- Strain the sauce and discard the veggies and herbs. Then strain the sauce again through a very fine sieve or muslin. Bring the sauce to the boil, and whisk in a teaspoon or two of butter.
- Check and adjust the seasoning. Note that stock cubes are dreadfully salty, and sometimes you will be using salted butter on passage, so don’t add any salt at all until the very end.
Day 5
That´s better … in the last 24 hours we have covered
139nm. Gentle trade wind sailing, breeze
on the port aft quarter about 12kts true, gennaker up, a warm breeze in the
cockpit, t-shirt temperatures on the night watch. A tropical wave is passing over us, just a
slightly more cloudy sky, too early in its development to have thunderstorms.
Otra Vida is 9 degrees north of the equator. As children we were taught about the Coriolis
effect, and how you could see water swirling down a plughole anticlockwise in
the northern hemisphere, clockwise in the south and straight down at the
equator. When we cross the equator I
intend to check this out (using seawater, not freshwater, of course).
I used to travel quite regularly for business to Singapore,
which sits almost on the equator, but somehow never found the time to observe
water in the hotel room sink - perhaps too much time sampling addictive street
food at hawker stalls and hunting for the legendary SPGs. Singapore : what a strange place – super-luxury
business hotels, a mix of interesting cultures, and as Webb Chiles describes it
“an unusually logical city” “not given to laughter, especially at itself”. I certainly felt safe there, but am not sure
I ever felt alive. On board Otra Vida, out here in the Atlantic
ocean hundreds of miles from land I feel both safe and alive.
In between scanning the horizon for boats I am reading
“Capital in the 21st Century”.
The book is a magisterial compendium of data-based insights on growth, capital,
income and inequality over the last two centuries, engagingly written by a very
smart French economist. It covers so
much ground that any quick summary will fail to do it justice. For anyone interested in history, economics
and politics it surely is a must-read. His extrapolations into the future are
not pleasant reading, and his suggestions for action seem well founded,
reasonable, and sadly unlikely to come to fruition. My understanding of economics is too limited to
be able to challenge his view, so I am looking forward to researching some intelligent
critiques when I have internet access again.
At first glance it seems to me that he has lifted the veil on capitalism
and provided solid and congruent data that confirms the core premise of Occupy
a few years ago – that capitalism is (in general) good at creating wealth, but
lousy at distributing it. My friends on
the right are not going to be happy about this book, not at all.
Day 7
The night is windless and warm, some 200nm north of the
equator, and Otra Vida´s engine is pushing us south at 4.5kts, the slow speed being
to conserve fuel. First thing I did this
morning on my 4am watch was a saltwater shower on deck. The water temperature here is 29C, and a
shower in the pre-dawn darkness is pleasant and refreshing.
This area of the ocean is called the Sargasso Sea, so named
for the amount of Sargasso seaweed found here, ranging from individual plants to
rafts as large as tennis courts. It´s
tough stuff and apparently gets caught on our rudder. It took a little while for us to work out why
we were going so slow, and now we put the engine in reverse every couple of
hours to let the seaweed drop off.
The hitchhiking bird that joined us a day out from the Cape
Verdes is still perched on the dinghy.
It would seem our friend is with us for the journey.
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| Sargasso seaweed |
We reached the half way point today : a half way cocktail to
celebrate, our first alcohol since leaving the Cape Verdes. We now have about another week to Cabedelo
based on the forecast winds, and about 90nm to the equator. The swell from the South Atlantic is
noticeable already.
Our mainsail, hoisted to stabilise the boat in the swell
while motoring, split at a seam overnight between the second and third reef
points. We now have a triple-reefed
mainsail for the rest of the journey.
The sail is getting weak after 5 years and lots of sun in the Med and
the Caribbean – Maret will repair it in Brazil and check and reinforce other
seams as needed. I hope it will be possible
to patch this one together through the next year or so in the Caribbean, but
for sure before setting off into the Pacific we will have a new mainsail made.
I also noticed that the AIS targets via our VHF radio were
fewer than from our dedicated AIS transceiver.
It took me just minutes to alter the data connections for our AIS
navigation instrument to use the AIS transceiver. It means that the main VHF aerial (or much
more likely the coaxial cable) has a leak and has corroded. Eight days into the passage and this is only
the second item added to the to-do list.
Day 10
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| Speeding across the equator |
We crossed the equator around noon. To celebrate, as it is the first crossing on
a boat for both of us, we offered generous glugs of Havana Club to Neptune, and
made “equator cocktails” based on the longstanding nautical tradition: rum and
seawater. I added some ice, lime and a
sprig of Sargasso seaweed. The result
was truly disgusting – not too much of a surprise. We each managed a few mouthfuls, and the rest
went over the side. The nausea took a
little longer to pass. I´ll wager you
won´t see that mixture on cocktail menus anytime soon.
Checked the swirl of seawater in the sink. It seems to go straight down the plughole
with no appreciable swirl either way, perhaps because the movement of the boat
is more than the weak Coriolis force.
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| Don´t try this at home... |
The cabin temperature is 32C, humidity 88%. It’s a month
from mid-winter here.
Day 12
The South Atlantic trade winds arrived early this morning,
bringing easy beam reach sailing with the gennaker up, 6+kts boat speed plus
the 1kt or so favourable current. It
looks like we will make Cabedelo on Saturday, subject to the forecast being
correct.
Our visiting bird has departed after 10 days of riding on Otra
Vida´s dinghy. After preening its
feathers it did a final grandiose swooping circle around the boat before
heading off to its next destination. All
that´s left now is the shit to be cleaned up.
Brings to mind a few executives I have known.
Day 13
Out here on the ocean the idea of ownership, of possession,
of accumulation seems so irrelevant. The human pretensions of permanence and
control are seen for what they are. How
can you own the ocean? The sky? The clouds?
The questions are literally meaningless.
One can choose to experience the journey, or one can choose to endure
the journey and focus only on the destination.
The sea and sky are benignly indifferent whatever the choice, but I
think there is a qualitative difference in the experience. Out here the journey is enough: the perpetual
present moment, every second the same panorama of sea and sky, every second
different. The journey really is the
destination. Sure, it´s a cliché, but
that doesn’t stop it being true. There
is a purity and a peace that blossoms on passage, a cleansing of the mind. Perspective comes easily. I like passage life.
Day 15
The SE trades are giving us a speedy and comfortable beam
reach to Cabedelo. Dawn is just
breaking,
and in 3 hours we will be tied up to a dock, in a new country, on a new
continent. Our traditional landfall
bottle of cava is chilling in the fridge along with trout eggs which are
becoming something of a tradition too. The air temperature is 28C. Not bad for winter.
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| Winter scene on our approach to Cabedelo |
What a lovely passage this has been.
Total distance: 1569nm.
Average speed: 4.7kts. Freshwater
used: about 130 litres. Fish caught: 0
(again).
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