Active Light's passage from Cape Town to Curacao

Active Light Across the South Atlantic
September 23rd, 2007
written by M. Neil Sirman

We left Cape Town, South Africa around noon on March 8th, 2007, after two weeks at the Royal Cape Yacht Club. As was usual along the entire South African coast, we were afforded warm welcome by the people in the yacht clubs in each harbor. Cape Town's Royal Cape Yacht Club was no exception. Now we were off on what was to be our longest crossing to date. I recall our numbers for this passage from Cape Town to Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles as 6,200 nm in 48 days, counting three days layover at St. Helena. It was to be a wonderful, beautiful, relaxing, nearly perfect, refreshing, gorgeous, and soul-restoring passage. We learned so much and solved so many sudoku puzzles. We grew healthier eating only good food and avoiding shoreside junk. We read book after book and wasted no time on poisonous television. We breathed clean air and took daily healing salt water baths. In short, it was wonderful!

Table Mountain & Cape Town slip astern as we leave South Africa.

Cruising sailors often refer to the passage between Cabo San Lucas, Mexico and the South Pacific islands of the Marquesas as "The Milk Run", because it is so easy, . . . a long reaching passage in beam tradewinds from the northeast above the equator, and blowing from the southeast below. We have made that passage and it was great, but the South Atlantic passage is even better! Day after day after night of clear skies and wind from astern at 15 to 20 knots. No boat traffic at all and clean, clean water. We finally used our asymmetrical spinnaker a lot and we grew more proficient at downwind sailing. The secret is learning which sail combination, often headsails only, would keep our boat from rolling. Rolling robs you of sleep, and lack of sleep remains our biggest concern, . . . not storms, pirates, nor big seas.
We carried 105 gallons of fresh, sweet water trickle-filtered into our tanks from Cape Town, plus several jerry cans more on deck for rinsing the salt off us after our deck bucket baths. We arrived in Curacao having used only two thirds of all that. Our filtering method? We purchased a common household three-element water filter in Thailand, on sale for about US$25, and discovered it works well, if slowly, by simply siphoning from a water jerry can on the cabin top. The three elements are (1) paper filter for sediment, (2) charcoal for taste, and (3) a 0.35 micron ceramic element for whatever else, and it works very well. It is a slow process, taking about one hour per jerry can, but that is no problem for the patient cruiser. We were even filtering cistern and brackish well water in Chagos with this system, . . .but I digress. The point is that money spent on a power-hungry, expensive, desalinating water maker is wasted, unless your objective is to help pay for the college education of the water maker manufacturer's children.
Our friend Sheila Lee, also a sailor, asks us, "How on earth do you ever plan for provisions on such a long voyage?". Nancy remembers our first vacation cruise of two weeks together maybe thirteen years ago when we simply went to Costco and bought big packages of whatever we liked to eat; candy bars, trail mix, beef jerky! Now she makes a very thorough job of provisioning. She estimates how many days, how many meals of breakfast, lunch, and dinner we will need, then adds about 25% to those figures. She selects meals predicated on which foods are good for our health in each meal category, down to the condiment and spices level. She estimates the amount per meal, then does some multiplying and winds up with a pretty detailed shopping list that sometimes takes a lot of effort to complete. Then in passage, she gets a little irritated if I want to use such-and-such a product for something not on the scheduled menu because it may throw off the balance of what she has planned for meals. The final word is that she has become quite professional in this provisioning business and we both reap the benefits of her efforts. When we shove off on a long cruise, we know that we will be healthier and weigh less at the end of the passage because there just ain't no junk food aboard Active Light! No sugar, no white flour, no candy bars, . . . and not too much beef jerky. We have no refrigeration aboard, never have had, we don't need it, so provisioning is very important. We can't simply purchase 100 frozen TV dinners for a passage. We ate very well the whole trip, picking up some much-appreciated fresh garlic and cheese at St. Helena. But, again, I digress.

On the second or third day out we put the sail cover on the furled mainsail and I don't remember raising it again until the evening of the 47th day. We usually sailed with the big roller furling genoa with the wind about 30 degrees off the port stern or quarter. If the wind went light, we would put up the big asymmetrical spinnaker, very nice because for some reason I have yet to figure out, we roll less with that sail up. If the weather looked squally as evening approached, we would put up both the staysail and the RF genoa. The staysail would then blanket the genoa a little bit, so we would point up a little bit higher until morning. If the wind picked up during night watch, it was relatively easy to roll in the genoa.
Our friend Pat, aboard the Hans Christian s/v Motion, had given Nancy some of those Scopaderm seasickness patches (Pat found herself allergic to them), but they worked really well for Nancy.

Land ho! St Helena.

Like many cruising sailors, Nancy is often queasy for the first three days of a passage, so she had been (effectively) using a half-dosage of Stugeron, . . . but these Scopaderm patches worked better for her. This means that Neil did not have to cook for the first three days, and Nancy was much more comfortable for the entire trip. We had only three of the patches and she left each on for almost a week. Her skin became a bit irritated beneath the patch. In discussing this with her doctor later, she was cautioned not to leave the patch on for so long. That being said, I must add that of all the people in the world, I could not imagine a better passage mate than Nancy. In seven years of cruising she has missed one (1) watch when it came her time at night. That one time we had eaten some foul canned beef from Papua, New Guinea for lunch. (I thought it smelled peculiar and spit it out, but Nancy did not. She became violently sick!) That's a pretty good record. Furthermore, when on watch, she really stays awake and "watches". Her on-deck time is always 9 PM to midnight and 3 to 6 AM. I have often gotten up in the middle of the night for a drink of water or whatever, sneaked a look out into the cockpit, and there is Nancy, sitting bolt upright and her head rotating side to side as she scans the night horizon. I, on the other hand, will have a good look around for a minute, punch reset on the 15-minute timer, and take a short nap until awakened by the four short beeps on the timer. Why 15 minutes? That's how long it would for a vessel spotted dead ahead on our horizon and traveling 20 knots to run us down. But, yet again, I digress.

We monitored our weather-forecaster friend, Fred, back in Durban, on our shipboard ICOM 710 SSB every morning at 0700, talking to him for weather advice, reporting our position and weather conditions, and monitoring the progress of friends on other boats in passage. This is always fun, but this time, the weather was so consistently good, we stopped "coming up" on the SSB after arriving at St. Helena. Fred's signal, at a distance of over 2000 nm was getting weak and the weather in this bit of ocean always good. Fred is often feted in South Africa by grateful cruisers for his help in guiding them around that difficult cape, . . . and he deserves every bit of the praise he gets. One can only imagine the many lives and boats he has saved by advising them of upcoming SW weather fronts, not to mention misery avoided!

On the morning of March 21st we sighted St. Helena off the port bow. Since the advent of GPS and computerized electronic charts, land falls are a bit less exciting than in "pre-GPS" days. Back then, there was always the underlying excitement of "I can't believe we actually made it!" or "The island is really there after so many days of uncertainty!". Nowadays, we know exactly where we are within (allegedly) plus or minus 10 yards and such certainty detracts more than a bit from the magic moment of "Land Ho!" Nevertheless, it is still a good moment. First look at St. Helena is absolutely grim, . . . a rocky and forbidding coast as one approaches from any quarter. There are very few small beaches, the banks are high, comprised of very rugged red/brown rock, and there is little hint of the lush semi-tropical vegetation that lies hiding in the interior highlands. Much of the coastal plain visible from seaward is desert-like, even with cactus growing.

It is protocol at St. Helena to call for a water taxi on VHF channel 16 and someone will come out to get you and bring you back for only one pound per person. This is a bargain because taking a dinghy in to the cement wharf would be tricky, risky, and maybe dangerous. At the wharf, there was a sort of gymnastics iron bar welded in place right at the edge of the water. Lots of old rubber tires protected the sturdy taxi boats from being smashed in the swells against the cement wharf. The wharf itself was built in three levels so you could step on/off no matter the tide level or height of the taxi boat's freeboard. The way you landed was to grab a rope as soon as the boat touched the wharf and you would swing ashore as neatly as you please! This simple system worked wonderfully well, though I doubt it would meet with U.S. OSHA standards.

The "swing ashore" ropes at the Jamestown wharf.

Stepping ashore, the first person we met was one of the customs guys, a friendly fellow who walked with us to the customs clearance house. We had been at sea for two weeks by this time and were happy to be ashore. It really is a pretty and very quaint old English colony. We commented on this in an effusive and complimentary way, to which the local customs fellow responded, "Yeah, but it's (effing) boring to live here!" We all laughed. St. Helena was initially used by the Portuguese, Dutch, and English as a provisioning stopover by their early exploratory and trading vessels. Later, the English East India Company established hegemony to the island, and it remains a supported dependency of the UK to this day. We had a bit of a look around, had a cold beer and lunch at Ann's Place, and we met Ann. She is a St. Helena native who, with help from her extensive family, runs the most cruiser friendly bar and restaurant in St. Helena. She is a very pleasant and colorful lady who loves to sit with a group of cruisers and answer all the questions in the world about life on St. Helena. She is most entertaining, kept us all laughing, and speaks of everyone she addresses as "My Darling!". We met several of our cruising friends at St. Helena.

Back aboard Active Light, we witnessed a little drama going on just astern of us. A fishing vessel had apparently lost their generator set and had a new one brought out on a heavy barge. We took many pictures as this enormous engine was lifted aboard with a simple chain hoist. You need to appreciate how dangerous and tricky this maneuver was in the rolling seaway of this anchorage. Everything went smoothly as the monster was lowered to deck. (Photo upper right.) We forgot about it all and were eating our supper down below just after dark when we heard a cheer from the fishing boats. Clambering on deck, we found the fishing vessel aglow with lights and the crew so happy to have the lights back on.
Next morning, we took this photo of St. Helena's famous Jacobs Ladder (right photo) prior to our assault on this local icon.

Jacob's Ladder going uphill to the right.

Jacob's Ladder was built in 1829 to haul manure (!) up the cliff and other goods down. It is quite steep, consisting of 699 steps, each about eleven inches high. We stopped first at Ann's Place for breakfast and a couple of bottles of water before beginning our assault. Ann told us local school kids descend the ladder by leaning their backpacks on one rail, their feet on the other and sliding rapidly the whole way down, but we did not actually see this being done. We took it slowly, in truth about an hour, to climb the thing. It was nice, great views. I lost my hat about halfway up and had to climb outside the railing to retrieve it. We witnessed with a bird's eye view the (perhaps imagined) drama of a rare-to-St. Helena cruise ship departing the island without one of its passengers (photo below left). It was steaming off to the southwest when whistles blew and engines reversed as a shore taxi came racing out with a lone and apparently distraught passenger aboard. Someone had missed the headcount aboard and the Love Boat (that's what Nancy calls all such cruise ships) was leaving without them! We concocted all sorts of scenarios as to what some elderly tourist gentleman or widow was doing as they lost track of time and missed their cruise ship's departure, perhaps drinking happily in a local tavern or shopping her little heart out in St. Helena's several quaint boutiques.
We spent a nice couple of hours with gorgeous views up on top, bread and cheese snacks, and then faced the long trip back down. We both handled it just fine, but we were very glad to stagger wobble-kneed into Ann's cool shaded tables and an ice cold beer again.

Nancy at the top of Jacob's Ladder.

A day or so later, we arranged with two other cruising couples to tour the interior of the island with the services of Robert, an elderly local unofficial tour guide. Recommended to us by no less an authority than Ann herself, he turned out to be a charming and quietly amusing fellow with a small pickup truck equipped with rain canopy (which we were to need) and wooden bench seats for all. We started off up the long inclined road shown in the lower left photo, stopping for snapshots and lots of interesting stories from Robert. The other cruisers were Lynnette (Kiwi) and Rene' (Swiss) aboard Te Kaihau and Hamish and Carla (good people, but we can't remember their boat's name.) It was lovely to look down onto the various farms and houses in the valley below. We were to soon purchase a new home ourselves back in the States and we always enjoy seeing other people's homes and gardens in foreign places, mulling over ideas for our own.

Robert and his pickup.

Napoleon was buried here. He spent the last six years of his life rather unhappily exiled to a hilltop house named Longwood, not far from Jamestown. The house is a nice, very pretty, and the views are terrific, looking out over the western Atlantic. However, it is shrouded in fog and cloud but for about two months of the year. The house was cold and damp and, in those days, heated only with open fireplaces. These produced so much particulate pollution that the poor old fellow was constantly ill with lung infection. He died there in 1821, rather unhappy, if you read the local documents, and was buried in a little wooded glen. It started to rain just as we arrived at the site. He was later disinterred and reburied in France.

We spent the rest of the day rattling up and down narrow, hilly tarmac roads, stopping frequently for pictures, a lunch break, and to hear Robert's always humorous commentary about who did what with whom in the island's history. There are so few residents here that everyone pretty much knows his neighbors' business. There don't seem to be a lot of secrets. The island is a dependency of the UK and all the residents receive a monthly (small) support stipend from the UK. While we were there, a debate was (not) raging about a UK offer to build either an airport (there is no airport service yet to the island) or a walled harbor just off Jamestown. It seems about half the residents wanted the new airport for the jobs and easy contact with the world it would bring along with a tourist industry. The other half of the residents seemed to fear the changes in island lifestyle such an airport would bring. As it is, according to Ann, only two cruise ships per year come to St. Helena. Oddly, they both appeared during the three days we were there. They get lots of yachties, perhaps 40 to 50 sailboats per year. We sympathized with the "new harbor" advocates. We had a tiny little insight into island politics listening to the wonderful (and only) St. Helena FM radio station one morning. Mixed in with a very eclectic assortment of music, a news reporter spoke about an island council meeting held to publicly discuss the upcoming vote over airport vs. harbor. After naming all the council members present, it was glibly declared that the audience consisted of one (1) person.

After the tour, we settled into Ann's Place with cold beers, cool shade, and comfortable chairs. It was late afternoon and we were all speculating on our dinner options. Tourists from the cruise ship Geographic Explorer had been in port that day and had a catered lunch and lecture at Ann's. There were a lot of leftover dishes, and Ann asked us to "help her" by rendering the dishes empty. There were delicious quiches, chicken, fish, tuna cakes, fruit, and even apple cobbler with English custard for desert. Ann held court the whole time, regaling us with tales of her attempt to live in England and St. Helena island life. Everyone was called "My Darling" about twenty times. It was a wonderful and memorable afternoon. We will long remember Ann's generosity and kindness. What a gorgeous person!

We raised anchor next morning and slipped away to the west without starting the engine, an act we smugly pull off whenever it is safe to do so. Active Light is a wonderful sailing boat, but her long fixed keel makes her difficult to turn in tight anchorages and marinas. We soon fell back into our comfortable and safe routine of watch-keeping, reading, sleeping, and endless talking about house plans in our future. We stopped coming up on the morning SSB radio net, as we were losing the signal. Now we were really on our own in the deep, safe South Atlantic. We passed whole weeks sometimes without seeing another boat or even an airplane. We did have a lot of bird passengers during the evening and night hours. These were okay at first, but then they began pooping on our deck and sails and pecking at our sail covers, so out came the slingshot and there were feathers in our wake!

St. Helena slips astern on a Sunday morning.

The photo to the right is not a pretty one (it is Neil's leg), but there is a story in it. We have been out cruising aboard Active Light for seven years now and we are still trying to figure out how best to sail straight down wind. If we can steer a course that puts the wind an angle of at least 30 or more degrees from directly astern, there is no problem. The wind holds the boat steady enough to inhibit resonant rolling from side to side, we can sleep, and the forward sail, usually the roller furling genoa will stay filled if we have at least 10 knots across the deck. Without boring you too much with sailing details, let us say that our goals are primarily to keep the boat moving and be able to put our heads down to sleep with a reasonable feeling of being safe. This sometimes means flying the asymmetrical at night, something we rarely do for safety reasons.
One evening, however, as we approached the equator with its changeable, squally weather conditions, we entered the night's watch routine with the genoa up and pulling quite nicely. It had been a really good day and everything seemed fairly settled. Just at dusk, the wind fell light enough that I decided we could get away with running with the spinnaker all night again. It works so well when the winds are light, we can go almost directly downwind and rolling is minimized. So, there we are out on deck, wrestling with setting the thing when a "squallette" catches up to us. There was not enough wind in it to really worry about, maybe 18 to 20 knots across the deck, but as the chute opened, I found that one wrap of the "snuffer" line (a sock that fits over the spinnaker that helps us raise and lower the large sail) . . . was wrapped around my right leg. The snuffer line went up so fast and strongly as the big sail opened, I found myself hanging upside down, not really dangling overboard, but holding on to the dinghy straps trying to stay aboard.

Neil's ankle wrap rope burn a week later.

A pretty typical intertropical convergence zone (doldrums) downpour.

Flexing my ankle, I got the mess loosened enough to get un-inverted again, but with a pretty good rope burn all around my ankle. Then the sail decided to wrap itself around the forestay, a messy situation which took us over an hour to straighten out. We won't go into the embarrassing details of that! Our efforts were witnessed only by a few seabirds. At first, the rope burn did not seem too bad, but a week later it was a bit painful during our daily salt water baths. Enough of this story. Needless to say, now we are even more cautious about putting up the spinnaker at night. So far, our west-about circumnavigation has been mostly downwind sailing with favorable currents. I suspect a better downwind rig would be a vessel with a square-rigged spar or twin roller furling genoa headsails, neither of which we are set up for aboard Active Light

Only two more things happened that we can remember. The first is that we had engine problems. This is rare aboard Active Light. Our power plant is a mid-range Kubota tractor engine that has been "marinized" with a water-circulating exhaust manifold. Sold by Universal as the M-40 model, Nancy and I broke all records for length of installation time when we pulled our old, worn Volvo MD2B ourselves and replaced it with this unit. It took us eleven and one half months to do this! We had no idea what we were doing, but lots of advice and slow attention to detail have left us with an engine that has given us very few problems for eight years. However, as we were motoring across many of the ITCZ miles on this passage, we became alarmed as the engine kept sputtering and dying. We found we could rap on the sides of the fuel pump and it would run again for a few hours, then die again. Finally, no amount of rapping would get the old electric fuel pump to run. Our first thoughts were, "Oh, too bad, I suppose we will just have to sail the rest of the way." Further thought went like this, "Uh, no engine, no battery charging, no battery, no radio email, no computer after a couple of days, and after three days, no more night time navigation lights, . . ."! This was getting serious. Not going into the nitty gritty, we substituted the heater day tank electric pump for the dead one on the engine, learned a great deal about air blocks, bleeding, and cleaning fuel filters, and many long hours later, we were tired, dirty, smelling of diesel, . . . but we had our engine back and charging the batteries.
The second event is that we were almost run down by a container vessel in full mid-morning daylight because some old fool on watch aboard our boat (that would be Neil) had his head in a sudoku puzzle. The blame for any collision mishap would have been fully on the conscience of my sister-in-law, Linda Morningstar, who is responsible for addicting me to those puzzles. Not to make light of this serious infraction, I was on watch, the coast was clear, we had just cleared Galleon Passage between Trinidad and Tobago the night before. I looked up and there was this big vessel passing us not 100 yards off our starboard beam. This is twice I have done this in seven years, both times seriously endangering our vessel and our lives.