Pete

Pete writes

We're soft pedaling downwind towards Cape Town at about 2kts, the main is down, two headsails are up and poled out. I've just come up on watch, the breeze is soft and perhaps a little crisp for this time of year. The sky is completely clear down to the horizon except for a low patch of cloud out over the port quarter, the moon is not up yet so the stars are brilliant. Orion is about 40 degs high on the port beam and the Southern Cross has not long risen off the starboard bow, we now have a little over 100 mls to the Cape.
Sitting in the cockpit just now I realized there are very few of the stars up there that I could name now. When Jeanne and I sailed across the Atlantic and Pacific about 30 years ago, I would have known a lot of stars, as navigation was by sextant. The stars I knew then were those 1st magnitude stars which would be visible with the horizon at dawn and dusk, in the area we were sailing. I knew nothing of their history or which constellation they belonged to. To me then they were just a signpost, something I used daily to work out the boat's position, handy but of no real interest.
Recently, as I had run out of good books Alex gave me one of his secreted specials to read. Its called "Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene. The author is Prof of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University but don't let that put you off, he talks in easy to read layman's language using metaphors we can relate to. His book is a history and explanation of the universe from the early thinkers, Galileo, Descartes, Newton to Einstein and on to the present day. It's brilliant stuff and as much of it is about philosophy as physics. I'm about half way through the book now but I've left it alone for the last week as you need to devote time to get your head around the concepts of space and time especially when he is moving onto the idea of a 10 dimensional space/time i.e. something can be located with its time in a 9 dimensional space and I'm just lost for time with all the hand steering we're doing at the moment...still I look up at the stars now and wonder.
Now onto the literary segment. Our HF radio has died so no BBC World Service, I left home without my cds so none of my favorite music or world news. Good books preserve sanity and give an escape at this stage.
A couple of the books I really appreciated were, The Kite Flyer by Khaled Hosseni about Afghanistan under the Taliban; Havana Bay by Martin Cruz Smith a well told spy thriller and Woodlands by Thomas Hardy an excellent novel of English country life written in the 1880's.
The woodlanders was a step back in time, how's this for the beginning of chapt.4.
"There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child." The weather hasn't changed but I don't think you could use a metaphor like that now, they were obviously more used to early childhood deaths at that time. Here's another little gem, a young girl has returned to her parent's house in a small village after several years at an elite boarding school, she has just finished a walk around the house and grounds that she grew up in. "Having concluded her perambulation of this now uselessly commodious edifice, Grace began to feel that she had come a long journey since the morning; and when her father had been up himself, as well as his wife, to see that her room was comfortable and the fire burning, she prepared to retire for the night."
They don't write them like that any more. Try teaching this book to second form English Lit. Cheers Pete.

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Opposite ends...

Twin poling rather slowly towards the barn door. I've just gybed us - a welter of sheets, downhauls, topping lifts, strops and the works, a difficult manoeuvre with Berri's current set-up but I think we can make some mods in CT. One armed paperhanger is close. Looks as if I might have to go out and reverse it all - let the 10 minute rule apply. Glorious night out there.

Pete is a sparkling clean person and he washes his clothes. Me, I kind of like the foetids so I tend just to wring them through and it doesn't use as much water but it does catch up eventually. I've been preparing a washing bag of interesting feral colonies in varied technicolor (the colonies - the bag is black plastic to keep them in the dark) and I'm hoping Derek the washing inspector in the CT customs shed doesn't discover the second last non extinct pair of breeding Barking Toads in the bag - I don't want to have to wear it all until they breed in two years time and be inspected daily by Clive the biologist. And I hate to think what is occurring inside the bag as the colonies mix and match.

Yesterday's airing for the neuronic trio led to the thought that there can't be too many people alive who have been to the opposite ends of mainland America - and I bet there aren't too many who have stood on the Greenwich Meridian at the Observatory (51 N 00 E)and been able to say that they stood at the exact opposite end of the earth a few months earlier, on the international date line east of NZ (51 S 180 E) near the Antipodes Islands. And I may well be the only person around who can claim both. But an interesting possibility for a roomful of people. And another one - the opposite end to the Amchitka passage through the Aleutians into the Bering Sea and on the date line is only about 3000 miles south west of here on the Greenwich meridian. We nearly crossed that one last time around. Across Peel Sound from that northern point of America is Strzelezki Harbour. I wonder whether that is the same Strzelezki that named the mountain in Australia.
Idle nonsense.

Latest Position

Posted by I & G in the UK.

The fifth Cape

Position 0630/7th 3335 01456 trip 49 DMG 42 and 164 to go
We have the assymetric kite up, VMG about 4.5, iff the wx system holds for the two days forecast, it should get us home but no predictions! Barnacles not helping.

Last night: Looking back over the last 66 days of sailing - the first 36 k of this little marathon - I'm astonished at how lenient the Examiner has been with us. 7500 miles of downhill, easy sailing most of the way, except for some small bursts of the pearshaped up in the convergence zone. So, desperately frustrating though it has been to be out in the gridlock within sight of the pub and no Marvin to take over, I don't think we have grounds for complaint as we wallow here. On the contrary, in fact. But we are not in the bar yet - not nohow and I might change my mind at any time.

Middle watch again - we have just enough breeze to be making headway, or we had when I started writing this but it's dropping out rapidly. Massive to-do list for CT if we ever actually get there. Battery down to 65% - lowest I can remember ever seeing it - so a bit of diesel and we can make some water too. Just not enough wind for the Airbreeze whizzer to keep the charge up.

I've been idly engaging the neuronic trio in contemplating the preconceived, taken for granted notion of size, of the vast stretches of this little blue green blob in the universe in human terms. Berrimilla and I have been at the northernmost point of mainland America, on the southern shore of Bellot Strait in the NW Passage and at the opposite end, at Cape Horn which is on an island south of the end of the mainland. At both places I was conscious of the huge distance to the other end. We are now just short of one of the fiercest Capes of all, Cape Agulhas at the southern tip of Africa. The enormous spread of the continent fills the whole of my perspective from Berri's bow around to past her port quarter, yet it is over the horizon, low, relatively flat and so far invisible - a quirk of geography class at school and completely unreal. Big, mysterious and unknowable. And Agulhas, not Good Hope, is the real 'Great Cape' and one of the five. So ends as rather mixed up contemplation. The next couple of days - and perhaps several more - are going to be very long. More dead leaves in the bus shelter.

David W - Dutch Harbour sounds pretty much par but I'd like to see that facebook page - would you please ask for me? You should read Steve Tompkins' blog - I think it is 'a sense of place' and there's a link on the old /tng site.

Frustration by the truckload

Position 1900/6th 3329 01418 and 197 to go

What a day - frustrating, therapeutic in an 'it's nice when you stop banging your head' sort of way, fierce concentration just to stay in the same spot, just enough wind in the sails to pass the bubbles but desperately disappointing when you've spent three hours hand steering, playing every little shift, every blasted wave that throws the boat around and stops her dead, doing doughnuts, fogging and rolling and you find that you have gained - nothing. I have a couple of screen prints of one session and I'll post them if we ever get to CT. I was looking at 200 miles to go for about 12 hours - we cracked it, I hope finally, about three hours ago.

And the water really is soapy - there's a greasy film over the surface, easily visible when it is oily calm like it has been today and there are bubbles, formed I know not how because there are no white caps and they hang around - they don't seem to pop. Can this be yet another example of us humans trashing the planet?

Radio dead again so this by Iridium and short. So much to write, but really too busy steering or trying to get some sleep. We have now what I hope - and the grib predicts - is the top of a big low forming around us and deepening below us tomorrow and Tuesday and - I hope - giving us just enough to stem the current for 197 miles and through the barn door. But I'm not too confident.

What it must have been like for the emigrant ships and the slave ships stuck out here for weeks in these conditions is beyond my imaginative tolerance - rationed, tainted water, maggoty or mouldy or just no food, hot, no cooling breeze, people dying around you, their corpses often floating beside the ship until they burst and sank and worst of all, not knowing when it would end. I just don't want to think about it.

another quickie

Trying to hand steer in rolling sea, about 5kts breeze, just poled out genoa. Tricky.

0715 position 3336 01404 trip 41 but DMG 35 and 2056 to CT

Was a Soft Plumaged Petrel doing aerobatics in the 35 kts the other night - breathtaking amidst the blasting spray - Port. M. o' war everywhere.

Carol, tks - puts new perspective on canonisation don't it?
Hi Gerry and Doug
Tim, thanks for generous kick of the Iridium tin.

gotto try send this and back on deck

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Latest Position

Posted by I & G in the UK.

Going nowhere...

0700/5th position 3348 01321 trip 98 but Distance Made Good only 34 and 241 to CapeTown. ETA around the time Zarquon turns up with his speech...

This has to be high on the list of things in the 'not having fun' category. Poor old barge being thrown wildly and violently all over the ocean - 3 reefs, not much headsail, 30 kts apparent massively short steep boatbreaking swell - mostly easterly wind waves piled up on top of the big SW swell from the southern ocean - bloody awful conditions and not in the tourist brochure

About 4 hours later - I started writing this with just wet feet from the leak over the end of my bunk. Then pearshapedness in spades too much crashing, no point in breaking the boat just to get to Cape Town before Christmas - into full party gear and out into the blasting spray to drop the main and lash it to the boom. Murphy's first law of statistics of course in full force and I got soaked, blasted, tossed and turned as I fixed all that and sorted some other snafus at the same time. In and out of the cabin several times but all eventually sorted but one very wet - and knackered - old fart. Ordinary wet weather gear in those circumstances is about as effective at keeping the water out as an umbrella. Time soon to break out the TPS drysuit and helmet...

So a sleep later, the wind has dropped from 30 to about 22 knots, Pete pulled the main back up to the third reef and we are pointing once again directly at Capetown and going sideways - the current is giving us a 60 - 80 degree knock and instead of East, our course over the ground is about 020T and our VMG is less than a knot. And we have 241 miles to go - but cant get east. ETA Capetown after the 2012 world cup? No options but wait for change in conditions - nothing useful in sight on the grib

I could give you detailed description of the simple things in life getting complicated - like having a crap facing forwards and downwards and only occasionally connected to the seat as the boat gyrates and crashes - but I don't want to spoil your breakfasts.

Malcom, thanks.
Sue - ok, he stays.

Thump and bang and grot

2015/4th position 3419 01307 pointing directly at CT but we are getting a 25 degree knock to the NW from the current. SPBF. the GPS trip log reads 7517 miles from Falmouth and we've got 252 to go at a vmg of about 2 knots. Monday not looking good.

I didn't like this bit of Africa the first time we were here in 2005 and I still don't like it. We are bashing into 25 knots apparent in big SW swell with steep wind waves from the east in rain squalls and grot. I've just put the second reef in and got a faceful of water for my trouble. Bleeah! Almost time to get out the helmet and facemask.

In the daylight overcast, the water looks light grey and it seems to be soapy - Berri's passing seems to create sudsy froth. Odd. Portuguese men of war in their thousands, their tentacles tangled and wound into knots around the safety line we tow astern. Pete put on the rubber gloves and cleared them off but they will be back.

Happy arsebone in the ascendant! That milk crate makes such a difference, as does having the BBC world service.

Doug, if it's not too fraught when we can see the Cape Town lighthouse, if we ever get that far, we'll send Susan Knight some jellybabies - kept some specially for her.
Carol, thanks for passes - thick overcast and grot and no chance at the mo.

Latest Position

Posted by I & G in the UK.

And all of this shall grind the arsebone and pass away

0630/3rd position 3509 01222 trip 108 but DMG to Cape Town 69. 295 to go - Monday morning on the cards

Yesterday - On the port tack in Berri with any sort of heel, there is nowhere comfortable to sit and relax. Nowhere. You are constantly braced by legs, arms, eyebrows and the poor old arsebone and we've been on the port tack seemingly for ever. With no prospect, for the moment, of any change. Necessity and adversity being the mothers of invention, Pete had a brilliant idea and our now largely redundant coolgardie fridge milk crate is upended on the floor next to the galley with a folding cushion on top and we have a seat. I know where there's an arsebone overflowing with joy and happiness!

We are 25 miles south of Africa - in the Southern Ocean - and to emphasise the point, we're in big rolling swells with wind waves over the top. Heading SE, more or less directly into the current and picking the time to tack is a tricky and somewhat arbitrary decision. We have 317 miles to go, directly upwind and across the current yet we don't want to get too far south to the natural lay line because the developing low to our WNW seems to be deepening rapidly and is predicted to move north, producing 25 knot easterlies down here. And, to make it even harder, we just got a little lift, so the other tack will be a bit less efficient in the VMG department.

Middle watch this morning - Anyway - all seemed cool and froody so tried a tack and - oh joy! - the combination of wind and current gave us a 90 degree tack and we're pointing at southern Namibia instead of the Gulf of Guinea like last time and there is the prospect of a lift later. But it may not last - things seldom do out here! Lots of very big ships going around the end of Africa each way. Spoke one going east - surly and uninterested but confirmed he could see us at 7 miles on radar - reassuring! The new reflector seems to work.

With the radio once again randomly functional, I have a Cape Town MW station and the Beeb world service dialled in and we have human voices again. The very first voice I heard was some guy reporting in broad Australian from Melbourne. So there ya go.

Sue - would you like me to despatch Pinkbok for Xmas tree? I think he'd be relieved!
John and Sherryl - great to hear and good luck with Matangi and new lodger!
Robin - gotcha - Pete will write
Tim - thanks for generous offer - separate email follows/precedes this post.

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Latest position images and Henry Knight

Note that the marker in the south west corner of the lower image is
not a Berri position. It marks the supposed site of Henry Knight's
grave. For Henry's story, go to log entries around November 14th.
I and G in UK

Latest Position

Umpteenth quickie

The radio has come back from the dead. Damn! That will make the problem harder to diagnose.

Position 0700/3rd 3417 01052 trip 98 but vmg to CT only 59 miles. 364 to go.

We have 10 days worth of doses of Dr Murphy's medicinal compound and the second packet of real M&Ms is broached and dwindling. Major incentives to get across this bloody current and into CT.

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Moving - arachnid like but moving

0700/02 position 3340 00954 trip 95, 413 to CT so real DMG 76. Best guess at ETA from here late Sunday, early Monday.

We have a steady wind at last and should keep some if it for at least 24 hours - but no predictions! Almost level with CT and Sydney. Pooey morning so back to back breakfast Murph at 0430 to fortify. Excellent recipe and much fortification added. Been bashing iridium lately so will keep these short for a bit.

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Oscillating Wollongong

Finally - after about four years since we last saw it from Berri from way down in the southern ocean on the other side of Africa - The ISS - new improved version, bigger, better, brighter with Scott's bit of fishing line on the big solar array to hold the thing together. I was not expecting to see it as it is cloudy and 3/4 moon anyway but it appeared in a gap for about a minute - Yay! Thanks Deborah and Carol both of whom sent me this one. I wonder who is up there now.

While it is tedious, this bit of the journey has been really interesting - seamount, current, water temp etc. We are now re-crossing the continental shelf SE of the seamount ridge and the water temperature has dropped 2 degrees. An ominous sign. The predicted midnight wind change has not happened - we are ghosting along in about 5 knots of breeze at about 3 knots. No obvious sign of the change in the clouds - it may have dissipated before getting to us but so far the grib has been very good at predictions. Here's hoping. Soon we will pass Sydney - at 33.51S on almost exactly the same latitude as Cape Town but on the east coast of the continent so subject to very different weather conditions.

Then there's Wollongong, 50 miles further south. I hope we don't need to go that far but if we do there's an ancient Berri tradition dating all the way back to 1994. The journey back from Hobart after a Sydney-Hobart race is often really tedious - not much wind and up to 3 knots of adverse current all the way up the NSW coast. That first time for me in Berri, Floris and I were bringing her home (actually from the Sydney-Eden race that year) and we decided to open a beer once we got to Wollongong which we duly did. Wollongong has moved a few miles further south every year since - a virtual concept! From here, we could perhaps start to move it north again.

Hi Norm!

Link to recent post

Alex asked me to post this link - to the right place in the right blog
- from 2008.
http://awberrimilla.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html

The link should take you more or less there, but you will have to
scroll to the correct date.
The unwary, who choose to stray to other pages, may be assailed with
invitations to sample a cocktail of invigorating medication in several
jolly colours.
The management team apologises. This is the unreachable and hacked
site. Some kind Canadians seem to think Alex and Pete need pepping up.

Isabella in the UK

Nostalgia, part 4?

Another blog from the desktop on the old laptop. I must have saved it to send later. I remember writing this one, (and Tony's brisket!)less than 18 months ago, huge sense of achievement but tempered with the knowledge of what was to come and the uncertainty of setting out to do something that really put us out there on our own in the most hostile of environments. As it turned out, Nome and Pat Hahn and his family became the basis for the success of our transit of the NW Passage - and are now lifelong friends - I have an invitation to follow the Iditarod next year on a snow machine with Pat and the team supporting one of the Mushers. Who'd a thought that before Baton Rouge and Pascal's little chart?

Early am 5th July Nome with what passes in America for coffee:
Strange - eerie? - feeling. I remember vividly looking at Nome on google earth in Sydney what seems now only yesterday yet so far in the past it has no time frame. I remember my feelings at the time - this tiny spot so far away - a harbour - Berri still on her mooring at RANSA - so far to go, so much preparation, perseverance, patience and persistence to get there - such a thoroughly uncompromising task to get Berri here and this is only the beginning. And here we most definitely - yet somehow unbelievably - are. On Independence Day - seems fitting.

I sat in Breakers Bar on Front Street as the festivities went on outside - long, narrow dark bar receding into the murky cigarette smoky distance, Mr Zappa and the Grateful Dead on NPR loud in the background, a bunch of goldpanners, construction workers and locals spread along the bar drinking the most amazing concoctions. Ice, cranberry and Vodka with a side shot of Crown whisky is one I remember. I felt as if I belonged - yet the signpost outside the Nugget a few doors away said Sydney 7181 miles (easily the furthest away of all the names). Tony, the barman, had a cookpot behind the bar and he opened it up and put a big black lump about a foot long onto a huge cutting board and started to carve it. My July 4th brisket, said he - would you like a plate? Would I??! How much is it? Against the law to sell it in here - I'm giving it away…so I got a paper plate with slices of marinated sugar glazed brisket, cooked overnight, with crisp bread and a mix of beans and onion. One of the best meals I have ever experienced - washed down with Alaskan Amber. A feeling of something achieved yet the usual apprehension that the Examiner still lurks and we're really only at the start line. Can't ever escape that except by getting on with the job. Just needed Marvin along to park the amazing collection of hard country vehicles outside and tell me that his b.t.s.o.a.p. was wasted in Nome and did I have a real job for him?

On which: today is back on the gearbox problem. It's a linkage problem, I think - doesn't always seem to engage properly so I will try to dismantle it all again and adjust it - almost impossible to get to the business end of the Morse cable that moves the gear lever but I gotta do it somehow. McQ and K having their usual morning sleep in and will probably appear around lunchtime and start on the other jobs.

Still too much ice up north and we have been strongly advised by the locals who know that we should not leave until it is open at Point Barrow so we will stay here until that happens. So - out of this expensive hotel and into a B & B if it looks like more than a few days.....

And I won't bore you with the rest. To savour the moment, I have just made coffee using the little blue plastic funnel and one of the last of a pack of 250 filter papers that I bought in the store in Nome - last used, I think, during our rather nasty Atlantic crossing last September.

For the oceangraphically minded

Position 1215/01 3259 00850, 472 to go.

The current has vanished, at least for the time being. Hooooley dooooley! How can this be in a world where the laws of physics rule?

Some observations: We felt what seemed to be the strongest current as we passed the big seamount at 31.40S 008.24W. It sits on a ridge extending from the continental shelf and presumably has a significant effect on the huge volume of water flowing NW past it. We passed over the ridge about 35 miles S of the seamount.

The current ceased abruptly as we crossed the south eastern edge of the ridge and the water temperature rose about 2 degrees. This seems to be a very similar phenomenon to the East Australian Current which also runs along the continental shelf, except that there, the current is warm water flowing south whereas here it seems to be cold water flowing north. I have tweaked our heading to try to stay in the warmer water here and we have every appendage in the boat crossed.

If everything holds, Dec 5th will be tantalisingly close but I think just out of reach given the grib predictions for the next 4 days. Kite at the ready for a tiny snatch of northerly wind if it lasts long enough to reach us.

Quickie

0700/01 position 3248 00822, trip 106, CT 496 so real trip = 66. GPS trip from Falmouth reads 7144 sailing miles.

Astonishingle, amazingly, astoundingly - the current just disappeared! We are running along the edge of the shelf heading more or less towards CT. Lincoln's wise men may have known a thing or two. Perhaps. Now we need wind. I think Dec 5th is definitely a bridge too far but you never know out here.

Pink predictor, tks for stormsurf. We'll take what comes. El P in the pink.