Tuesday 9th June 2014
Well hello Simons Town, yeap we made it just, after the night we had out there I had my doubts.
I so should not write about how great it is out there, serious, it always shocks me how quick, something so nice can turn so ugly, there just never seems to be any in between, maybe we are doing something wrong, I don't know, or maybe we have done too many wrong things in our life and this is our punishment...haha Serious come on enough already we have paid back all our mistakes ten fold.
As you can probably tell we had a bad night out there, the day started beautiful, even the mental amount of ships coming and going, some way too close did not phase us.
We made it around the southern most tip of South Africa with no problems at all and crossed back into the Atlantic Ocean, we were so happy to be finally out of the Indian Ocean, man that ocean sucks.
Then the wind started to pick up, we managed to get all the sails up and turn the never ending groan of the engine off.
There is something so magical when you turn off the engine and the wind fills the sails and off you go.
It's hard to explain, I guess you need to be a sailor to understand or into nature, when your just relying on Mother Nature to take care of you.
But she can turn nasty on you big time, we really did have another lovely day out here I even cooked a roast lamb dinner for tea, it had to be calm for me to do that I tell you...haha
I was on watch and about 11pm the wind started to pick up big time, I hate waking up The Captain, but we really needed to get the main sail in, we were actually flying through the water, which is great but, all the sails out in big winds is not so great, we actually took in most of the sails and just left the Yankee out.
Things settled done some after that and The Captain went back to sleep, until I looked up and could see mountains in front of us, we were hugging the coast a fair bit, but this was just a bit too close, I changed our coarse a bit and headed back out to sea, The Captain woke up not long after this and I told him, I'm a bit uncomfortable about being so close he takes one look and turned us out even more.
So I go and lay down and bam it hits, the winds picks up like you would not believe, it was way over Gale force the waves man they were big and crashing over the top of us over and over we were pushed so far onto our side time and again I swear we would just tip over, I had myself wedged into a corner with my feet on the wheel to stop myself from landing on The Captains lap, he had himself wedged in on his side.
The worst part of it was we had given ourselves a dog leg and had gone out to sea a bit more as we wanted to come into the bay here on daylight, so we had to fight our way back, we knew we would be ok sort of, once we got into the bay, but it took hours and hours like about six or so, and trust me that many hours out in a storm like that really takes it out of you.
It's quite funny when your out there in one of these huge storms, I have to say I'm not really a religious person, even though I was brought up in a very Christian environment, ( but that's another story) I very much sit on the fence.
But when your out there in one of those storms, I turn into the biggest bible bashing lunatic of mankind, I pray to every god I can think of.....haha who knows there may just be something in this religious clap trap.
But eventually we made it into the bay, it still was wild as it's a huge bay, but at least it settled down a lot, it actually took us around five hours to get to the mooring we radioed the guy at the marina that we were coming in and he said he would meet us at the mooring in his boat.
We come around the corner and I can see him he points to where we need to go, but we can see no mooring only a beacon light.
He comes up next to the boat and asked me to jump in his with the boat hook and see if I can get the rope, so down I go, we motor over to the mooring which is a drum underwater, ( no wonder we could not see it) we tried and tried to grab a rope but there seemed to be none attached, he takes me back to our boat and says to come into the marina and tie up till they can get a diver to come out and see what's going on.
All the time The Captain is at the wheel he notices that the gears are not working properly.
As per usual we had many things go wrong on this little trip, the main engine started to make a funny noise, the generator started to overheat and the water maker sprung a leak.
Yeap we know, how the hell does this happen we always set off with everything working fine.
So while I'm out getting the fenders down and ropes in place The Captain checks the transmission fluid level, yeap that's the problem we have no fluid left in it, another repair to be added to the list, he fills it up and off we go towards the marina, only to get a call that they have a diver at the mooring now and to head back to it.
After a bit of a struggle trying to get the rope up with The Captain and three guys working on it and me at the wheel trying to keep us from floating away from it, they finally get it hooked up.
We both look at each other still feeling a bit shell shocked, but glad we made it, and both go and catch up on our lost sleep, man we sure needed it.
Today we clean up, mop up all the salt water, try and get this boat back into some kind of living environment and get ready to do it all over again in a weeks time or so.
Well tomorrow is another day.