Before this trip I had never heard of Mayotte and until Covid few others in the yachting community had either. Madagascar has been the go to place, perhaps for obvious reasons, but Covid (along with bubonic plague, drought, increasingly intense tropical storms, starvation and poverty) has ruled out the country as a sailing option. Nobody is clear whether or not it has reopened to yachties and false rumours abound. Recently an American yacht attempted entry but was escorted out of the territorial waters. And yet in the Seychelles we were told it had reopened. With ISIS taking over northern Mozambique on one side and Madagascar closed on the other, Mayotte has become the stopover of necessity for yachties travelling down to South Africa. Mayotte is French and therefore will have good infrastructure and plentiful supplies of camembert, saucisson, croissants and wine. And it has lemurs. Why go to Madagascar?!

We use PredictWind for weather forecasting and passage planning. It is simple to use and does all the planning for you. The problem with this is that you come to rely on the routes given and when things do not work out as shown, which given the vagaries of weather forecasting is often, you still need an understanding of the wind, currents and so forth to work things out for yourself. PredictWind is, like many apps, monetised as a subscription service and for which we pay around £200 per annum for the basic version. If you want detailed information on, for example, currents you need to upgrade to the “professional” service at even greater cost. We were reminded of this yesterday when working out why we were unable to sail a suitable angle to get to the pass through the reef into the lagoon. We were following the PredictWind route and knew this included motoring for the final approach. However the weather for sailing was perfect - 10+kts wind from the south, smooth sea and Vega sailing beautifully to windward. The problem was, as we were able to work out, a very strong NW current (current direction is the direction in which it is flowing, wind direction is the direction it is blowing from). If we sailed directly into the current our speed through the water was clearly greater than our speed over the ground. Furthermore any deviation from facing directly into the current resulted in a big change of course direction as we were pushed sideways. Given the angle of the wind (in line with the current) we were only able to sail angles that meant we were pushed sideways away from our desired track (known as leeway). Had the wind and current direction been a few degrees different we might have been able to sail a course with the current pushing us onto a more favourable angle for our destination (known as lift). Sailors may understand what I am describing. Anyway, the issue was that we had to motor into the current to reach the pass. I think PredictWind may have allowed for the current when proposing the route on the assumption that there would be no wind. However, in the wind conditions actually prevailing and without any current information to have been able to anticipate the issue, we could only sit back and watch as Endorphin overtook us and sailed to the reef, having a different angle of approach. We effectively had 12 hours added to our passage time battling the current.

There are cheaper alternatives to PredictWind . For example, for less than the cost of the PredictWind annual subscription you can buy the LuckGrib app that allows you to passage plan in even more detail but with much more user input and understanding. We will be using LuckGrib from South Africa.

As we approached the entry through the reef at 0600 local time. My first surprise in the early morning light was that, unlike the impression given by the charts, Mayotte and it’s neighbouring islands are not coral atolls but proper hilly islands like the Seychelles! My second surprise was to receive a text from Vodafone welcoming me to Europe! We can use our UK phone plans at no extra cost. After two hours of motoring through the lagoon to our anchorage we caught up with Endorphin, Hecla arrived an hour later and then we and Jon went ashore to sort out our formalities at the yacht club and the airport. There is a French ex pat sailing community here based around the yacht club and so we stopped for a celebratory beer before heading over to the airport. The roads are immaculate, the airport terminal new, the formalities quick and easy. Vive La France!