Day 62 - Arrival at Cape Town

Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Tue 25 Aug 2015 09:09
We eventually arrived at our waypoint, 100 miles east of Durban. This was the point of no return!! If the weather looked bad, we would have carried straight to Durban for shelter. If the weather looked favourable, we would head south down the coast towards Cape Town. The first available stopping off places are East London or Port Elizabeth which are 250 miles and 375 mailers from our waypoint so we really needed a weather window of at least 2 days to find a port of refuge.

The weather forecast looked remarkably favourable so, taking a deep breath, we swung left towards what is reputably one of the most dangerous passages in the world. We also were trying to sail as much as possible as the wind was behind us so we could manage without the damaged mainsail and just fly the genoa. We were debating when to drop the mainsail to try to repair it as once we got to Port Elizabeth, we would need to beat to windward, which we can't do without the main. We were also trying to conserve diesel and, the further south we could sail, the further we would be able to motor if the winds died, or when they start to come on the nose.

We had our first site of South Africa the next morning. If you haven's done a long haul offshore passage, it will be difficult to understand just what a welcome sight that is! The weather held up over the next few days and we managed to get a good number of miles covered.

The next question was, 'at what point do we have enough fuel to continue without repairing the mainsail?' This was starting to look like a possibility, and by the time we were off Port Elizabeth, we had reached that point, so decided to carry on while the weather was holding up.

On Friday, we came across a huge pod of whales and must have seen over 100 breaches. It is pretty impressive to see these massive beasts leap,out of the water, seemingly just for fun. At one point, I was on deck and on the phone to Frankie, when a huge whale surfaced 20 metres behind the boat. I think that Frankie was amused by my language particularly as, 20 seconds later and 50 metres behind the boat, it decided to show off and breeched. What an amazing experience, but a little too close for comfort!!

The following day, we made the decision to carry on towards Cape Town. We were expecting the wind to come round on the nose and also some heavy weather about the most southerly point of South Africa which is Cape Agulhas. This is where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet and is renowned for being a bit tricky. However, the most wind we had was 32 knots, although the waves were causing us to slam, so we reduced the engine speed and pottered along at 3 to 5 knots which wasn't too unpleasant.

Finally, about midnight on Monday, we rounded The Cape of Good Hope, (originally called The Cape of Storms for a very good reason), and by 09.00 on Tuesday, we we moored up in the V&A marina in Cape Town. With 8300 miles done and 'only' 6,700 to go, we are now more than half way home.