On May 5 we sent a note to our
son. The key message was as follows:
“We are sending you this note
before we send out the general note to the gang. You should be the first to
know.
We are not continuing on the
circumnavigation. It is all explained in the next note we send.
We are safe, we are happy, but we
have had some experiences that are telling us ‘head back’, and so we are.”
IT ALL STARTED OUT SO WELL:
On May 1, we headed back to Pototogat after our productive
nine days in Teluk Bayur. It was a good trip - a slow but steady 20 hours. We
had a couple of squalls (I had 33 knots of wind with rain & lightning on my
night watch) but we were prepared ... only a bit of headsail flying, which we
then wrapped up tight. We had the motor running while we were making water
(which we couldn't do in the not-so-clean harbor of Teluk Bayur), which made
things a bit easier.
We then got busy getting the boat
and ourselves ready for offshore: taking the dinghy motor off, tightly securing
the dinghy to the davits, putting away breakables, running jack lines (to hook
ourselves to when we leave the cockpit), putting out our MOB sling and
horseshoe, checking the contents of our ditch kit (what we'll take with us if
we have to leave the boat in a hurry), digging out our foul weather gear,
and so on.
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| The dinghy motor off the dinghy, securely mounted to Cankata. |
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| Darrel waterproofing the canvas. |
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| Airing out our seldom-used foul-weather gear. |
We had a wonderful two months in
Indonesia, slowly working our way south and enjoying fine weather, but now we were
at the starting line of our crossing of the Indian Ocean.
Our May 3 email:
Darrel is in the water, scrubbing
a bit of scum off the hulls of CanKata so we'll glide through the water better.
We decided to head off from here,
Pototogat, since it is lovely and calm and good for doing our preparations.
We have set up the starboard
berth (no more sleeping together until Rodrigues, sigh) so that whoever is
off-watch and napping is easily accessible by the helmsman. The laundry is done, all the safety equipment
is at our finger tips, our EPIRB has been tested, our strobe lights are
attached to our life jackets, the sea-sick meds are on the kitchen counter, and
our flag has been tucked away. A basket of raisins, crackers, ginger cookies,
chocolates and peanuts is sitting on the table, in case the helmsman gets
peckish.
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| A good drying day. |
Not ticked off: Secure all books.
Ha! We have Kindles now. No more books to go flying across the boat (which they
seldom do in a cat anyway).
As soon as Darrel dries off,
we'll be underway.
Another email later that day:
LATITUDE: 02-13.37S
LONGITUDE: 099-10.76E
Above is our position at 1000
UTC. We are moving slowly at 3.8 to 4.0 knots.
The winds are calm, the swell is
gentle, the sky is clear, and we were thrown a good-bye bash by about 100
dolphins, just as we were leaving. They didn't come very close ... seemed more
interested in a school of tuna.
We have taken off our exterior
sun shields (to protect them from severe wave and salt exposure) and now the
boat is good and hot ... 40 degrees most of the day. Good thing we're not
trying to keep meat frozen.
When we left, I asked the captain
if we needed to maintain an average speed. "No", he replied,
"time is on our side", which got me singing that fab Rolling Stone
song, which prompted me to put on some music. I put "TIME" into the
media player search engine and got 214 items with "time" in the
title, album or artist. We got a great selection, including "Best Singles
of All Time" (was Agadoo really a best single?), "Timeless - Hank
Williams", "It's Time" by Michael Bublé or Mick Bubbles as an
Aussie friend calls him, and "Now is the Time" by Alanis. We heard
songs ranging from a track off JC Superstar to "As Time Goes By" to
(unfortunately) "Christmas Time". It was a good way to start our
journey, with time on our side.
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| Leaving Indonesia in our wake. |
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| Out our port: nothing to see but sea. |
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| Our navigation system showing 2366 Nm to go! |
Our May 4 email:
LATITUDE: 02-17.32S
LONGITUDE: 099-13.40E
Well that was a false start.
On our 6:00 p.m. radio chat, yacht
Green Ghost said they were very worried about the bad weather coming. After
sign-off, Darrel immediately tried to get another, more recent "GRIB"
(the weather information we get via our HF radio) since the GRIB we had received
earlier that morning did not show any bad weather. It took a very long time to
get connected (one of the main Ham stations for this area is currently non-operational), but Darrel
eventually got the GRIB and he saw what they were worried about. Yikes. A big
system was showing up on May 11 and we would be in its path if we continued. So
we stopped the boat and hovered in the same area so we could get another
weather report the next morning to get a better idea of how strong the system
was and in what direction it was heading.
At 600 a.m. Darrel got another
report after numerous tries and saw that in the area of 85E - 90E and 05S - 12S
there were winds up to 80 knots and waves up to 9 metres directly in our path. So we will not continue, but rather head back
to a safe anchorage to get more detailed information via internet, and to wait
until there is a better weather window to go.
We are sailing as much as we can (we
averaged less than 1 knot/hour overnight) to conserve precious fuel, so will be
crawling around in these light winds. I am NOT complaining about these light
winds.
We are having a heck of a time
with our radio stations, finding it very tough to get a connection to get
weather information.
(P.S. It is said to be bad luck
to start a passage on a Friday. Hmmmmm.)
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| The GRIB showing the weather system |
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| Following our track back as best we can in light winds. |
LATITUDE: 02-01.04S
LONGITUDE: 099-34.50ECOMMENT: Once again at Pototogat
We had a very slow sail back to
our protected anchorage. And now we have internet access, so we can get LOTS of
weather information.
The forecast for the bad weather
system seems to have calmed down considerably, which is very good news.
HOWEVER ...
Before we even got the updated
weather information, Darrel and I had a discussion about what had happened out
there. (Captain Ron: "If it's going to happen, it's going to happen out
there.") It was frightening for both of us, especially when we couldn't
get HF radio reception to receive our much-needed weather information.
Now, before I go on, I'll tell
you about my level of fear. I have often been asked, "Aren't you afraid?"
(Usually a woman asks me. Darrel never gets asked). My truthful answer has
always been "No", and I go on to add that driving a car on the
highway or going on a chair-lift in the mountains is much more frightening for
me than sailing the big seas. But I knew
that could change. At one time in my life, I used to love riding behind Darrel
on his motorbike, and even sometimes (but seldom) went with skimpy summer
clothes and no helmet. One day, a vision of me falling off the bike and sliding
face first across the highway popped into my head, and I was forevermore afraid
to ride on the motorbike.
Something similar has happened to
my view of sailing the high seas. When it occurred to me that we would eventually get a
good weather report and then head out again, I got a very sick feeling and
every single cell in my body wanted to cry out "NO". When I confessed
this to Darrel, he responded very honestly that he wasn't keen on heading out
again either. There seem to be a number of forces indicating that it is not the
thing for us to do.
So we are heading back to
Thailand. It will be a while before we get there - September or later - because we will probably leave
CanKata in Langkawi, Malaysia when we go to Canada this summer.
We are both happy with the
decision. We would have loved to continue, but we are both getting warning
signals that are telling us to turn around.
Just after we made our decision,
we received news that an important information weather/radio net that we would
have used closer to South Africa has been shut down! I believe we really
weren't meant to do this crossing.
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| Relieved to be far from that nasty weather system. |
At this time, Darrel and I would like to thank all the
wonderful Indonesians we met for their warmth, friendliness, hospitality, and
helpfulness. It is a beautiful country – especially Sumatra and its many islands.
We’d also like to thank yacht Erica, Kevin of yacht
Helena, Daryl of yacht Bintang, and the 101 Anchorages within the Indonesian
Archipelago guide for extremely helpful information on cruising along the
west coast of Sumatra.
