“I (*insert another phrase not fit to print here*) hate this! I hate this!" I ball my fists and tuck myself into a corner beneath the dodger, just like Katherine Hepburn tucks herself beneath the coffee table. Andrew says nothing. He blinks at me. “God damn it! I hate this." I growl, I kvetch. It’s unbecoming of a first mate. And, I immediately feel guilty for bringing this sort of pisspoor attitude into our midst. I push my bad attitude aside, send Andrew to bed, and install myself into foul weather gear. Then, I wait.
For the darkness to come, it’s narrowing in on me.
For the rain. I know it’s coming.
I am sullen, and resigned, but I climb down the companion way stairs and turn on the radar to see exactly what I’m heading into. Neon green pixels dot the heavy screen of our 1990’s vintage radar, stretching and pulsing with each swing of the radar circle, a five mile radius of rain headed my way.
I knew it.
I turn the radar off and trudge back up to the cockpit and wait.
Now, the darkness is thick and all around me. Claustrophobia widens my eyes, like an owl, pupils dilated to try to see something, absorb something, but I cannot. The GPS screen lights a semi-circle of Sonrisa’s cockpit, but forward of the helm, everything is swallowed by night. The rain starts. At first it’s gentle, pattering on the top of Sonrisa’s bimini, plops and splatters, raindrops each that could fill a bucket on their own accord. There is no wind, only the dips and bobs of waves and the sound of Sonrisa’s engines. I sit behind the helm, thinking “this is fine, it’s just a gentle rain storm.”
But it’s with this thought that I can suddenly hear a roaring over the drone of the egnine. It’s not the whoooshing of big wind, but the sound a stadium makes at full capacity in the thores of some competition that means everything to everyone in attendance. And, the stadium is getting closer to me until suddenly it hits. Rain is everywhere. It’s so thick, I think I may drown. I attempt to look up to the top of the mast to see if the wind direction has changed, but I can’t turn my eyes skyward. There’s no space between raindrops to see between.
The claustrophobia closes in further. I try to fiddle with my headlamp which is now refusing to light. On the other side of Sonrisa’s splash screens and life lines, an erie green cloud circles her hull. It lights and fades.
An artistic rendition kind of what it looked like.
The Phosphoresence. Those little buggy algeas that are so friendly when rolling on the crests of Sonrisa’s bow wake or playing with me as I float off the beach of Innofinholu, they seem more sinister tonight. They seem to highlight the vastness of the ocean I cannot see in all directions, hundreds of miles in front of me, hundreds of miles behind me, and thousands of miles ot the east and west before there is anything approximating land. Their light sinks in a three dimensional realm, to let me know just below their soft green glow extends over 6,000 feet of water between me and the bottom of the sea. I push an image out of my mind - my body glowing green as I fall through the depths.
I shudder and tuck myself into Sonrisa’s footwell, watching the GPS screen, senses piqued for any changes in Sonrisa’s engine rumble, rain pummeling me.
“Thank goodness for this foul weather gear keeping me dry.” I think, but only as I start to notice my foul weather gear is not keeping me dry at all. Indeed the rain has soaked through completely, and only the fact of it’s tropical temperature has kept me from becoming completely irate with discomfort.
Katherine Hepburn keeps dry while using Andrew’s foul weather gear as her nest.
Andrew hears the torrents of rain hitting Sonrisa like whole waves crashing on her bow and he joins me in the cockpit because misery loves company. He brings with him the scuba diving flashlight, shining it forward and illuminating Sonrisa’s deck through streaking, falling rain.
A scuba flashlight. That guy is always thinking.
This turned out to be the worst of it. By the time Andrew’s watch came, he enjoyed some reasonably nice sailing wind and a drier dark night. I slept some. Then took over early again when Katherine Hepburn came out of hiding and demanded treats to make up for the absolute shit show this passage is turning out to be.
The third day of passage was grey, drab, and continuing with that strange, light Northwest wind.
“Why in the hell is there a Northwest wind? These are the Southeast Trades!” Andrew says as we look up at our large head sail set on its downwind sailing pole, flogging and flapping, risking a tear in the waves still tossing us about.
“Mmmm...we obviously are not in the trades. I think this is the doldrums. It must be. Remember what it was like getting through the doldrums between the North and the South Pacific?”
It was just like this.
And we were as grumpy as this.
Only, then we had a 21 day passage, and this is only three. And we didn’t have Katherine Hepburn to keep us company.
As the day progressed, we receive word that Erie Spirit ahead of us pushed their engine much harder and arrived at our destination around 3 p.m. in the afternoon. “The pass into the atoll is wide and if you follow the route track we have on the charts, it’s clear of any baumies. I see no reason not to come in the dark.”
Enter at dark?
The crew of Sonrisa tries to play it cool as we creep up on the Chagosian Atolls in the dark of night. “Sure, we’ll give it a try. Wide entry, clear path, a scout ahead. Sure! Maybe we can break the rule not to enter an unknown port at night, just this once. It’s been a miserable passage. I’d be so nice to have a nice night sleep.” My longing to be asleep in a protected anchorage is deep and intense.
“This seems like the craziest place to break this rule,” I say. Andrew chews his lip. Chagos is completely uninhabited, except for a military base around one hundred miles away called Diego Garcia. In order to get a permit to come here at all, we needed significant insurances for both human and boat - $250,000 US each person for emergency medical evacuation and over a million dollars in wreck removal insurances for Sonrisa. This is because there is no one here to help you, no parts shops, no way to ship anything in, no way to fix your boat out of the water, it is truly one of the most remote locations in the entire world.
“We’ll just go in slow enough that if we hit anything it will just be a little bump.” Andrew says, but I can see doubt in his eyes mirroring my own.
We reach the mouth of the entrance, and that ebony darkness is still shrouding everything beyond Sonrisa’s cockpit. Andrew turns on the decklight and takes his position at the point of Sonrisa’s bow to guide me around anything he might “see,” but I can see from my position behind the helm that we are captured inside a globe of night. We may as well be trying to do this blindfolded.
Go on, steer yourself right on through!
Sonrisa’s helm feels uncertain under my palms. I’m squinting to see the Google Earth on the navigation station down below, comparing those to my location on the Navionics GPS Charts in Sonrisa’s cockpit.
“You’re going to slow down as we get closer, right?” Andrew shouts back at me. I’m approaching at 4.0 knots, which is not exactly fast (you can probably walk that fast), but I throttle down to 3.0 knots. My palms sweat and my knuckles tighten to white as I try to keep Sonrisa centered on the track we’ve been instructed to follow. Her bow falls back and I’m scuttling sideways in a direction not aligining with my intended steerage. I correct, turning the wheel the opposite direction. Slowly her bow comes up, then falls off again the other way.
“I can’t hold a straight line!”
“What?” Andrew yells back.
“I can’t hold the line, there’s a current coming out of the atoll!”
“What? Steer to the track!”
I pinch my right eye at him and my cheek twitches with a seed of irritation. “I am steering to the track, but I can’t hold it!” We are still far enough out of the mouth of the atoll that I have sideways leeway, but we will soon be inside the entrance.
Chatter from our friends on the VHF is ongoing, but I can’t hear it well enough to understand. So now, I’m clutching the speaker to my ear while also trying to manage the direction of Sonrisa’s bow...”as you get closer you will hear crashing waves to your left, that’s okay.” Mark on Erie Spirit says over the radio.
“Oh hell no. You people are crazy.” I think. The night is so dark we cannot see anything at all around Sonrisa, we are going in blind, current is pushing me all around course, and now you are talking about crashing waves? “I can't hold our line! I’m abandoning this attempt!” I yell out to Andrew so he can hear me on the bow.
“Just steer straight! You are over steering!”
“GRWWOOWOOOOLLLL!” was my response. Not sure what I actually said, but it probably was laden with more explicatives. I swing Sonrisa’s bow back out into the deep. Andrew returns to the cockpit.
“Listen, fella. I’m very experienced driving Sonrisa. I’m not oversteering, there is a current pushing her bow away. So. We either increase our speed to counteract the current, or we abandon this attempt and go in tomorrow morning. I, personally, think we should hove-to and wait.”
“Yeah,” Andrew says. He grabs the radio mike and fills in Steel Sapphire so they know we are abandoning this attempt and they are clear to head in if that is what they want to do.
“Don't you want to wait and watch Steely to see if you can follow us in?” Pete asks over the radio.
“Mmmnnnnoooooo.....we’ll just hove-to.” Andrew says.
With their trademark VHF Bow and Cockpit Radios, Steel Sapphire’s crew guides her straight and true through the pass speeding along at 5 knots, giving updates to each other (and anyone else who cares to listen within VHF range) on their progress in soothing, midnight easy listening radio DJ voices. We all hold our breath waiting for them to safely reach anchor. When they do, Pete radios out. “Yeah, there is a side setting current as you approach the pass, which then turns bow on through the pass. If you just go fast enough, you pop out nice and clear on the other side with no problems. But yeah, you’ll have to carry about five knots of boat speed. You going to try it?”
“No, I think we’ll wait until tomorrow morning,” Andrew says.
“You’re word.” Pete says in response.
I nestle back into my bean bag to finish my watch while Andrew goes to sleep.
Perfecting my hoving-to tactics is one of my favorite things to niggle with. Tonight, I’m trying my hand at hoving-to under jib sail alone (without the main to help). It’s not quite as effective, but we’re too lazy to hoist the main at midnight. I finesse the helm to balance against the small head sail - filled backward with wind. And, we settle in to scooting sideways anywhere from .2-.4 knots of speed. We are blocked from big ocean waves by the atoll, and there is no rain. I even see a few stars peeking through the mist.
Sonrisa’s tangled yarn-ball track wandering back and forth outside the mouth of the atoll while waiting for sunrise to come.
We needed this passage, I think. It has been years probably since we’ve had a truly uncomfortable passage. We had great weather for our last two long passages out of the South Pacific, and once we reached Indonesia, we were sailing in protected seas with very short distances between stops. Then, we spent all last year fixing Sonrisa’s keel bolts and bobbing around the close quarters of Malaysia and Thailand, and this year’s passages to date started out quite nice. We need to be reminded of what it is like to sail long distance with a tossed watch schedule, sea sickness, challenging cooking conditions, unpredictable weather and a cantankerous first mate. Because the bottom line is: if we are able to continue South around South Africa this year, this uncomfortable passage is the least of our challenges. The Alhugas current and the lower latitude storm fronts await us. Are we ready?
I’m feeling rather awake after napping all day, so I stretch my watch to 3:00 a.m. Andrew takes over until first light when we motor without incident through the pass. Bobby the resident Sea Booby swoops and circles us to say “hello,” almost taking Andrew up on the offer of his right arm as a perch.
“Good morning, Chagos. Nice to be here.”
