Quiet Day, More People

Yesterday (Thursday) I had a quiet day around the marina but nevertheless I was so tired after dinner that I postponed my blogging until this morning.

The internet service has been good  in every way except one.  I have strong 5-bar connection from the boat to the club router and can do my web work very well from the boat.  However, the Skype service has proved so bad that I have given up trying to use it.  Everything is wrong with it: voice fadeouts, long voice delays, echos, frequent disconnections, etc.  I do not blame either the club router or Skype, but rather the internet service provider for the club.  To get onto the internet I must go through their portal and am therefore at the mercy of their capacity and policies.  I am also getting annoying and impossible to eliminate adverts from the service.  I plan to purchase a phone card and make my calls from a pay phone at the club.  Fortunately they have good telephones and a nice antique desk to work on.  It will mean fewer calls from me, but at least they will be of good technical quality.

Yesterday began badly for me.  In Bracui I had put all of my passwords into an encryped thumb drive so that I could have them on hand whenever I was off the boat doing my internet work.  Before leaving Brazil I changed my banking password as a precaution and updated the thumb drive but not the good old reliable paper record that I keep in a notebook.  The flaw in this is that I must have the thumb drive in order to see my passwords, and I spent about 2 hours looking for it all over the boat with no success.  In the end I was forced to telephone my bank in Australia and obtain a new password. 

While visiting the club house to make that call to Australia I met Marcus Reuter, the general manager of the RCYC ( http://rcyc.co.za/).  He walked over to me and asked me if I was from Fremantle because he had overheard me talking with Diane.  He had spent three great months in the SW of WA when he has younger and we had a good chat about the area. 

He spoke about the great organizational confusion over the recent changes (not changes so much as new enforcements) of the government's POE rules which were promulgated with very little preparation and consultation with the yacht clubs, key players in the system.  The club plans to allocate three slips for new arrivals with big yellow signs above them.  I strongly endorsed that, telling him how I had come in not seeing a clear indication of where I should go.  I said that they needed a great big sign with big arrows pointing very clearly to the arrival/immigration slips. 

I told Marcus how I had tried contacting the club on VHF 16 and VHF 77 during my approach, with no success.  Marcus told me that the club has not monitored VHF 16 regularly for years because they are a yacht club and cannot spare the resources.  That was understandable and fine but I told him that the Noonsite web page had informed me to not call the port captain on VHF 16 but rather the RCYC, who monitored VHF 16.  Marcus will have the Noonsite instructions amended, and I could tell that he would do that fast.  The only question I have is why it has taken so long for this to come out.  Anyway, I like to think that in my own small way I have helped future visitors,

Toward noon I began work on cleaning out the boat.  It seemed like such a daunting task that I worked mechanically with no goals, overview, or schedule.  By the end of the day I had cleaned the storage areas on the upper starboard side of the cabin and transferred the wine bottles from the V berth space to the cabin, which enabled me to get rid of several soggy cardboard cartons.  I had also cleared out the entire V berth area, wiped everything with a bleach solution, and opened the sail locker covers to dry and air out the sails. 

The material on all of Pachuca's cushions is outstanding.  It is tough and has shown little wear, hasn't faded noticeably, and has not been affected by dampness.  The problem is that the cushion material underneath the covers is not waterproof and acts like a gigantic sponge, and this does not make sense to me in a small and wet boat like Pachuca.  I will address the problem (at great cost no doubt) when I refit the boat in Fremantle.  In the meantime the two mattresses in the V berth were damp and the one on the port quarter berth area is downright soggy.

So I took the mattresses of the V berth section up to the jetty and washed them all in good soapy water using a soft brush.  Afterwards I rinsed them very well, trying to get the fresh water to work its way through the cushion material and flush out the soap.  I then managed to fling the heavy soggy mattresses onto the deck and leaned them on edge against the rails where they dried amazingly well - but not completely - in the last hours of sun.  For the night I lay them flat on the deck with their vinyl backs up to protect them from dew and any rain shower that came by.

That left the starboard settee and the space under the table crammed with material, leaving me with the port settee and a bit of table space for myself.  That worked out OK and if we get good sunshine on this day (10% chance of rain predicted) I may be able to begin sleeping in the V berth area for the first time since leaving Argentina.

While I was at the bow of the boat doing some work I said hello to a man passing by and he asked if I was Robert.  It turned out to be Tom, an old hand in the ham radio scene and other aspects of boating who had heard my communications with SAMMNet (South African Maritime Mobile Net).  He knew the founder of SAMMNet as well as Sam and Graham and no doubt everyone else who supports the network.  I asked if the network was supported in any way by the SA government and he told me that it is 100% resourced by that remarkable group of volunteers.  They purchase all of the equipment themselves and of course put in the many hours of work every day.  I asked Tom if there was any avenue by which I could make a donation to the network for equipment.  He seemed surprised and pleased at the thought and before we departed he suggested that he would arrange a visit to meet Sam.

Tom and his son are experienced sailors, and I know that his son is a boat builder.  He spoke of the biannual Cape Town to St Helena yacht race, and how the race boats are transported back by the cargo/passenger ship that services the island in order to avoid the headwinds of  the South Atlantic high, not to mention the current.

I asked him about Tristan da Cunha.  He had passed it three times.  On one passage they were heading directly for it with a plan to visit but a gale prevented it.  He spoke of the Cape Town to Rio race and how one time it was just him and his son hand steering the boat (which his son had built in only 4 months) all of the way back to Cape Town.

I told him about the savage gales that I had encountered on my way to TdC.  He told me that on one passage from Cape Town they got hit by a gale on this side of TdC with 50 and 55 kt winds that stayed with them for 5 days because they were sailing before it with two storm jibs.  Again it was he and his son steering by hand.  I told him that 55 kts is more like a storm and they must have been exhausted after 5 days.  I also said that I assumed that they were trailing warp for steering stability but no, they had nothing overboard.  (They were obviously in the "dangerous semicircle" where they were moving in the direction of the gale and therefore prolonging their ordeal.  I would have hove to and let it pass over me, but they had their own agenda.)