Day 3 - Rough Night and Progress with Sailmail Problem

I thought that the passage of the cold front the previous night was the end of the matter but in late afternoon the boat started to get battered by huge breaking waves and the wind picked up to 25-30 kts. I rolled in the little headsail there was and ran all night with the staysail. With the waves crashing over the deck it was the same old problem of drippy vents and cabin hatch. Unfortunately I still had the problem of invasion of the navigation by sea water whenever a wave hit from aft of the beam and I'll have to accept that as a characteristic of the boat. The water problem over the navigation station was not nearly as bad as I have seen it, and I am confident that the new spray dodger will stop water from broadsides from the beam or forward.

As dawn approached the pounding stopped and the wind began to calm down. We were making only about 1.5 kts so I rolled out some headsail. Even though we were moving smartly through the water the SOG (speed over the ground) was only about 2 kts, which I attributed to the strong west current around the southern edge of the Aghulas Bank. I woke up at 6.15 AM to find the boat's course and speed all over the place, but generally under 1.5 kts.

I received more information on the Sailmail problem during the 6.35 AM SAMMMnet session. There are people out there trying to help me. One gentleman suggested that I try station V8V2222 which turned out to be Brunei. He passed on the frequencies an UTC times to try. Other suggestions were the distant stations in Chile and even Halifax. I had also tried unsuccessfully the station in the Red Sea. Somebody suggestion frequencies to try at 1300 and 2000 UTC to what I think is a station in Mozambique which is not listed in my Sailmail menu. After the session I tried some of these stations and got a connection with the Chile station. The transmission rate was 67 bytes a minute so I terminated the session then moved all of my outgoing messages from the post box. I then composed two very short messages, one to Brenda asking her to post a request that no messages be sent to my Sailmail address until the problem is resolved. The other was to Sailmail technical support in which I informed them that their Africa station RC01 had been down for 3 days with a known problem and to please fix it as a matter of urgency. In my time if a major system went down it was All Hands To The Pumps to resolve the problem. After 3 hours meetings would be held. After 24 hours the university administration would be involved. After 72 hours somebody had better start looking for another job. (Just kidding, but in any event it never came to that.) Anyway, until the South Africa station gets its act together I'll be relying on distant Sailmail stations and very low transmission rate. I will keep writing my daily blogs as usual but will not send them. Instead I will send bare minimum situation reports to the blog. There will be no grib files and I will rely on SAMMNet for the vital weather information.

Then I attended to the sailing problem. Even though we were sailing well through the water we were making no significant progress. It reminded me of the situation several weeks out of La Paz approaching the doldrums where when I went to my preferred tack of SE we were making 0.5 kts because of the strong current set to the west. I was forced to tack to the SW, taking me much further west than I had planned, but at least we were moving to the south. This time I had a choice of floundering around for at least 24 hours or using the engine. Soon we were motoring SSE at 2.5 kts with both sails filled. We were at 37S40 and the magical latitude of 40S was 140 miles away. With the engine on I was able to start the heater to dry out the boat and my wet weather gear.

At the afternoon SAMMNet session I received more information from someone named Bert. He gave me the call signs, frequencies, and optimum contact times for 3 Ham stations that they used on a passage from Brazil. Two stations were useful at mid-ocean and the third was useful within a week of South Africa.

Fortunately I had upgraded my Airmail3 with Winlink-2000 (Ham) capability, so I set up a message to route through one of the stations for a trial.

I had some spare time and I took the opportunity to have my first cockpit bath of the passage, then put two sets of underclothes in a small tub of soapy water to be cleaned by the agitation of the boat. I then chopped up vegetables for my first bean stew of the passage. I had soaked a generous amount of black beans from Brazil overnight. Today I threw in 500g of lentils, a large potato and tomato, 2 large onions, a carrot and plenty of garlic. I also threw in some cooked beef that I had purchased at Food Lover's.

I tried connecting with one of the suggested Ham stations with no success. The frequencies that had been suggested did not exist in my selection list. It could well be that I have not set up Airmail3 for Ham, so I'll keep working on it.

Just before dark I dropped the staysail and rolled out more jib. The apparent wind was up to 12 kts and we were now making 4 kts to the SSE, under engine. At 4.30 PM we crossed latitude 38S and I didn't want to stop the engine because of the current. I had a look at the Pilot Chart for the Indian Ocean for March and sure enough the Aghulas current in our current position is at 2 kts with a set to the SW. However, as we move south it will bend toward the south then to the east to join the S Atlantic current, which will have a speed of about 0.7 kts. But this happens at the magical 40S.

It is 8 PM and Sailmail seems to be working again. Glory Be! Maybe that message that I got through to the Sailmail technical group did some good

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