Another Night at Enseada de Sitio Forte

First a few words on my Sailmail problems. As I traveled north from Argentina the Sailmail transmission rates deteriorated to the point where some sessions were taking 30 minutes on baud rates of 200. A few days ago I received a warning from the Sailmail organization that I was using too much air time so I stopped receiving grib files which saved much air time because for some reason transmission of data from the boat is faster and more reliable than receiving data from the station. The only choice of stations that I have is Chile, 1750 miles away. Trinidad is 2260 miles away, Panama 2940 miles away, and Florida 3780 miles away. I've had no luck with any of these three more distant stations, though according to the Sailmail propagation tool Trinidad offers a one-hour window at noon GMT, which I would be trying soon. [Note, I got no response from Trinidad either because they could not get my signal or they were attending to another session - it is impossible to say which.]

A Sailmail session starts with any messages in my "out" box sent out. Then any incoming messages are sent to me. Last night I managed to transmit the blog entry, my position report to Pangolin, and a very short private message. After transmitting my messages Sailmail informed me that there were 4 incoming messages but the transmission was so bad with so many retries that the connection was terminated.

The point is that there will be much uncertainty in by ability to receive incoming messages until I can get ashore and connect to Sailmail via the internet. It's a pity because I look forward to reading my incoming Sailmail at night.

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I spent a very quiet and peaceful night and at 8 AM the masthead unit was reporting a wind speed of 0.0 knots. What secure bliss! It was a brilliant sunny day.

Over breakfast I studied the chart for anchorages on the island of Gipoia, north of here on the way to Bracui. I first selected a bay on the north side of the island which would offer me protection from winds from the E, S, and W, but then I had a look at the satellite photographs in MarinePlotter and changed my mind. Charts are great and are of prime importance, but it is difficult to overstate the advantage of being able to see actual photographs of the terrain. I was able to see which bays had beaches and which bay showed shoaling which probably meant sand bottoms if they could be seen from space. Rightly or wrongly, I prefer bays with sandy beaches at the head because I figure that the holding ground will be good and there will be less chance of fouling the anchor on a rock.

So I chose Praia Do Dentista on the SW side of Ilha Da Gipoia, giving me protection from N,E, and S winds. The distances in this bay are so small that even a west wind would not have the fetch to cause serious wave action unless it got to over 20 knots.

At 8.45 AM the wind came on fast and strong as though someone had thrown a switch. The first gust slammed in from the south at over 20 knots and I heard the chain rattle as it stretched out in the new direction. All three anchor alarms went off because I had set the limits short due to my proximity to the shore. I reset them with more generous tolerances with little worry because if the anchor dragged the boat would move into deeper water. Moist clouds began to appear over the hills. The wind was from the south which meant that I was getting good protection from the hills to my north, and further out to see I could see that conditions were rougher. Since the distances I was dealing with were so small (only 12 linear miles from Bracui) I saw no need to rush off and leave the shelter of this anchorage, so I tidied the boat up and got it ready for travel in case of emergency then made myself a cup of coffee.

Later I had a look around the deck and discovered that the boarding ladder was still down. I could not stow it in either of the usual positions because the foredeck now had the platform with the Zodiac and Swarbrick sitting on top of it, and the starboard quarter berth area was too loaded up to accommodate it. Fortunately I found such a good storage place for it that I'm wondering why it took so long to figure it out. In front of the binnacle is the cockpit table folded down. I turned the ladder upside down with the hanging rails facing forward and backed it to the binnacle against the table. Lashing the ladder to the binnacle was a simple job and now the ladder was secure and as unobtrusive as I could wish for, clear of the floor area ahead of the binnacle and not interfering with passage to the steering station. From the steering station I would look through the bottom two rungs of the inverted ladder, but that was no problem at all.

I then removed the Monitor wind vane figuring that I would not be requiring it again until my departure from Angra later in the year and after that struck the Brazilian courtesy flag to protect it from wind damage.

I had seen two yachts across the bay that were very exposed to the wind and I figured that they must have been on moorings. However, later I saw one of them sailing out with full mainsail up (no jib) and towing the inflatable with the outboard motor attached. When they cleared the bay they gybed the mainsail and headed west. It illustrated the different approaches to sailing. I would have gone out with a bit of jib and no mainsail, let alone an unreefed one, and I would certainly not have towed the inflatable with outboard motor in those conditions.

At 1.30 PM the wind was down to 10 kt gusting to 15 or 16 kt and the sea was flat again, but by then I had already decided to stay at the anchorage another night. I did useful things such shaving for the first time in days and hair trimming of my moustache, nose and ears. I also spent an unpleasant 30 minutes cleaning out the ice box compartment. I was forced to throw away a 6 oranges that I had foolishly failed to remove from their plastic bag. Remaining were 14 medium sized potatoes, one onion, two bunches of garlic, and about a half dozen nice sized carrots. I transferred to the refrigerator the yeast and a half dozen eggs. In the refrigerator were also the Kiwi fruit and plenty of bananas.

The anchor had not budged an inch even though the boat was repeatedly hit side on with gusts of 30 knots. Plow anchors have two great properties. Given that they are on good ground (e.g. sand or sand and mud) and have sufficient scope, they will reset themselves without fouling when the boat exerts a pull from a different direction and better yet, they have a tendency to dig themselves deeper when pulled very hard.

At 4 PM the wind was down to a steady 6-8 kt with little gusting. It was still from the south and I hoped that it would remain so until morning. In the evening I would have a second meal of my latest pork stew with a few glasses of wine, followed by the second half of Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and others in "As Good As It Gets."

Incidentally, the yesterday's dive has done me no harm and has probably helped me. Since that dive the coughing has stopped, though I have cleared my throat a couple of times.

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