The Chagos Diaries: #1 - Passage to Chagos
Passage Day 1: Mon Jul 13 2020 - A Sticky Start
We wake up early, as always happens on passage day. It’s not deliberate – there’s nothing I’d like more than to have a lie in, as I know I won’t be getting much sleep in the next couple of days until we’ve settled into our watch system.
But as I lay in bed the night before, I couldn’t help running through the pre-departure checklist in my mind, trying to think of what I’d missed. And naturally, I woke up still thinking about it. After 10 minutes of tossing and turning, I figured I might as well get up and get moving. It’s always the same.
I pull down yet another weather forecast, and am gratified to note that nothing has changed. It’s pretty much always upwind from Maldives to Chagos, but at least our current weather window is going to be lighter wind than normal. We’ll already have a huge ocean swell to deal with, the last thing we need is the extra waves caused by strong winds on top of the swell.
In fact, our first day is predicted to have not much wind at all, so we’re planning to motor off to the south east for a few hours, so that when the wind does fill in, we’ll have a better sailing angle. Well, that’s the plan, anyway, we’ll see how it turns out.
We’ll motor SE for a day until the wind fills in. It will be coming from the SE (theoretically), so we’ll then be able to turn away and have a nice sailing angle.
It seems we’re not the only ones making an early start - as we eat a leisurely breakfast, I look up to see an empty space where Erie Spirit is usually anchored. I stand up to get a better look, and sure enough, they’ve already raised anchor and are mile away heading towards the pass.
We’re not in quite as much of a rush – in fact we’re somewhat dreading the act of raising our anchor. At 38 metres (125 feet) it’s the deepest we’ve ever had to set it, and although we had enough chain to do so, it means the windlass is going to have a lot more weight to try and lift when the time comes.
I have my doubts.
An hour later we get our answer - it doesn’t have the grunt to bring the chain and anchor up, which is a minor problem, considering that together they weigh just under 400kg!
As Jen pushes the button on the windlass remote control, the windlass just spins and the chain doesn’t budge. After 121 days, it seemed like the Maldives is still not ready to let us go.
I have a brainwave, and use the manual crank handle on the windlass at the same time as Jen engages the motor, and my puny little arms are just enough to give the motor the extra help it needs, and up comes the anchor. Phew!
Sonrisa already have theirs raised, and are kindly standing by in case we can’t solve the problem without extra help. I give them the signal, and together we head off towards Chagos!
I promise I’m wearing shorts…honest!
As soon as we head through the pass between the reef at the southern edge of the atoll, it becomes clear what we are in for. Big rolling waves meet us, bouncing us up and down, and the anemic wind is barely enough to fill the sails, so we settle in to motor for a few hours.
The rest of the day and overnight is spent chasing wind puffs - sometimes enough to turn the motor off entirely, sometimes, a combination of motor and sail is required to keep us moving.
But slowly, inexorably, we’re making our way towards sailors’ nirvana.
Passage Day 2: Tuesday July 14 2020 - Timing is (almost) everything.
Sailors are fond of saying that it’s as much about the journey as it is about the destination. But you’d be surprised just how much time we spend on passage talking about our destination, and more specifically one particular aspect of it…our ETA
One of the hardest parts of any passage longer than 2 days is trying to time your arrival. Most of the time, it’s critical to arrive in an unfamiliar location in daylight. After all, we don’t have headlights on a boat, and there’s certainly no street lighting.
And when your destination is surrounded by coral reefs and bommies that are poorly charted, daylight alone is no longer sufficient. We also need the sun almost directly overhead so that the reefs can be seen and avoided.
In this part of the world that gives us a safe arrival window of approximately 5 hours in every 24 - from 10am to 3pm. Outside of those times, you’re asking for trouble.
This passage in particular is a great example. Salomon Atoll in Chagos is essentially a ring of islands connected by fringing coral reef. The atoll is about 3 miles in diameter. There is just one passage through the reef, at the northern side of the atoll. Fortunately, it’s a relatively deep pass, but still not one you’d want to undertake in the dark.
Salomon Atoll, Chagos. The entrance pass is between the two islands at the top of the picture.
Once you’re through the pass, it’s a couple of miles to the place we’re allowed to anchor. Between the pass and the anchorage are countless scattered bommies, which need to be spotted visually so we can steer between them.
And once we arrive at the anchorage, there’s plenty of coral around there too, so we need good visibility to be able to find the best place to drop the anchor, in sand so it will dig in, and with no coral bommies nearby for our chain to wrap around as we swing.
So as we set off two days ago, the one thing uppermost in our mind was, and has continued to be, “What’s our ETA?”. After all, if we arrive outside of that 5 hour safe window, there’s no car park for us to pull over in to and wait. And the water immediately outside the reef is 2,000 metres deep, so nowhere to anchor either. If we’re early, or late, we will have to sail around in reef infested waters, in the dark, killing time, for up to 19 hours, when we’re already tired from a long trip, and with the possibility of unpleasant weather making the waiting time extremely uncomfortable.
In theory, this should be a relatively easy passage to time our arrival. It’s 300 miles, and usually we sail 125-150 miles per day, so if we left early on morning one, we would typically arrive somewhere around midday on day 3. Perfect, right?
But this is not a normal passage. For one thing, we’re in the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (more commonly known as the Doldrums), where the wind strength and direction are extremely variable, and there are often long periods of light wind interspersed with heavy squalls. And that’s exactly what we’ve been experiencing. Those 125-150 mile days are when you have a constant speed, but with the wind varying on this trip for 3 knots to 25 knots, sometimes every 30 minutes, there’s no such thing as an average speed calculation!
No wind + lots of swell = a rolly motor.
Typically, we’d finesse our timings by using the engine, especially as we get down to the last 100 miles or so, and speed the boat up if need be to ensure we arrive in the best window. But this time that’s not so easy, as we have another dilemma.
We’re going to be in Chagos for up to 4 weeks, and from there we sail to Seychelles. Between Maldives and Seychelles will thus be a 1,500 mile journey, and we only have enough fuel on board for 1,100 miles. We use the same fuel supply to run our generator, and if we’re in Chagos for a month, we’ll be eating into that fuel reserve every day.
So, we really don’t want to burn a single drop more than we need to on the first leg to Chagos.
We told ourselves that the one thing we had plenty of for this trip was time, so we would just sail as slow or fast as the wind allowed, use no engine, and if we arrived outside of the window, just slow the boat down for the last 30 or 40 miles and wait it out.
But it’s one thing to say that in theory, and quite another to resist the temptation to switch the engine on when no wind and huge swells make the boat roll from one side to the other violently, and incessantly, for hours on end. When you know that motoring will remove 80% of the unpleasant motion instantly, the temptation is so great. Especially when you know that doing that will also get you into the calm waters of the anchorage a full day earlier.
We think our two buddy boats have both succumbed to the temptation, and have disappeared over the horizon. We do have our engine on, but running very slowly to conserve fuel, and at this stage, our ETA is 11pm tonight. Meaning we will have 11 hours to kill upon arrival before we are willing to tackle the pass on Wednesday morning at 10am, all while our buddies are tucked up asleep in bed in their nice calm anchorage.
Turncoats!
Passage Day 3: Wednesday July 15 2020 - A tricky finish.
So having spent a good half an hour this morning writing the last post about timing your arrival, we proceeded to break all our own rules.
As I write this, it’s 1am on Wednesday 15th, and WE’VE ARRIVED. We’re safely anchored in Chagos.
As expected, Erie Spirit switched on the engine and high tailed it here, arriving at 3pm today. We were on track to arrive around 1 or 2am, and so were actively trying to slow down, which was proving difficult, as the lack of wind meant the swell was awful if we just drifted, and we kept getting tempted to put the engine on just to smooth out the motion.
Then Mark on Erie Spirit contacted us and Sonrisa to say that it was an easy entrance, and he could talk us through it, and knowing what he now knew, he’d have no qualms in coming in at night.
We have forward facing sonar on Steel Sapphire, which allows us to see the depth in front of us, not just below us. The technology has been around for a while, but in truth it’s not the most reliable instrument we have on board. Sometimes it works perfectly, other times, not so much.
Our forward facing sonar screen as I write this sitting in the marina. You can see that land is about 80m ahead. It’s awesome…when it works!
We also had a copy of the Royal Cruising Club’s Pilotage document For Chagos, which included a section on entering the atoll. Now it did say that entering at night was not recommended, but they also helpfully provided some waypoints of a safe route, which it turned out was exactly what Mark had followed a few hours before.
In the meantime, Sonrisa arrived at the pass 30 minutes before us, but got the heebie-jeebies as the currnet grabbed them, and in the end turned around and headed back out to sea. Sensible folks - it’s most defintiely not the recommended approach, and discretion is always the better part of valour.
After a LOT of discussion, we decided that between the sonar, the safe path from the RCC Pilot book, and Mark’s instructions, we’d be prepared to give it a go.
So we did. We had both engines running, in case one died and the current grabbed us), and Jen stood on the bow shining our most powerful torch..
The pass itself was deep and wide, and completely unseen - it was the darkest of nights. And the pathway through the atoll to our anchorage was uneventful. Dropping anchor involved a little bit of cross your fingers, as we didn’t know what the bottom substrate is, but the anchor dug in nicely in 18m of water, and we figured we can re-evaluate in the morning.
We’d done it. After a sticky start, and a tricky finish, we’d arrived in Chagos!
