Departing from Cape Town February 19
We have now been a month in Cape Town, and have completed some big projects on Heretic here. Our engine project went very smoothly: Seth has grown very competent with diesels, and, once the engine was lifted out of the boat with the Yacht Club’s crane, he had it completely taken apart in one afternoon. The engineering company here has been excellent, and we got our parts shipped from Europe relatively quickly. We had the cylinders honed, the valves and injectors cleaned, new injector nozzles put on, and all three pistons replaced. The engine returned to the boat today, started up on the first turn of the key, and we are provisioning and getting ready to leave for the South Atlantic.
Other projects have included six coats of varnish (Heretic looks very nice), rebedding one of the aft ports, the port shrouds, and a few bolts in the toerail to stop some minor leaks, repairing tears in our staysail that were the result of the gale off Cape Agulhas, and having a third reef point put in our spare mainsail. The mainsail that has made it over 25,000 nautical miles from Maine to Mossel Bay, South Africa, is now officially retired. The UV radiation in the southern hemisphere has rotted its cloth enough to where the last tear is irreparable, so we have switched to our spare mainsail. We are very happy with it: the fabric feels almost like new; it has batten cars so the battens won’t work through their pockets at the luff, and the third reef point we had done here looks excellent.
We have also been able to do some sightseeing. We rented a car (it is very difficult to do anything here without one), and headed down to the Cape of Good Hope for two day trips. We saw the African Penguin nesting colony near Simons Town, and did a shore dive with our scuba gear nearby. Unfortunately, we did not see any penguins underwater, but we had fun diving in a kelp forest, a big change from the tropical reefs of Mozambique and the Indian Ocean islands. We hiked in the Cape Point nature reserve. We hiked out to Cape Point and then along the cliffs to the Cape of Good Hope, the most southwesterly point in Africa. We were lucky enough to spot ostriches, eland (the biggest African antelope), and baboons on our hike. We have also hiked up and over Table Mountain right here in Cape Town. Our hike took us up the city side, over the top, which is indeed flat like a table, and then over the other side into the Kristenbosh Botanic Gardens that specialize in plants indigenous to southern Africa. We enjoyed learning about the fynbos vegetation we had seen on Table Mountain. The Cape area is home to a highly diverse flora kingdom, and the plants we’ve seen are beautiful.
We’ve also enjoyed some of the sights in the city. We visited the excellent Natural History museum, which has displays on ancient rock art, and pre-dinosaur fossils of mammal-like reptiles. It also has a planetarium, where we finally learned the official southern constellations. During all the time we’ve spent sailing in the southern hemisphere we have been making up our own, except for the obvious Southern Cross, of course. We visited the Robben Island gateway, whose exhibit on the atrocities of apartheid was so moving that we have yet to visit the prison itself where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for so many years. Last night we heard the Cape Town Philharmonic play at City Hall. The acoustics were excellent and their rendition of Dvorak’s New World Symphony also excellent.
In the next few days, we will finish our provisioning for the Atlantic, a big job since we are buying goods here that we hope will last us until our return to Maine, and we will say our goodbyes to the good friends we’ve spent so much time with here: Wolfgang and Denise aboard Moony and Soenke and Judith aboard Hippopotamus. We leave this coming Tuesday, February 23, for St. Helena island, about 1500 miles northwest of here. The winds are reputedly light on this passage so we are not expecting to break any records. We will carry on from there to Ascension island, and then the Caribbean.
Cheers,
Ellen and Seth