ATLANTIC CIRCUIT, PART 3. Ireland to the Caribbean

 

ATLANTIC CIRCUIT, PART 3.

Ireland to the Caribbean

 I arrived in Ireland on 9 August 2022 after turning away from the Greenland coast due to ice, fog and an engine failure (and perhaps lack of moral fibre – the ice was not that thick) and spent a month in Bantry Bay.  I have friends in that district and the time passed pleasantly, sorting out broken gear, drinking Guinness and socialising. By early September, if not 'in all respects ready for sea', a delusionally optimistic concept, I felt that Iron Bark III was ready for an unchallenging passage. She had a new gooseneck and alternator mount, sails were repaired (including resewing the sunstrip to the staysail by hand, several days of work with needle, palm and awl) and she was provisioned and watered.

Anchored in Bantry Bay

I left on 12 September with a forecast of north and east winds for five days, strong to near gale force at times. This is more wind than I liked but too good to pass up, being a fair wind in an area where the prevailing wind is southwest and foul for the passage. The forecast was accurate. Three days running under deep reefed sails (staysail alone at times), got me clear of the Celtic Sea and around Ushant with 300 miles of sea room. There was a great deal of shipping bound to and from the English Channel and I did not get much sleep.

 Southbound from Ireland or Britain unless bound for a port in the Bay of Biscay or northern Spain, I think it is wise to make as much westing as possible early in the passage. Beginning from Ireland instead of the south coast of England makes this a lot easier as it gave me a 200 mile start to the west. On previous voyages coming this way I sailed from Cornwall and had to work hard to make my westing.

 A strong, fair wind took me out to 12°30’W where I turned south. The wind remained fair and strong, increasing to near gale force (F7) in the latitude of Cape Finisterre, the southern point of the Bay of Biscay. East winds are often accelerated around Cape Finisterre and I felt this even though I was 200 miles offshore. I expected the wind would moderate and back to the north as I sailed down the Iberian Peninsula, which it did to the extent that I was becalmed at times, with one day's run down to 48 miles. Shipping became more common as I closed Cape St Vincent, the southwest corner of Portugal, and again I got little sleep.

 Up to then I had kept well offshore, in part to avoid shipping and in part to avoid Orcas. The pod of Orcas off the Portuguese coast is a bloody nuisance. There have been several hundred 'interactions', all with yachts of less than 15 metres. A couple of yachts have been sunk and more than 25 have been towed in after their rudders were torn off by these Orcas. I rounded Cape St Vincent with my rudder unchewed and anchored close behind that cape in Sagres Bay, 11 days from Ireland.

 There is a wind acceleration zone around Cape St Vincent that affects Sagres Bay and it was blowing 25-30kt in the anchorage. There seemed to be little ashore other than large crowds of tourists so I did not bother to launch the dinghy. After a day's rest I pushed on east and made a short overnight passage to anchor in the mouth of the Guadiana River on 25 September. The next morning, I took the flood tide 20 miles up the river to meet up with friends that I knew were anchored near the village of Alcoutim.

Anchored on the Guadiana River near Alcoutim

 The Guadiana River winds between rocky, scrub-covered hills with a small village every 10 miles or so. It is attractive and relatively undeveloped – the sort of place that I like. My friends, Miki Knoll and Karl Bitz on their Nicholson 32 Faï Tira, had been had been on the Guadiana River for over a year and knew the area and its people well. With Karl as a guide (Miki was off visiting family in Germany), I had some fine walks and met an interesting group of expats living along the river. There is a network of narrow-gauge railway lines, now long disused, that serviced small mines that formerly dotted the hinterland. The railbeds and their tunnels winding around and through the steep hillsides make for interesting walks, and Karl knew them all. The tide runs hard in the river, something to plan around when rowing a couple of miles to the village for a loaf of bread or bottle of wine. It pays to keep in mind what the moon is doing.

The banks of  the Guadiana River are relatively undeveloped

Walking along old rail beds and tunnels near the Guadiana River

The north wind that carried Iron Bark so quickly and comfortably to the Guadiana River was succeeded by a protracted period of southwest winds, headwinds for a passage further south and I was content to stay up the river and potter on with small carpentry jobs. I also gave Karl a hand to dry Faȉ Tira between tides against a wall in Alcoutim. What should have been a simple antifouling job turned out to be rather tense. It took two tries on successive tides to get the boat against the rather short wall on the ramp. That far up the river, wind direction has a big effect on the water level and throws tide predictions off. When it came time to dry out Faȉ Tira, the tide was not as big as predicted and Faȉ Tira grounded far enough from the wall for it to be likely that she would fall away from the wall as the tide went out. Karl winched her off using a line led around a spit post, but it was a bit too close for comfort. Getting Faȉ Tira off after scrubbing and antifouling also took two tries due to the tide height being less than predicted.

 Faȉ Tira running down the Guadiana River

 After a pleasant 6 weeks on the Guadiana River, I sailed for the Canaries on 2 November 2022, with a forecast for fresh north winds for several days. Faȉ Tira was obviously looking at the same forecast and sailed for the Canaries the same day. The forecast wind never appeared and the passage was made in light airs and headwinds - nothing difficult, but slow. My first day’s run was a modest 102 miles, and that was the best that I did for the entire passage. A couple of small striped pilot fish tagged along, as they often do. They did not need to work very hard to keep up with Iron Bark.

There was not much wind on the passage from the Guadiana River to the Canaries.

 It took me nine days to make good 580 nautical miles from the Guadiana to the Canaries. I anchored at Playa del Risco on the north coast of Lanzarote near Faȉ Tira, who had arrived a couple of hours earlier despite being several feet shorter on the waterline. However they were not dragging a propeller (Faȉ Tira has an outboard engine) and Karl and Miki are about half my age and rather more spry than me, which probably helped too.

 The Canaries are over-run with tourists, crowded, expensive and tacky – all things that I went to sea to avoid. However, they are such an obvious stop when bound south or west from Europe that it is difficult to go around them, and there is always the chance of meeting interesting vessels there. Thus it was this time. Predictably Faȉ Tira was there, but amongst the usual collection of AWBs (Average White Boats) anchored at Playa del Risco there was a purple junk schooner. I rowed over and found it was Kokachin, Pete Hill and Linda Crew-Gee’s new boat. A happy reunion followed. I first met Pete in the Canaries in 1986 on Badger, another junk schooner. Pete has sailed an eclectic selection of vessels, mostly self-built, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and is a superlative seaman but unassuming to the point of being nearly invisible except to his friends.

 A few days later the authorities evicted us from Playa del Risco for no apparent reason other than that they would prefer that yachts only berthed in marinas (a good reason not to go to the Canaries if you dislike marinas as much as I do). Our little flotilla of Kokachin, Faȉ Tira and Iron Bark moved to the south coast of Lanzarote and anchored off the town of Playa Blanca. Playa Blanca is entirely given over to restaurants, bars and tourist tat with little in the way of provisions available. It also has the inevitable large marina. I bought some onions and wine in town and later rowed into the marina with a few jerry cans to buy some water. I was immediately ejected. Only vessels under power are allowed in the marina – louts on jet skis are welcome, sailors rowing are not. I did manage to fill my 30 litres of cans, for which I was charged €15.

 Having had enough of this style of yachting, I decided to leave the Canaries immediately and henceforth to make whatever diversion necessary to avoid visiting them again. Pete and Linda invited Miki, Karl and I to dinner on Kokachin and we agreed to meet up in Carriacou, in the Eastern Caribbean in the new year. 

The next morning, I sailed for the Gambia in West Africa. The Republic of Gambia is one of Africa’s smallest countries. It is a narrow strip of land on either side of the Gambia River, entirely surrounded by Senegal. The river is navigable for over 200 miles, little developed and its people have a reputation for being friendly and non-violent, which is far from universal in Africa.

 It is about 1000 miles from Lanzarote to the mouth of the Gambia River, which I expected to be an easy trade wind passage. It took me a day to work through the alternating wind shadows and wind acceleration zones around the Canary Islands, dodging ships, yachts and fishing boats, before I found a steady, fair breeze and uncrowded water. Four days of this breeze carried us into the tropics and into the haze of Sahara dust. I kept about 100 miles out from the African shore to avoid the numerous fishing canoes and small boats in shallower water. There was a steady stream of merchant vessels out where I was, but they have AIS to wake a single hander, unlike the fishing boats.

 Nine days out from the Canaries I hauled on to the wind and closed the coast with visibility reduced to two miles by Sahara dust. Despite the poor visibility, there were numerous signs that land was near – butterflies, flies and a whiff of woodsmoke in the wind. The edge of the continental shelf was marked by the first of numerous fishing boats, which appeared and disappeared through the haze. Closer inshore that evening there was a plethora of fishing canoes that signalled their presence by with a variable array of flashing lights. At midnight I hove-to, drifting with the tide, to wait on daylight to enter the river.

 Daylight showed we were in muddy river water shallow enough to have an unpleasant tidal lop. I made sail and beat in against a fresh trade wind reinforced by the overnight land breeze with a strong ebb tide setting us backwards. Low land and slightly higher buildings appeared, the land breeze died and the incipient sea breeze killed the remnants of the trade wind. This left me drifting between some derelict-looking anchored merchant ships, so I gave up, started the engine and motored the final 5 miles to anchor off the port of Half Die, so named following a cholera epidemic in the nineteenth century. It had been an easy, untroubled passage of 10 days whose details would soon be forgotten without reference to the log.

The low coast of Gambia through Sahara dust

 I launched the dinghy and rowed ashore to clear in and had not walked far down the dusty street towards the port offices when a small, active man approached, introduced himself as Bailo and offered to act as my guide. Looking a little lost and the having the only white face in the street made me an obvious mark. I accepted and was soon grateful for his assistance. I knew that I would need some local currency for port charges but the ATMs at the first two banks were out of order and the banks would not change money over the counter, but Bailo found an ATM that worked. Then he led me to buy a SIM for my phone to get photocopies of mt passport and ship’s papers, which he said (correctly) would be needed to clear in. As about half the town is without electricity at any time, finding a working photocopier requires local knowledge. Then the actual business of clearing in required attending customs, immigration, quarantine and the port captain in the right order, each lurking in an unmarked office scattered around the port area. Without someone to show me the way I would have taken most of the day to sort things out. As it was, we were done by 1300hrs. For his efforts, Bailo asked the price of a sack of rice (€25), which I thought fair.

 The anchorage off Half Die is convenient to town with a pontoon landing for a dinghy, but unless one has business in Half Die or the capital, Banjul, has little other attraction. It is on a mud flat littered with several dozen wrecks and rather choppy with wind against tide. The next day I moved 7 miles Lamin Lodge, Gambia’s yachting centre, tucked away up a mangrove creek. There were about 20 yachts anchored off the lodge, about half inhabited and about half more or less derelict, with a considerable overlap between the two categories. The lodge itself is a ramshackle affair, built stakes driven into the mud, floored and walled with half-round flitches with some very large gaps between them. Vervet monkey scurrying around remind you that this is Africa. The staff and owners of Lamin Lodge are Muslim, as are most of the population of the Gambia, but they do not mind selling cold beer to itinerant yachtsmen. The owners and staff will graciously accept a drink if you offer to buy them one, but of fruit juice only. Muslims, Christians and animist seem to rub along well in the Gambia. As Friday is a Muslim holiday and Sunday a Christian one, many people  regard it as a waste of time coming to work on Saturday so much of the place has a permanent long weekend.

Lamin Lodge, the Gambia. The closer you get, the more ramshackle it looks.

 I stayed at Lamin Lodge for two days then headed off upriver. The river is tidal for several hundred miles and pays to work the tides. Going upriver one can carry a fair tide for 7 or 7-1/2 hours, depending boat speed. The shorter ebb coming downstream is compensated for by its greater strength as the ebb stream is added to the river’s flow. The tide turns as much as 1-1/2 hours after high or low water. Motoring at 4 knots through the water, a yacht will make about 40 miles per day in either direction without bucking a foul tide. Under sail, I usually covered 35 to 40 miles to make good about 25 miles.

The river is muddy and the bottom is invisible in water deeper than half a metre, making eye-ball navigation impossible. The mouth of the river is charted to modern standards but once 10 miles upriver from Banjul/Half Die the chart depends on a 19^th century lead-line survey, which of course is not on a modern datum. The digital Navionics chart that I used seems to have the picked up the coordinates of the river banks from a modern source that corresponds closely to WGS84. The soundings from the old survey were then superimposed to give a best fit with the river banks. The result is that soundings do not align exactly with either the river banks or to WGS84. The combination of muddy water and offset soundings make the occasional grounding likely but as the bottom is soft mud, this is seldom serious. Grounding while going upstream, the flood tide will soon lift you off. A grounding coming downstream with the ebb means waiting to the tide to turn unless you are quick to go astern and can get off before the tide sews you. However, the general lie of the banks is as charted with one notable exception (more on that later) and the mud gives a surprisingly good depth sounder reflection so navigation is not difficult.

 I took the flood tide upstream, sailing if there was any wind at all and motoring if it was calm, and anchored when the tide turned. There was usually a light north or north east breeze until about midday, then a calm. The tide turned later each day as I headed upstream and on the third day, by the time the flood stream began, the morning breeze had died, which meant motoring for 7 or 8 hours. This made the cabin very hot.

 The Gambia River is crossed by a bridge about 70 miles from its mouth, and it was here that I first touched bottom. It was late in the day and I was nosing along under motor nearly midstream about a mile or so downstream from the bridge, preparing to anchor for the night when Iron Bark stopped responding to the rudder. The mud was so soft that I did not feel her touch. We were doing less than two knots and, although the tide was falling, we came off readily by going hard astern. The chart showed 15m there and even allowing for a datum offset, there should have been plenty of water there. The bridge pontoons have apparently altered the river flow so that an extensive mud bank has built out from the north shore and the deep channel is now close to the south side of the river.

 The bridge has a charted clearance of 16.5m (55ft) so I decided to wait until near low water to go under it, although Iron Bark’s mast is only 16.2m. In fact there appeared to be plenty of clearance and I have since been told that there is no problem getting 18m (60ft) through at low water. Five miles above the bridge is an uncharted overhead power cable with a considerable amount of sag in its middle. It is hard to estimate vertical clearance from deck level so I went under it where it is highest, close to the shore near a pylon, but looking back the middle appeared to be at least as high as the bridge. Any vessel that can get under the bridge can probably ignore the cable.

 The river had been getting fresher with each mile upstream and was barely brackish even on the flood tide at the bridge. With the change in salinity, we left behind the dolphins and flamingos that made pink patches against the shore and tropical rainforest replaced the mangroves of the lower river. Above the bridge there were fishing canoe everywhere and numerous nets to dodge.

Fishing canoe

 When two days above the Senegambia Bridge I anchored as usual when the tide turned against me. That stretch of river appeared uninhabited but the night was disturbed by loud explosions at irregular intervals and of unfathomable (to me) origin. Later I learned they be air gun blasts to deter hippopotamus from destroying rice fields some distance back from the river.

 On 11 December 2022, I anchored at the large village/small town of Kuntaur, having taken 5 days to make 140 miles from Lamin Lodge. I had seen two yachts below the bridge and one above it. Just above Kuntaur is the Baboon Islands National Park, which has chimpanzees (re-introduced in the 1970s after being hunter to extinction) and allegedly hippopotamus. I thought there was little chance of seeing either from the deck of Iron Bark so took a tour in a canoe with an outboard engine and saw both.

Hippopotamus and chimpanzees

The engine's raw water pump was playing up - it did not like the silty river water. The pump was leaking a little and had broken a drive belt just below the bridge. I had enough spares to rebuild the pump but was worried that the drive shaft was scored. There was a fair chance that I would do more harm than good by attempting to fix it so decided to leave it and do as little motoring as possible. That meant turning back at Kuntaur, although the river is navigable for another 50 or 60 miles. 

As expected, the trip downriver was faster due to the stronger ebb current, but as one was rushing down to meet the incoming tide, the ebb only lasted 5 hours or so. The second day after leaving Kunaur and 20 miles upstream from the bridge, the engine surged and died. There was little wind and progress was entirely dependent on tide and engine so I angled in to the shore and anchored. It sounded like a fuel problem, and it was. The electric transfer pump that fills the day tank from the keel tank had stopped pumping although it still made the same noise and drew the usual current. I filled the day tank by pumping diesel from the keel tank into a jerry can with a portable hand pump then siphoned it from the jerry can to the day tank. It was messyķ but not difficult and I was soon on my way again.

 That night I anchored just above the bridge. Next morning, I motored under it at low water and, as there was a light breeze, made sail and shut down the engine. I was at the mast tidying up halyards when we went aground midriver, two miles below the bridge. Despite my experience coming up river, I had not allowed enough for the extension of the mud bank below the bridge. By the time I had scrambled aft and started the engine the tide had fallen too far for us to get off. The keel sank into mud so soft that at low water when there was only 0.7m of water around the boat, we remained upright with the waterline only 20cm higher than usual. The incoming tide floated us off in the evening and I motored a mile to the south (deep) side of the river and anchored for the night.

More worrying was the fact that the raw water pump was leaking more with every hour of use. If necessary and  with enough patience I could make my way down the river and into open water under sail, though given the light airs that prevail upriver, that might take a long time. As I  had no desire to spend weeks on the downriver voyage, I  used the engine nearly continuously for the four days it took to reach Half Die. By the time I was anchored off Half Die, the water pump was leaking badly enough that I decided not to use the engine again until I could do a proper job on it.

 I reached Half Die on the evening of 17 December and went ashore the following day to do some shopping. Not knowing the place, it took me two days to buy and stow food and water for an Atlantic crossing. The piped water in Half Die is untreated and there is a fair chance of getting something nasty from it – cholera for instance. Given the etymology of the name Half Die, I cautiously (cravenly?) filled the tank with 54 litres of bottled water. It was cheaper than piped water from in the Canaries.

 Rebuilding the raw water pump was likely to take two days, with no guarantee of success. It was now 19 December, so that would take me into the Christmas holidays and complicate getting outward clearance. There is plenty of room in Half Die to work out to sea under sail and I was bound for Carriacou, which is easy to approach under sail.  As Iron Bark has a solar panel to run the AIS receiver while I slept and there is nothing else on Iron Bark that depends on electricity other than the GPS, which only needs to be turned on occasionally and briefly, I had no need of an engine for the Atlantic crossing. There was no reason to delay so I got my outward clearance and sailed early the next morning on the last of the land breeze.

 The north east trades, reinforce by the land breeze carried us quickly down the buoyed approach channel and out into deeper water. By dusk we had left the last fishing canoes astern but there were still many larger fishing boats to dodge. These were astern at dawn and I got a few hours’ sleep. The trade wind was generally fresh to strong, the sky overhead was completely cloudless but the horizon was hazy with Sahara dust. Three days out and 400 miles offshore the first wispy clouds appeared and the dust started to decrease. We continued to run almost directly downwind, generally with a reef or two in the mainsail and just a corner of the jib unrolled and backed for balance. More mainsail and/or booming out a headsail would probably have given us an extra 10 or 12 miles per day, but scarcely seemed worth the wear on the gear and the loss of sleep entailed by having to tumble out of bed on every slight increase in wind. I long ago concluded the last 10 or 15% of speed entails a disproportionate amount of wear on both gear and crew and is seldom worth pursuing. 

 I had a desultory go at working on the engine but decided it was a job better done in harbour. I acquired several crickets in the Gambia that lived somewhere in the mast or boom, chirping away at night. I never saw them and the last one went silent a week out from land. At about the same time one of my molars, which was loose and infected, became painful so I did a bit of home dentistry and pulled it out fairly painlessly, but with a good deal of spilt blood.

Running in a fresh trade wind

A night's haul of flying fish, mid Atlantic

 The passage was a classic example of an easy trade wind crossing with the wind dead aft, never less than force 3 or more than force 6, averaging about 140 miles a day. Most days a tropic bird or two came by and inspected us, but little else until we were close to the West Indies. The days ran into one another, as they do on an easy passage, and Christmas passed with little notice. There were a few light rain showers as we approached the West Indies but none were heavy enough to wash the salt from the deck and sails so I could not top up the water tank.

 At dawn on 8 January 2023 the conical peak of Petite Martinique showed above the horizon. We ran on, gybed around the south end of Carriacou and beat in to anchor in Tyrell Bay at midday, after a fast and easy passage of 2650 miles in 19 days.

 This ended another North Atlantic circuit, a voyage of no particular note but with enough incident to prevent it being forgotten. The outward leg ran into some heavy weather off Bermuda and the return voyage got far enough north to need to dodge ice and far enough east to see a hippopotamus. The complete circuit from Carriacou to Carriacou with a winter on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland took 16 months during which time I sailed 12,100 miles.