We left St Helena early in the morning and as the island was slowly disappearing into the distance, we picked up a south-easterly wind and set course to cross the equator at 30W. Our thinking was that we wished to be far enough off Africa because piracy was not unknown on its west coast, and I wished to ensure that we would cross the ITCZ (doldrums) at right angles to minimise our time in the notoriously unpredictable winds, known in days of yore as the ‘Horse Latitudes’.
We had set up an HF SSB radio net before leaving St Helena so that we could talk to the other boats leaving for various destinations over the course of the following days. It worked reasonably well for the first 1500 miles or so. We also knew that all being well, we should manage to cover a thousand miles per week and to that end we had stores on board and sufficient bottled water should the water maker fail, as it had done on our initial Atlantic crossing. We also decided that we would run a dry boat with the exception of celebrating crossing the equator. And our arrival in Europe.
So, on the first day I established that we had three problems. Firstly, the fridge pump was unserviceable, secondly, we seemed to have a problem with the GPS antenna because we were getting persistent messages of ‘No Fix’, and the automatic bilge pump was faulty. The fridge pump was easy to fix but the GPS continued to give us a problem for two weeks. Interrogation of the built-in test equipment repeatedly showed that the unit could not find suitable satellites to provide a reasonable fix. This may have been because the GPS had been installed in 2006 and may not have been searching for all the satellites that had since become available. That said, there were three other GPS sets on-board and once again I took regular star shots to ensure that I kept my hand in just in case they all went down.
However, probably the most serious problem occurred on day two when in the evening we noticed that a large tear had appeared on the yankee above the UV strip on its foot. As soon as the wind allowed, we unbent the sail and brought it into the saloon through the forward hatch and spent the next two days repairing it. We were to really regret not buying a length of sail cloth before leaving South Africa, because we quickly ran out of the sail repair tape that we had in our spares locker and had to start using our store of sunbrella to patch it up.
Towards the end of the first week, we got a large fish within a few metres of the boat before it escaped and then lost the other lure almost immediately afterwards so it proved that there were fish out here, even if we can't catch them! We completed just over a thousand miles in the first week with the wind essentially behind us and with the now patched yankee poled out.
On Easter day, just after seven in the morning we caught a skipjack tuna, so we had sashimi for lunch followed by the roast lamb that we had got out of the freezer to celebrate Easter. The celebration didn't last long because the following day I looked up to see that we had yet another tear in the yankee. The upper part of the sail was basically in shreds. Of course, this was after six years of wear and tear, but it should have been spotted as a problem by Quantum Sails whom I had engaged to refurbish it. However, we cheered up when in the evening of 9th April, we crossed the equator northbound, when we celebrated with a bottle of champagne and to our delight a pod of dolphins appeared alongside us, and which was the first time we had seen any since South Africa. We took this to be a very good omen.
On the following morning we were surrounded by rain clouds and the wind became light and variable. The radar turned completely black and there was a torrential downpour before we became completely becalmed. We had clearly entered the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ or Doldrums). I decided that we could safely run the engine and use up to 200 litres of diesel which might enable us to push northwards sufficiently far to exit the ITCZ. Meanwhile, we pulled the yankee back into the cockpit to dry out before taking it below into the saloon so we could repair it. It turned out to be an enormous task because it was very badly ripped, and the sewing machine was not really man enough for the job and constantly jammed.
A couple of days later Sarah was on watch when the wind died completely and so we decided to tie the wheel and just drift, until the wind came back just after 0400. My attempt to unfurl the main whilst I was half asleep resulted in it being jammed in the furler so that it would neither furl nor unfurl, all in the dark, of course! In the end we had to release the halyard and pull the sail down to unjam it, before it could be set once more. I spent the rest of the day trying to fix the sewing machine. Being the cheapest entry version Elna, it had plastic gears, which had become worn and repeatedly slipped around the spindles. In the end I recognised that it was beyond repair and decided to give it to join so many of my tools to ‘Davy Jones locker’ along with the instruction manual. This meant that we would have to hand sew the remaining tears in the sail.
By now we had got to the edge of the ITCZ and started to pick up the North East Trade Winds. The irony was that in discussion over the radio net with those boats that were headed directly to Brazil and the Caribbean, if we turned left at this point, we would be there a week or so before them. I suggested this change of course to Sarah on the grounds that we could have another year in the Caribbean, but sadly this suggestion did not meet with approval.
We now had to think about where we should head for, because even though the Canaries Islands were approximately nine days away, it looked like the Azores would be a more suitable destination, not least because this was the usual route from South Africa to Europe and would be in a more favourable wind direction.
From here on our days were spent sewing. This was not an easy task because the sunbrella was thick, waterproof, and tightly woven so pushing a needle through this material and the sail cloth took its toll on our fingers. The yankee was beginning to look like a patchwork quilt, but we were still bouncing along into the headwinds using our staysail and main, and most of the time recording 6 to 7kts.
On the19th, At midnight on 18th April, Moonbeam completed her circumnavigation when our plotted position on our chart crossed our outbound, track, which was plotted at 0300 on the 19th January 2007, five years and three months previously and with a total distance between them of 39,201 nautical miles. What an achievement.! We had a glass of champagne at lunch to celebrate and it made us feel very emotional because we had experienced so much wonder, joy, sadness and at times even terror, but we had never ever felt that Moonbeam would let us down. However, just to bring us back down to earth we nearly ran over another yacht! We had heard them calling another yacht on the VHF, who had a broken shroud, and talked to them over the radio to discover that they were just 25 miles or so away from us. Given our exchange of positions we thought that they were behind us even though we could not see them on radar, and because they were smaller than Moonbeam, they would be slower. It was therefore a bit of a shock to see them the following dawn just a mile or so behind us! It is always strange to meet another yacht in the middle of the ocean thousands of miles from anywhere.
David, Sarah's brother had been doing a magnificent job of weather watching for us and at the same time encapsulating the news in a paragraph or two so that he could email us on a daily basis. This information was invaluable to us as the only other source of weather forecasting was from the daily grib files which showed the wind direction and strength and the occasional downloading of a synoptic chart from the SSB. He amused me by reporting that a Canadian co-pilot had caused injury to passengers by violently altering course to avoid Venus, because it reminded me of the numerous occasions that I had witnessed pilots (including me) altering course around the moon!
The repair of the yankee by hand sewing was finally completed on 21st April when we said goodbye to the tropics as we crossed the Tropic of Cancer. We spent the following morning bending on the sail, only to see a small tear on the foot so we promptly furled it away until I could drop the sail sufficiently to be able to fix it the next day. Apart from replacing the impeller on the generator, it had run without problems and enabled us to keep our water tank full and the fridge and freezer cold as well as recharging the batteries. It was run night and morning for a couple of hours which was sufficient for our needs.
As we were continuing northwards the sea temperature steadily decreased and we started to need warmer clothing. At the same time David reported that a low-pressure system was developing to the north of us, which would make landfall in the Azores somewhat of a challenge. We thought that we would watch the situation and decide on whether or not to continue towards the Azores or change our destination in two- or three-days’ time.
We were beginning to see ships more frequently now and saw one which was even going to Gibraltar! We were now 3500 nautical miles from St Helena and the forecast low that David had alerted us to, was intensifying, so we changed course, due east and motor sailed for a while, whilst declaring Madeira as our destination in Europe. Our reward that evening was to see the green flash once again, which was only the third time this entire trip.
We were beginning to get pretty tired, because we were spending most of the time close hauled in generally overcast weather and quite large seas, but this was being offset by our steady countdown of miles to Madeira. We had now lost contact with all the yachts on our radio net as we were getting close to Europe, and they were continuing on to the Azores or the Caribbean and for the first time we were waking up feeling cold as our duvet was not really warm enough which reflected the drop in temperature over the past week or so.
Our plots were satisfyingly closing Madeira and with the help of the engine the last day of the month saw us just 149 miles to go at dawn, when we were surrounded by a pod of Atlantic Spotted Dolphins. It turned out that our position looked so close to Madeira on ‘Yotreps’ that Gemma tried to ring us, on our mobile rather than the sat phone!
At sunrise on 1st May 2012, we could see Madeira rising up on the horizon and we were able to drop anchor in Funchal Harbour at 1645 that day. It had taken us 31 days six hours and 45 minutes to cover 4498 miles from St Helena and to arrive safely albeit with sore fingers! We celebrated with the bottle of champagne that Bill Barrett had given us in Singapore and that we said we would not open until we arrived home in Europe.