Thoughts from the West Indian Ocean…..
22 October 2012 (Eastern Hemisphere)
Dear F&F,
We left Los Angeles, California 5 years ago. So much has happened. Yesterday \”Beach House\” was literally half way round the world from where we started.
Playing on the old riddle, \”How far can you run into the forest?\”…..\”Half way, as beyond that is toward home\”.
The sail yesterday was brilliant once we made our turn down wind at the top of the Mascarene Mountains. A bit of unusual sea surface disturbance was seen as we went near the 100 meter depths, but nothing exciting.
The skies seem to cloud up at night and get clear during the day when the sun heats everything up. No real rain in the last 24 hours and we\’ve about 525 miles to the top of Madagascar\’s Cape d\’Ambre. The weather should be pretty good from here to there and we plan on approaching the Cape from the Southeast as the winds will come more from the south up the East Coast of the island. We\’ll be very near the port of Diego Suarez, but don\’t plan on stopping there. We\’ll hopefully arrive at the Cape just after day break on our Thursday and stay very close to the shore as has been recommended to stay out of the turbulence at the top. Apparently it can be pretty exciting for about 10 miles…we shall see. After that, if we\’re feeling strong we\’ll sail the short overnight passage to Nosy Be (Big Island) where we\’ll check in at the Port of Hellvile (named after French Admiral Hell), locally known as Adonay.
As I write, we\’ve taken down the headsail and are just going on one reef in the main till the day\’s winds let us know what\’s up. We had wind from the SSE last night at 20-25 on our beam, so we were a bit over canvassed and just rolled up the genoa. We also took advantage of that and headed a bit south to begin positioning ourselves for landfall in three days.
We\’ll hear from Dave and Kathy on s/v \”Sunflower\” via email and radio this afternoon and see how there crossing of the Mascarene Plateau went.
We had a nice enough day to start to clean up, do the chores and relax. Here\’s hoping that\’s how the rest of this ride goes!..:-) Day 5 run, 197 nautical miles.
KIT, Scott and Nikki