By Grant

What’s the opposite of “life throws you curve balls?”. How do you describe something that completely surprises you in a good way? Seriously, please share me your favourite idioms for this experience because I certainly need it to describe the story below.

So a week ago we are preparing to leave Phuket and as always rushing about to get everything finished. Still odds and ends on the boat that needed fixing, we (kids, Apple and I) needed to do the provisioning because Delphine was still in China and generally getting our minds ready for a long passage of over 1000nm. What was worrying me was the lack of wind.

This passage is an ancient one where essentially all trade ships from the east which planned to sail to the west ie around the Cape and to Europe would have left in pretty much the same place and headed pretty much the same way. We certainly aren’t the first and this trade route goes back 4 centuries to the first real traders in the 15th century. And after 600+ years we have learnt the the preferred time to do this passage is from January to March when the North East Monsoon Winds are blowing. This allows you to have the wind mostly behind you as opposed to the alternative wind which is typically South West and straight into you. So with this in mind, we had originally planned to sail in February but due to some unforeseen work commitments we were now leaving in March. And guess what? There was no wind. I had been watching the forecasts for a few weeks and every time I looked, it looks very very light. Almost too light to be able to sail. We are a big heavy boat and prefer a little more wind but it looked like this year the wind had decided to end in February. To put this in perspective, we cannot motor 1000nm. We don’t carry enough fuel and also we just don’t like motoring. The more you motor, the more you must service the mechanical parts of your boat and frankly I am tired of doing oil changes and I plan to make it to South Africa in December without anymore major services (touch wood… Dang as Alex would say I have now put the mockers on that). Anyway, I made the call that we were going to leave. I saw a touch of wind in the forecast on the day I planned to leave and hoped that we could stay with this little depression as long as possible and take it from there.

We left from Layan Beach on the West Coast of Phuket. It is pretty much a straight line to Galle sailing through the Andaman and Nicoba islands. Which remind me of another story I should tell you. We had planned to come to the Andaman Islands as this was a highlighted stop for our around the world journey. However, geopolitics seemed to have scuppered this. After following all the procedures for getting our visas etc for the Andaman Islands, which are Indian Islands for those who don’t know, we were told by our agent that we are wasting our time and we will be rejected at the border so to speak. Why? Well the reason explained to us is that even though my children and I will arrive in the Andaman as South African passport holders and Delphine holding a Grenada passport, their place of birth on the said South African passports was Shanghai and no person BORN in China would be allowed into India. We couldn’t believe this and obviously resisted and tried other avenues but after getting pretty clear ‘NO’ from the necessary authorities we gave up visiting. Quite shocking how bad global relations between countries have become.

Anyway for us it meant straight to Sri Lanka. And off we went.

When we weighed anchor and left I could feel a little breeze and was excited about this. It was after midday because the final checkout had taken longer than expected largely due to the horrendous traffic of Phuket (or should we say little Moscow because of all the Russians living and holidaying there). But the breeze was offshore and difficult to be sure if it was not just a little local land effect. Well a few miles away from land we found out. It was land effect and there was no wind. Like zero! Worse than this was an hour later we did got wind and it was due westerly or straight onto our nose. I couldn’t believe it. No forecast had this. Anyway we changed course and started sailing more south to at least use the wind and turn off our engines. But a few hours later this died to zero and we stared motoring and started praying the wind would come. As night fell we still had no wind but late into the evening, almost early morning a little breeze arrived and we were able to start sailing again. It wasn’t a great start and frankly I was having thoughts about turning around and waiting for a better weather window but we stuck to our guns and soldiered on. And what a great decision that was.

From this moment on and for the next 7 days we had the most amazing sail filled with the perfect conditions. Flat water, crisp breeze and perfect champagne sailing. At times we sailed with a full main and Genoa, other times we raised the Big Black Gennikar spinnaker and at night we mostly sailed our Parasail Spinnakar. For the most part we were doing 7-10knots helped by a beautiful 1-2 knots helping current. We had no squalls, clear skies and frankly you couldn’t ever have gotten better conditions. What we expected to be an awful 8 days motoring turned out to be our best passage over the full 3 years we have been sailing. Nothing compares to perfect sailing conditions. It has to be one of the gifts God bestowed on this earth. The sound of the water smashing lightly on your hull, the fresh breeze keeping you cool, the perfect sunsets sitting with your family. Perfectly content in the moment with nothing else occupying your mind but the present. This is the reason you sail.

And that was not all. On day 3 we caught another Marlin. A black Marlin. Not quite the same size as the previous 800lbs Marlin but still a monster at around 500lbs. Our little crew are getting so efficient at dealing with big fish that it didn’t feel stressful at all and a few hours after catching the beaut we had cleaned and filleted the fish and were already drying significant amounts into Biltong. See the pics.

Another addition to this journey was a friend of ours from China. XiaoHui was one of my earliest friends and we met in Moganshan almost 18 years ago. He was a budding designer at the time but for me he helped me build our first resort and together we would try do random things during the construction. He didn’t speak English (and still doesn’t) and I didn’t speak Chinese at the time and so our friendship was built largely through drawings and hand signs in the early day. But he was a genuinely lovely human and over the years ended up designing some significant parts of our future projects and now he has a very successful design studio of his own which makes Delphine and I feel very proud about. Anyway, whilst on my short jaunt to China I randomly threw the idea out to a few of my local friends if anyone wanted to join this passage. As you can imagine they all decline immediately (in complete fear) but not XiaoHui. He decided to come along with no experience on a yacht or ocean. Not easy having someone onboard who doesn’t speak English and even though my chinese is quite good and obviously Delphine’s much much better, neither of us know the terms on a boat. But we made it work and he had a great time. In his words, ”It was like a dream and an extraordinary adventure. You guys are brave!”

He couldn’t have picked a better passage. And neither could we have picked a better day to leave!