Back at the helm - sailing the Yaghan to Antarctica, Patagonia and the South Pacific

by Martensson, Helene

  4,200 nautical miles is roughly the same distance we used to sail in a whole year during our most active sailing period. The most difficult sailing conditions for Yaghan are lack of wind and heavy swell. It makes the rigging and sails beat hard, which may cause damage. The kicker had started to leak hydraulic oil. We wrapped it in a cloth covered by a plastic bag. It looked as if it was wearing a nappy. It worked, though, which was the main thing.

  I called my parents every week, even from the middle of the Pacific. We have an Iridium phone on board, which we use to keep in contact with our parents and children when we are at sea. The calls do not last long, but at least I am able to find out what things are like back home. We keep in contact with our children by e-mail, but our parents do not use the Internet, so the telephone is the only way. My father sounded depressed and tired, and talking to my mother was difficult. She could not quite hear what I was saying. She was finding it harder to communicate, she could not find the right words, or she used the wrong words, and she found it difficult to understand what I said. She probably had no idea where we were or when we would be returning. My mother was getting worse by the month. It saddened her when she could not find the right word or when she failed to understand. I almost did not want to talk to her. It felt as though I was only making things worse. I missed them both terribly, just like I always did when I was a child. I wished I could have done more for them. I had arranged home-help before we left Sweden, but my father had cancelled it even before we got to the Kiel Canal. I sincerely wished that my parents would be around for many years after we had returned from our circumnavigation. Sitting at the helm with the night sky and bright stars above I often thought about all this. During those nights in the Pacific, en route to Polynesia, cheerful and happy thoughts were born, but sad and distressing ones too.

  We were less than five hundred nautical miles from the Ahe atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago, and we had planned to arrive on the morning of Sunday April 22. We were also expecting the wind to pick up during the final three days, reaching around 20 knots, so we would be travelling faster than we had been doing for a long time. During my night watch I had made a batch of lovely cinnamon buns. They were ready just before I was due to wake up Arne. I later learned that Arne skipped his usual morning meal. Instead he ate seven buns for breakfast and three more in the afternoon. I put the leftover buns in the freezer.

  Towards the end of a long haul like this you tend to have mixed feelings about arriving at your destination. When we spotted the lights at Salvador de Bahia after fifteen days on the Atlantic, I thought it was disappointing and far too premature. We had arrived far too soon, I just wanted to keep on sailing! We had been at sea for almost twenty-five days, working in shifts and never getting a full night's sleep. But we were not tired. We were still enjoying our voyage, and we were looking forward to seeing the Tuamotu islands in French Polynesia. Neither of us had been there before.

  For the three final dinners before we arrived we chose whatever we had enjoyed most during the crossing. We had salmon and mashed potato with tomato salad; Thai chicken with fragrant rice and sausages with pasta and Greek salad and the last of the feta cheese, in that order.

  My last night watch was disruptive. The wind had increased in strength over the past twenty-four hours. We were sailing through the night with the main and genoa reefed. There was a large squall right behind us, less than a mile away, and I hoped it would find its way around Yaghan. The sea was choppy with high swell and wind waves. It was pitch black, but the stars were bright except when they were concealed by the squall. The music was flowing out of the speakers. It was hard to come to terms with the fact that the following night we would be sleeping in a boat that would be lying completely still, for the first time since Puerto Montt, inside the Ahe lagoon.

  The Tuamoto Islands

  At 0800 hours local time, Sunday April 22, we slowly entered the lagoon at the Ahe Atoll after having waited for the tide to turn for almost an hour so there would be slack water sailing through the gap. I was in the bow, making sure that there were no shoals or spikes in the reef. The water was so clear that I kept calling out that it was getting shallow. It turned out to be between six and eight metres deep, but you could see every single grain of sand on the bottom, so it appeared to be only two to three metres. We had never seen water as clear as that before. As we passed through, dolphins jumped around the bow, showing Yaghan the way into Ahe lagoon. It was a warm welcome!

  We had sailed 4,200 nautical miles from Isla Robinson Crusoe, and it had taken us twenty-five days – our longest distance so far. We had spent thirty-three days at sea since leaving Puerto Montt on March 22. Our average speed was 7 knots, which was faster than we thought while we were rolling on the swell, sails flapping.

  We had travelled 17,000 nautical miles since leaving Sweden on June 1, 2006, and we had made it all the way to French Polynesia.

  A few hours later, after carefully motoring across the lagoon, we were moored securely at a small cement quay, bow to land and facing the wind. After arriving in this turquoise paradise we just had to swim in the warm, clear water. Then we were overcome by a tremendous amount of energy, which we spent on cleaning the boat inside and out. We tore out the vacuum cleaner and filled up the washing machine with our dirty clothes and sheets. Without us noticing, a young Polynesian woman had parked herself on the quay right next to Yaghan. The next time we looked she was sitting on the rail, swinging her legs on the outside. Soon after that she was sitting in the cockpit, looking down at us through the hatch. We said hello. She said her name was Martha. She sat there quietly watching all afternoon. Several hours later she asked me gravely: “Madame, madame, pourquoi vous travaillez si beaucoup?” Lady, why are you working so hard?

  She thought our boat was so tidy, and she could not understand why we were rushing about, cleaning and polishing the way we did.

  But we thought it was worth it when we sat down later in the evening in a clean and tidy boat that smelled of detergent. We drank a toast to each other and to our voyage. This time, our glasses were filled with real Champagne. It was a dark, quiet evening, and we just sat there for a long time enjoying it. The stars were just as bright as they had been at sea, only the Milky Way was a little more difficult to make out. Then we slept well inside Yaghan, which did not move all night, and nor did we.

  The next day we were invaded by every little boy on the atoll. They hung in bunches from the rail, making contact with the foreigners aboard the large, white sailing boat that was moored at their quay. We made one big mistake on the first day; we handed out chocolate bars. I had bought a whole stock of them in Puerto Montt. The weather had been so hot and close at sea that we had eaten very little chocolate, so most of it was left. Not after our stay in Ahe lagoon, though, with all those little boys on board.

  We were not free of Martha and the boys until after dark. Then we had Yaghan to ourselves.

  Before coming to Polynesia we had read all of Bengt Danielsson's often amusing, but always lovingly told, books about the South Pacific, his friends on the island of Raroia and those he met later when travelling in the area. He frequently mentions their lazy, work-shy attitude to life as well as their lack of business sense. We detected the same attitude in little Martha, who was still spending every hour of the day watching what we were up to. In his books, Danielsson mentions that each atoll has its own Chinese shop-keeper who sells nothing but sweets, corned beef, rice, noodles and milk powder. Danielsson wrote his books in the fifties, and lo and behold, when we stepped into the shop at Ahe, there was our first Chinaman. There would be many more during our stay in Polynesia. The stock had not changed much over the years, corned beef, rice and milk powder filled most of the shelf space. We left with a tray of Coca Cola and one of Fanta, a jar of jam and some ice cream. What we wanted to buy was tomatoes, lettuce and fruit, but we found none.

  Our stay at Ahe had passed quickly, and we began to prepare to leave this quiet, turquoise lagoon where we had relaxed
for several days. We were sailing around Polynesia for several months, and would not be turning west until July. Before we left, I was hoisted to the top of the mast to oil the whisker poles. We had noticed that they were catching. Now they would run smoothly during the eighty nautical mile crossing to Rangiroa, which was our next destination in the Tuamotu archipelago.

  French Polynesia

  We left the little atoll after sunrise and set out for Rangiroa, the third largest atoll in the world. It is almost forty nautical miles long and twenty wide. The largest atoll in the world is the Mahe atoll in the Maldives.

  There is very little land on which to settle on an atoll. At least nine tenths are water. The word “atoll” originated in the Maldives and means “water in the middle”, or lagoon. We slowly motored through the bright blue-green lagoon towards the exit. We had worked up a great respect for corals. In the morning the tide had turned and was flowing into the lagoon. Enormous amounts of water were flowing in from the Pacific through the narrow gap at a rate of almost 5 knots. We had read in one of our guide books, South Pacific Anchorages, that you should only sail in or out of Ahe Atoll with the current.

  Considering the long distance ahead of us, we had to leave Ahe in the morning, or we would not arrive in Rangiroa until after dark. Anchoring at Rangiroa in the dark was out of the question, so we had no choice but to fight the incoming tide. When we arrived, we discovered how difficult it is to distinguish land on an atoll, we were almost there before we could make it out. They are only a couple of metres high, excluding the palm trees. The central lagoon is surrounded by a narrow reef, part of which is completely submerged.

  We would never have made it out of there if it had not been for Yaghan’s powerful engine. The water literally boils at the exit; it was unpleasant and we got nervous. We were both sheltering behind the sprayhood to avoid being soaked by the water that came gushing across the bow. We set sail once we had made it to deeper, darker and calmer waters, the wind picked up and Yaghan was soon heading towards Rangiroa south-west of our current position. I went below to make breakfast, which we ate as the lovely Ahe atoll disappeared behind us in the haze.

  There are seventy-six islands in the Tuamotu Archipelago. From our guidebooks, we had learned that most of the islands do not accommodate a boat the size and draft of Yaghan. Lagoons are usually full of coral spikes, and it is hard to find a safe anchorage with enough leeway: one hundred, preferably two hundred metres from land. Even though the prevailing wind is the trade wind, strong squalls with rapid wind changes occur every now and then, so we needed the space. Tuamotu Islands used to be referred to as “the dangerous islands”, and you are discouraged to go there without radar on board. We would never do it without one. Like in Antarctica, radar is essential for determining your position and distance to land.

  We would not be able to see everything we wanted to see during our voyage. We chose Ahe and Rangiroa, one of the smallest and one of the largest atolls. Most of the people that live on Ahe cultivate pearls for a living. At Rangiroa tourism competes with the pearl industry, but the main industry in Tuamotu is pearl cultivation. There is a small pearl farm in every lagoon.

  We slipped into the larger entrance right next to Tiputa, which is the village on Rangiroa. We arrived only an hour after slack water, so this time the entrance was easier to negotiate. Again, dolphins were swimming in front of and under our bow to the great delight of another sailing boat that was on its way out. The dolphins looked as if they lived and ate well; they were unusually large and chubby. We dropped anchor by an elegant resort were there were already a few boats. The anchorage was completely exposed to all except easterly and northerly winds, and it was as far as twenty nautical miles to the other end of the reef. In other words, the wind could cause a great deal of swell inside the lagoon when the winds were neither easterly nor northerly. We anchored a good distance away from neighbouring boats.

  The first evening on Rangiroa we went ashore in the dinghy to have dinner at the restaurant. It was a wonderful feeling, after forty-five on board dinners since leaving Chile, to sit down at table and eat food I had not cooked myself. Two weeks earlier we had even run out of fruit and vegetables. We had tuna sashimi, grilled mahi-mahi and we finished off with fruit – very nice indeed. We had lunch at the restaurant every day during our stay. We usually had Tuamotu salad consisting of grilled tuna and lots of vegetables.

  One day we went to the police station for a preliminary customs clearance. We had to confirm it as soon as we arrived in Papeete, Tahiti, by reporting to the harbour police. One advantage of Sweden being a member of the EU is that we do not need to pay a deposit for a three month visa in French Polynesia. It makes things a lot easier since we can decide where we want to continue from instead of having to bother about where to reclaim the deposit. In the taxi back from the police station we passed a small stall where they sold fruit and vegetables. We made our lives’ biggest investment in fruit and vegetables. We paid the equivalent of just over one hundred dollars for a few grapefruits, plums, red and white cabbage, a cucumber, a few melons and potatoes! All fruit and vegetables have to be transported by air, and most of it is imported from Chile. We now had enough to last us until we got to Tahiti.

  We went scuba diving for the first time in Polynesia in the same atoll entrance, Tiputa, that we had sailed through a few days before. We also went diving at the other, Avatoru Pass. It is exciting to dive in the entrance to an atoll; you are transported with the current at a speed of several knots and at a depth of ten to twenty metres. The water is very nutrient-rich and attracts a lot of fish and sharks. At Avatoru pass we were immediately surrounded by three big sharks as soon as we reached a depth of fifteen metres. They kept circling around us for at least five minutes. They were very close; they came closer and closer and then they slowly went away. We have dived near sharks many times before, but we have never experienced it in this way. If the hairs at the back of your neck can stand on end under water, they did. We were scared, and then even more terrified when we heard that the scuba diving operators regularly feed the sharks in the pass to make sure that the many Japanese tourists that come to visit will encounter them. In the Maldives, where we have dived a lot, feeding sharks is not allowed. This seems to me to be a sound and reasonable ban, everything else is dangerous. We will avoid diving in places where they say they feed the sharks in the future.

  After leaving Rangiroa we continued to Tahiti, which is nearly two hundred nautical miles further west. It took us twenty-four hours. When we passed through Tipota Pass I could not understand how we could have dared diving in the boiling confusion that came gushing out of the lagoon. Afterwards, however, we were pleased that we did. We arrived in Tahiti the following morning. At the crack of dawn it was not Tahiti, but its sister island, Moorea, that I first laid eyes on. Soon we could make out the 2,000-metre-high craters on Tahiti against the morning sky. The entire island with its mountains and valleys seemed completely grey at first, but the closer we got and the higher the sun climbed in the sky, the greener it became. Soon we were slipping through the wide passage in the reef at Matavai Bay with Point Venus lighthouse on our left.

  This place was named after James Cook's visit. He arrived with a group of scientists in 1769 to measure the transit of Venus. They were to make an accurate measurement from the moment it appeared as a black dot against the sun's disk until it had completed the passage. All the expeditions that had made the same attempt eight years earlier had failed miserably, so Cook's expedition simply had to succeed. You might call that first major expedition, which took place in 1761, one of the first international scientific projects of its kind. France, England, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Russia and several other countries had dispatched scientists to over a hundred locations around the world, from Siberia, China, South Africa and Indonesia to the deep woods of Wisconsin, in order to measure the transit of Venus. Everyone had failed, but in 1769 it was time for another attempt. The measurements that were taken on June 3, 176
9, from this small headland in Tahiti were successful, even though the perfectionist Cook himself called the whole enterprise a fiasco. They were not as precise as he had hoped. It had nothing to do with the method, but with the fact that once Venus turned up, it did not behave in quite the way the astronomers had expected, like a sharp, circular disk. Instead it turned out to be encircled by a dark shadow or fussy edge, which made it hard to determine at what time the planet entered in front of the sun and at what time it exited. The observations were invaluable, however, since the atmosphere around Venus was a new and interesting discovery. Only a few weeks earlier, in May, but 238 years later, Yaghan passed Point Venus on her circumnavigation of the world in the wake of James Cook's voyage.

  Papeete Marina in Boulevard Pomare was deserted. Only ten boats were moored there. We must have been early. Because of the hurricane season, it is not a good idea to go to Polynesia until May at the earliest. The harbour master did not think that the major invasion of sailing boats that had passed through the Panama Canal would arrive until June.

  We were not used to the sound of cars and the city, so we thought there was an awful din. The marina was only five metres from a dual carriageway full of persistent little cars. The customs clearance was quickly over and done with, and we were told that there was a relatively new marina outside town, past the airport. We decided to go there. Marina Tahina became our home for a while. We longed for civilization. Paul Gaugin came to Tahiti to look for paradise and something genuine; we were looking for civilization, but we all ended up in Papeete. After five weeks on the Chilean channels and then five weeks in the Pacific, we were looking forward to nice restaurants, cafés, fresh bread, French cheese and other delicacies. We also wanted to take a stroll around town, I wanted to look at black Tahitian pearls in the shops, and we wanted to be safe and comfortable in a nice marina.