[Dar Es Salaam - Phuket] Day 5 -- Heavy Traffic and an Angle View on Life

The morning of the fifth day started with a container ship passing and another soon after. In the middle of nowhere, or more specifically, the Indian Ocean, now miles and miles off shore it feels like a big conincidence to meet another ship. There is so much space around you, but still this world has become such a small place, you just can't escape your kind. With the solitude you'd expect (and will experience most of the way) on such a journey, two ships in two hours seem like heavy traffic. Add to that the pirates you're trying to avoid and suddenly the endless oceans seems to be a small overpopulated playground. I started wondering how it would feel back in Thailand, where places are ever so crowded even in terms of a busy European city.

The autopilot was still causing us some trouble. We were constantly busy adjusting the course and couldn't find why such a high tech machine wouldn't do the job. Even twenty years ago mechanical auto pilots were able to steer better than the fancy pilot installed on our boat. Added to its inability to steer to our desire came the pilot just loosing power every once in a while and waking up after its "sudden power failure" with an annoying beep.

While steering was a nuisance like that, our sailing got better by the minute. We were making some more speed, but with the boat cranking to the side a lot for the moderate wind speeds we had. We had to realize the boat just wasn't able to take much wind from the side, when you go hard into the wind.

With about thirty degrees inclination all day long you start viewing life at a different angle. At the end of the day I noticed that I had difficulties of holding my soup so it wouldn't spill. I was only able to manage by vision as my sense of gravity had seemingly slid off the side. All movement starts to be awkward. Surprisingly, it gets much worse before it gets better. At first, I was able to move quickly yet still careful throught the cranked boat, always clinging on to whatever I could get a hold of. With time, my moves became not better, but rather slow and uncoordinate. I felt like bouncing through the boat with every move it made rather than directing my body's course. Working in that inclined shaker was yet another thing to manage, escpecially with the obligation of not dropping anything and placing every tool in a safe position as it might otherwise instantly be rolling over board. Fortunately, after worsening, I actually got used to life in inclination and coordination of movements improved again.

Working in inclination had become a necessity. By now we'd found enough things to be worked on. I had started to investigate on the source of the frequent power failures of our autopilot. That meant following miles of cables throughout the ship. Unfortunately they didn't lead me to the solution and the outages remained mystery. In the state room, we were still cleaning out fresh water on a regular basis. We'd started to look for the source and were taking things apart now. Hours later we discovered the cracks in the boat floor where our water was leaking through from the tank below. With no immediate solution we decided to just use more water to lower the levels in the tank.

With all these little problems, we'd somehow started to look at our vessel in a different way. We were now examining everything for potential sources of more trouble. Our eyes fell on the first mast, that bent and moved a fraction to much to our likings. We started pondering about the possibilities of it breaking and taking the second mast with it on its way down. But we soon put these thoughts aside. Having a negative attitude towards the vessel that provides the only shelter, transport and safety you have is of no use. At the end of the day things would imrove again. It was late evening when I found out how to correct the autopilot settings and make it steer much better than any of us could have done. The days of minutely course corrections were over. Suddenly we could just lean back and watch. Until the next power failure.

captains log:
0700 overtaken by containership
wind SE 10-14kn
0900 ship opposite direction
SSE ~10kn
1000 up SS, top of fock very bent, hope he doesn't come down
at 15kn the boat doesn't support the fock, too much water over the rail, auto pilot not able to steer the boat
1200 put 2nd reef in main
S4°07 N44°20
1600 put up SS
2100 reef in genoa, 17.5kn