Ep 102 - Crossing the Indian - Part 1 | SAILING THE INDIAN OCEAN

Come along with us on another adventure as we tackle our hardest challenge yet crossing the indian ocean. So what are you looking at here love? I was just having a look at this big weather system that's kind of engulfing us at the moment. So the length of this system here this this one storm here is 1142 nautical miles long. It's crazy man. 1142 it's just and width wise it's 516 nautical miles wide. 500 miles wide a thousand miles long. Huge. No outrunning that. No you're just stuck in that shit for days and days and days so we're just not gonna do it at all. Not done. So this is low pressure system here you see that that's just a big trough that's where all the bad weather is basically originating originating converging convection convecting yeah so hopefully that shifts a little bit further north and we can drop down low because it's all clear down here it's beautiful and that's where we want to get into that wind we want to drop down south get into this south easterly trade and run just past the top of madagascar over towards tanzania over here but we've got another big low pressure system there which is that's that technical like technically speaking that's actually a cyclone but obviously not a tropical cyclone because it's not um compressed and condensed so yeah just that that rotation of um pressure as a cyclone but it's a pretty volatile bit of um ocean this one between maldives and africa we're gonna get i think it's gonna it's not gonna be particularly pleasant yeah we're gonna get the shit kicked out of us at some point i think so getting ready to leave asia man um we've got our swahili words up on the wall for practice and the captain's checking weather and messages it's actually downloaded music yeah ready to go unfortunately charlie's and i have crook which um isn't isn't a very good way to start a passage but i guess if you're going to be on passage anywhere hey dad it's you uh if you're going to be sick it's probably the best to be on passage so it is what it is old fella folded the washing got all printed out some schoolwork for the kids on tanzania getting organized all righty well you can see we're underweight um leaving the most southern island of the maldives gan for tanzania 2200 nautical miles to go um just under 5000 kilometers we're just over i don't know i'll work it out later a lot of nerves it's our longest passage by a long way um in fact by double pretty much so it's it's gonna be a it's gonna be an interesting trip this one there's gonna be you know it's gonna be anywhere between 14 to 18 days like sarah said so anything could happen anything will happen to be honest i dare say we'll get to experience absolutely everything you could experience on passage so the weather for the best but it's the best it's looked for the last week so we've decided to take this little opportunity and run um i think there's going to be a fair bit of motoring for the first three days just to get south uh the itcz moved up which means the winds are now swung kind of out of the south into the itcz so they're light for the for the first couple of days you know we're sort of seeing forecasts of six to eight knots that being said it'll probably be at least 50 percent higher than that so i reckon 10 to 15 knots which won't be particularly pleasant but once we get down level with chagos um we'll uh we'll hook a right hand turn and and start heading west where we should start to pick up some decent wind that's that's favorable um the winds down there are still running east to west uh as is the current so with any luck we'll just sit ourselves we don't want to go too far south and we don't stay too far north we want to just sit right in the in the the honey spot and um in the honeypot and and just have the right amount of wind somewhere between 10 and 15 knots we should be right trying my hardest to entice a nice big fish we had a little bit of stainless steel leftover in the in the tool shed from our old washing machine bracket so i just cut a piece off and bent it like that um nice and shiny it's essentially a flasher you just can't find anything like this in uh asian countries usually they've got teas or something like that you know so i'll run that behind the boat if we get any sunlight that'll be good but we'll see if it makes a difference i'm hoping so mahi-mahi baby i made it the other day we put it out the water and what an hour after we got onto that marlin so we don't want a marlin we'd love a mahi-mahi cut it cut it cut it thank god for that we're gonna get rid of these skirts we can't keep doing this i said i guarantee you can't keep doing this these marlin are huge and there's nothing we can't like if that reel can't stop them we've got no hope day two was pretty long and boring with very little wind we motored all day and it was very hot but on day three the wind picked up again and the indian ocean did too morning star time yeah it says hello yeah we should have covered some miles this time we have we're at 340 or 350 miles now but last night was good because we've got the current with us now yeah which is it's just dulled that choppy shit down and we've only got 12 knots of breeze but we're doing seven knots over ground so it's pretty good don't complain about that if this is what it's you know like we'll give it another day or so but if this is what it stays like we might just stay in this landscape the whole way yeah yeah good idea instead of going any further south because the further south we go the bigger the wind will get yeah go any further north it will drop so we might just sort of pick a latitude to stick around here and we just got to watch that cyclone at the other end it's already hit land was it yes it'll be gone in the next couple of days it was a beautiful day out here so i sat on the dolphin seat to enjoy it and as night fell and we were having dinner in the cockpit a booby decided to join us we just flew into the bloody clears he's not injured he's just an idiot he managed to fly away into the dark night sleeping on the job yeah nothing happening out here at a startling pace i made a treat for the crew it's a quick little uh i guess day five update where um i think we're about just over 500 miles now from the maldives and we've passed chagos we we really worked hard those first few days to drop down as fast out as we could to try and get into the better winds and better current um touch wood it looks like it's paid off um we're down sitting in about six degrees south at the moment still sort of heading in a bit of a southwesterly direction but um the it's lovely down here the swell's huge which is good because it's actually spaced the um yeah got about 10 knots at the moment sailing along at six um still got 11 days to go though 11 days after being out here for five so 16 for a total trip isn't too bad i'll be surprised if we get to maintain that but it is what it is we're um we've pretty much had the exact same sail configuration the whole time we've been out um petty and main just with a single reef in the main it's not really required at the moment like you can see it's pretty beautiful conditions out here but i don't know it just for us it alleviates the stress of our potential blow up or a problem you know if you've if you've already got the main reef down and we're not you know it's not like we're going slow we're doing six and a half seven knots so just leave it may as well just leave it like that especially at night time we'll still throw a single reef in the head sail and we've been ticking along nicely but yeah it's just the camera obviously never shows it um ever but believe it or not there's a two to three meter swell out there at the moment um which is lifting us pretty decently when the big ones come through but the period's about 16 seconds so it's it's actually fantastic it's it just it's really smooth and seas out for us um two days ago we had two meter seas at eight seconds and it was just incredible so yeah we're really enjoying this today fingers crossed it stays like this for a few days it should do with the with the height that we are at the moment the latitude sorry um the itcz's up to the north um the really shit strong winds and all that sort of stuff are down south we're sort of sitting right on the precipice of of that zone there so we'll do our best to stay here and try and maintain this uh sea state wind and and direction so anyway nothing really to report i still haven't got down and had a look at the um the throttle cable yet to try and fix something because we haven't needed the motor so i figured if we can sail the whole way there when we get there i'll just get brody down or we'll just wedge it or something um to get in there's a guy in dar es salaam in tanzania that says that he has the throttle cables i'm looking for so we might just go and anchor there if we can um they're unfortunately about to cop a cyclone a very very unseasonably late cyclone cyclone hedaya it's called it's only a category one but yeah i don't know it'll be interesting to see how that goes it's hitting them this afternoon and we're still we're still 11 days out but hopefully the damage is minimal and and um the people of tanzania and kenya get through it all right i'm i'm moderately concerned about debris um when you have big cyclones like typically big rain ensues and um yeah yeah logs and all sorts of shit wash out into the ocean so it might be a nervous night or two on the way into tanzania but we'll see how we go we've got to divert we'll divert if not we'll just we'll see what happens but still a long way out and uh yeah i'll take it as it comes for now we're just going to enjoy this magic sailing day five was some spectacular smooth sailing even if it did get a little rowdy in the afternoon how you doing nice sailing huh it's been a crazy day it's been all over the shop hasn't it bit of a roller coaster we were completely decalmed this morning down to two knots then at lunchtime it picked up and we were doing nine knots yep and the swell just kept growing all day and now we've got this giant waves like they're smashing inside of it's coming up through the trampolines at the front we've got salt spray all down the southern side even on the not uncomfortable though is it no it's actually quite fun we haven't had an ocean crossing like this well ever we've not uh i don't know the last three days have been pretty bloody good pretty good sailing yeah and we're pointing though the wind was supposed to be on our hind quarter we've been sailing at 50 degrees for the last three days but then it came back so we can't complain about that we'll take it the seas are getting pretty bloody big though big old squall fortunately we're reefed but yeah wasn't that bad just really quick seas are getting a little bit aggressive oh that wasted rainwater we uh while we're on passage we take the hoses out of our tanks um just to make sure that we don't uh cup a tank full of salt water when the waves come over the bow so it always hurts me watching all that rainwater just wash away celsius rides it well though hey what are we doing right now 8.3 knots well nearly nine nine knots and we're reefed down so not too bad i'd love that i know that won't stay like that anyway what day is it day five day six day six out here um and it's really squally today captain's hand steering main sail's still reached which gives us a bit of comfort knowing that there's quite a few squalls rolling through it's been really tedious out here though the wind's been dropping and then a squall will roll through and then it whips up the sea state just making life a bit challenging and uncomfortable um but it's nothing we can't handle celsius eating it up she is we're not we're over it we're clinging on to the fact that when we get to africa there's red meat and red wine bring it on and we are cold here yes i'm just going to try and keep the wind aft of 90 degrees otherwise we'll have to reef, it's going to be a bother yeah reef again 20 knots 20 knots on the beam right now but as soon as i bring the the wind forward of 90 degrees our apparent goes 25 26 27 knots as soon as i drop it after the beam the apparent wind speed drops off you're not creating as much unfortunately this has got us on a heading to somalia which we don't want to go to but hell no it's just i can see the gusts coming across the water it's just going to be in and out so when they get when it drops i'll turn back into it if it can keep the speed up because it keeps us comfortable as soon as the gust hits us you know i'm coming i'll bear away and run with the wind again there it comes again that's over 20 degrees and 20 knots at the moment watch once that needle drops below 90 degrees watch that apparent wash off just like that all that does is just reduces the loading on the sails and on the helm for me as soon as you go back above 90 degrees i'll show you watch this when you bring that beam back forward at 90 degrees rapidly much more comfortable when you run with it back down to 15 we're still doing 10.5 10.7 we got to this would be one of many squalls we would encounter on our passage across the indian just wondering that's a double i know it seems ridiculous but you wait to see the weather that's coming i reckon if we were already briefed it's partial that way i think if we just if we point a little bit higher and release the main a bit we might slow down and it might pass in front of us we're just going to hang on if i just let me concentrate i had a feeling i had 32 knots moment we are exactly 400 miles roughly 400 miles to the west of chagos which is that island right there so i click this out here there you go it's about 400 36 400 miles slightly down there so that right there is the wind we should be seeing which is almost spot on um straight out of the south click that away click this here we can get a bit of forecast so the forecast is saying that it's pretty much going to hold steady out of the south it's going to do exactly tonight what it did the last two nights and just drop out the shit which is going to be moderately frustrating tomorrow is very light on but then the wind sort of picks up in the next couple of days the reason we came down this far was because the wind should be out of the east or the southeast right now which is what this shows by tuesday that wind right there so we dropped down from here came down through here and we've dropped got ourselves through here this is uh the Seychelles victoria here and this is Daroe island Daroe shall we pronounce it and this is the Masarenae bank however you pronounce that too our plan was to basically cut straight through the middle here to give us plenty of depth when it comes time to pass over the Masarenae bank plateau and then also to give us a little bit of height this is what they call the witch's cauldron here this is a significant compression zone just above Madagascar so we want to we want to avoid that right there because the current rips through here the wind rips through there that's doing you know 30 odd knots so what i did was i planned to hit about seven degrees south which is where we are now and to ride this current as well we're switching the currents so this is the current so we're sitting in it right now i've got about one knot but then that's where we'll go through here stay in the top of this current here and it'll just keep us north of the witch's cauldron and then when we get closer we can sort of drop down once that wind dies down a little bit and run our way up into Dar es Salaam so it all looks good in planning and in theory doesn't always work out that way but i'm pretty confident that this time we've got it right i mean the only other thing we have to contend with is these bloody storms that keep ripping through we just copped that one pretty brutally as you would have seen and they these sort of come through every two days these big big systems i guess you can say every two days it just seemed to run through here so we should have a nice clear night tonight looking at that but then you can guarantee in two days time as we pass under the Seychelles we'll probably get another touch up so it is what it is we'll just keep looking at the weather and making sure we're the right thing but i think where we are right now we're just on the precipice of you know just enough wind as opposed to too much wind you get down here and it's really honking up here and there's not enough so as long as we stay about this latitude here we should be just fine. 10 knots 10 knots? we were just there doing eight and a half it's sort of coming we're surfing waves but nine knots double reef tensail single reef mate she's flying looking out here yeah it's gonna die off later oh tonight tonight and tomorrow looks like it's gonna be an absolute shit show so we may as well make the most of the ground while we can i guess one of the uh problems you encounter out here sometimes and this is only a new thing for us is um the sometimes the Sri Lankans or whatever nationality it is out here fishing they'll actually use a like an eperb or like a man overboard device to mark a fishing net so right now we've got we've got alarms going off they're about to hit something a boat it's actually said a sailing boat but there's nothing in front of us um at the moment there's like nine nine apparent boats around us i can't see one which scares the shit out of me because i know that these guys put their little eperbs or their little man overboard devices on top of the um the nets or whatever so yeah a bit scary but we'll see what happens so you can see right there there's three four five six six apparent boats here and you cannot see a single boat on the horizon and they're all supposed to be within a mile excelsior got through unscathed and that evening the sea state calmed down as well what are you doing way up here mate you can't park there day seven out here and we've been calmed again we're only cruising along between three and four knots um but it's beautiful and we've all had a really good sleep tonight um in this gentle sea state so took advantage of it uh brody stayed on shift till 1am and then i've just come on now at but it's beautiful we're making slow and steady progress um the weather's calm and we're all just enjoying it for what it is right now after yesterday which was pretty hectic with lots of squalls around um yeah it's great out here what the heck is happening the boat just sort of went to wind it went to wind and then the wind shifted and it just it was like the water probably couldn't recover in time and we just started going backwards we went eight knots forwards two knots backwards here we go back in this is fucking weird hey this yeah this weather just turned up this morning like in the blink of an eye and it's really bizarre we went from almost totally becalmed full stars out doing three knots to just getting smashed we had to reef in the headsail two reefs in the headsail we got a reef in the main three reefs and all this weather around us it's just whipping things up if it gets any worse we might have to make a break and run down with it for a little while see if we can't get away from it is it this distant here yeah this this to me we've been in 30 35 knot seas in the coast of australia and there's nowhere near as wild as this it's 17 knots right now this this sea state is dead set because they're like 25 30 knots yeah so weird so weird i mean the current's with us yeah so it shouldn't be like against it it's really really steep and huge but not much wind and it was totally calm earlier like at five o'clock this morning it was beautiful even the gusts in that storm when it went across they weren't that strong like we had 20 23 24 yeah we're stronger the other night yeah 35 yeah but the sea state is far far worse today yeah you know it could be we're just passing along the top of that um macerine baton plateau right so the shallow water yeah who says men can't do two things at once our captain hand steering in wild conditions and playing claw chair at the same time oh you're a hoot they say an unwatched kettle never boils but an unwatched kettle in our case might just jump off the stove we've been debating how to pronounce this plateau that we're coming up to if anyone can tell us the correct pronunciation that'd be um much appreciated it'll end the debate anyway i didn't even know it existed until three days ago no neither it's amazing and it's huge like how do we not know that in geography goes from four thousand meters to yeah that's insane it's not like the whole thing's eight meters on the whole thing between eight and 150 meters the whole thing's about 100 meters but there's a bank here say um that fucking bank there is really shallow comes up to 15 meters and we're in so we're quite close to it four thousand meters up to 15. there's a good chance that's why this is so shit yeah i'd say so it's a vegemite and cheese cracker kind of day out here today perfect salty snack for sealer imagine the mona lisa right but with the rock's face when he's doing the eyebrow and that's what it tastes like oh it's been one of those days out here um kathy's over it and the weather's not looking like improving anytime soon we've got a flogging headsail we're still at least 10 to 12 days away and we've already been out here for eight now so yeah it's a bit of a shit sandwich so we've been keeping a really close eye on the weather routing for the next period we've just reached halfway so we've still got about just on 1100 miles to go before we reach um dar es salaam and over the last couple of days we've just been keeping an eye on this area here which i've told everyone about this is called the witch's cauldron that's the tip of madagascar there this is essentially a compression zone where all the all the winds from the southeast of the indian ocean just come barreling through here they compress and it really honks along through here so right now it's saying 23 knots but we know that there's a ship in here at the moment it's reporting 38 knot winds so we were contemplating actually pulling up and resting for a couple of nights at an island here but looking at the forecast ahead if i hit play it's a bit slow this but in a couple of days time what you'll see here is this compression zone really really um dip in strength and velocity so i don't think for us we should actually be stopping um i hate this model actually i cannot stand the pwg so let's start that again real quick um right there click on that there the pwg just seems to exaggerate everything it's ridiculous ecm wf has been really accurate gfs isn't too bad either actually although it tends to exaggerate pressure systems so low pressure systems and and highs so this is a little low pressure system here gfs would have that looking like a freaking cyclone but anyway if you keep watching here as we get through friday we're starting to really get quite close to this compression zone here um wind speed there 23 22 and you can just see it starting to drop 20 knots um so for us i think it would be wise as much as we're all desperate to just stop for a night or two and get some rest for us to pass up an opportunity to to go through this area here with the forecast breeze of 19 knots it's just it's insane we we cannot pass this up so by saturday sunday this week we should be passing through this area here with i'm not going to say benign winds but benign for this particular area um and once we get through there we're laughing because it actually then picks up again um and but by then we should be in the mozambique channel getting quite close to tanzania so i think that's our plan moving forward it actually is actually looking even better um so the slower we go the better to be honest but this is um this is a good result that being said it's still a long way out you know it's next monday on that forecast and there's a lot there's a lot of change between now and then all righty we are on day nine of our little adventure across the indian ocean and uh the weather guides for the moment are uh shining down on us we've had a rough couple of days as you would have seen yesterday was was not pleasant um it was horrible actually had us contemplating whether we made the right choice in buying a boat but today we've uh we've woken to um some pretty spectacular conditions sarah was on shift this morning um last night we basically had to motor it was just shit out sea state no wind rolling over the place we're just flogging the sails so we dropped them both and we're motoring on one engine um i went to bed at three o'clock this morning and sarah took over a shift and it was great i woke up just after sunrise i was obviously bugging and i woke up to no engine noise and a sail over my head um so sarah done furled the head in we were ticking along nicely about four knots then the sea state just sort of calmed right out even even more the swell got really big i know you can't see that but the swell got really big which which spaced the periods right out and made it lovely again so we've um we just decided to throw the spinny for the first time this entire trip we got the spinnaker up which is just that tells you everything you need to know we've just done 1100 miles and we've only just got the spinnaker up now um lines are out flashes in the water see if we can't get a fish we're just up on top of the um macarenae or whatever the big plateau there um into nice more shallow water it's 2000 meters we're coming up on a pretty shallow bank here and then laroche island as well um i don't know if you can see any of that but yeah so at the moment we're not doing too badly we're doing seven knots over ground there's not much wind eight knots well there's seven knots of breeze and we're doing seven knots over ground but we're being assisted by a pretty decent little current here um 1.7 knots of uh current just on the tail which is bloody fantastic so at the moment we're pretty much sailing to wind speed um which makes me happy what is it? mahi mahi please. I can see blue. Spanish please. Do you reckon it's wahoo? holy wahoo there you go really set that in set it in deep the crew favorite on excelsior today we've got the spinach cobbler just finished baking the insert and the boys just got a wahoo we've had the spinnaker off so much calmer out here big swell periods but they're nice and spaced out so it's much more comfortable and yeah it's a good day all around we've made it halfway or we're over halfway and now we've got plenty of fish instead of chicken yay things well and truly ramp up in the next episode when we encounter more squalls that turn into a rotating tropical storm it's been a roller coaster ride from hell the last 24 hours i just i don't even have the words to describe it thanks for watching join us next time for part two onwards and upwards