A LEAK Offshore ｜ Sailing across the South Atlantic ｜ Sailing Florence Ep.13

It is never smooth sailing when you're trying to cross an ocean. We're currently stuck here in Walvis Bay in Namibia. We're trying to find a weather window to escape and sail out across the South Atlantic to St Helena Island but we currently got over 30 knots here at anchor inshore and it is a hell of a lot worse out to sea and we do not want to be out there right now. The trouble is that once these strong winds have blown through the forecast is for zero wind along this section of coast so we have to decide between too much wind and too little. We've already been waiting here for a couple of weeks and we don't want to wait here for another week and a half to see what might come after that big area of no wind so what we're going to try and do is sneak out in the area of shifty unstable wind between the strong winds and the no wind area. If we can get far enough north and offshore in the first three days then we should be able to pop out into steady trade wind conditions for the rest of the 1200 mile voyage to St Helena Island. But right now it is impossible for us to even get ashore to check out with customs and immigration and reprovision the boat so we actually not only need a weather window to sail across the ocean we also need a weather window just to get ashore get some food and check out. We are Matanami. We have spent the last six years sailing our 37 foot sailboat Florence around the world. In that time we have crossed three oceans over 36,000 miles have passed under our keel and we are now closing in on our goal to complete our circumnavigation. Before us lies the Atlantic Ocean which we will now cross twice in order to reach the shores of England once more. To get from here in Namibia to the Caribbean means sailing across 5,600 miles of the South Atlantic Ocean. But in the middle of that ocean lies the island of St Helena. Its position on the trade wind route from Africa to the Caribbean means it has been an important rest and reprovisioning stop for sailing vessels since before the 1700s. It is like a motorway service station on the ocean and along with using it as a rest stop we hope to get ashore and explore this unique island. We managed to find a small gap in the weather to make a quick trip ashore to check out and grab some fresh provisions but the bad weather confined us to Florence to anchor for the next two days as we waited for the wind to subside. We're about as ready as we're ever going to be to leave. The forecast is still not looking ideal but we're both keen to go. Yeah the boat is completely covered in sand it's ridiculous and the boat is also getting thrown around as you can see in the background I think we're rolling this is not the most comfortable anchorage in the world. Yeah it's kind of one of those places where you think if we're moving around like this and we're not getting us enough sleep we we may as well be doing that at sea. Normally most of the time we've been setting off to places we set off when it's calm and today it's been really windy this morning we were getting 30-35 knot gusts this morning so that's why the boat's getting thrown around from the leftover swell. So we're not both feeling as calm as we normally are. I'm feeling a bit nervous. Yeah this passage I don't think is notorious it's not certainly not one that we felt nervous in the lead-up to but just the the conditions that we've had over the last couple of days and the forecast not being ideal means that I think we're both feeling a bit nervous it's the longest passage we've had in a while as well. For a long time yeah but a few butterflies in the stomach just means it's a proper adventure if you didn't have any butterflies in stomach it wouldn't be a proper adventure. The trouble is that we could stay here and and no better window appear and all the while the boat's just getting absolutely covered in the Namib desert. We're both ready to go so let's go. So it's time to go. Right let's go. Not so bad after all. Oh it's beautiful. It feels so good to be sailing again. The motion through the waves is much better when we're actually sailing through them instead of anchored and rolling with them. So we've got about well actually that's a 27 knot gust so it's still pretty windy but we've got Florence Reef down two reefs in the main two reefs in the genoa so she can cope was when we started. Very little wind out here just enough to keep us moving at three knots. Beautiful sunset. A nice gentle start. Hopefully we won't run out of wind and we can keep going through the night. Well as you can see this morning the wind has disappeared. In fact we've been struggling to make even two knots for most of the night. We knew this was going to happen and now we've just got to hope that we can get to through this really light patch to the trade winds that should be on the other side of it. So in about an hour's time we'll get an update to the weather model so we can download the latest forecast and see what it says. I'm hoping it's going to show that even at less than two knots we can just plod along and wait for the wind to come to us. But if this if it looks like this wind hole is going to expand out from the coast we may have to turn on the engine to get ahead of it and get into those trade winds before the wind hole expands and swallows us up. We knew it was going to be light winds when we set off. That was going to be the problem trying to get through the light wind patch and we prefer that to dealing with too much wind. It's much more comfortable in light winds at least even though we've been going slow it's been really nice and comfortable on board. Beautiful sailing, beautiful night skies and a really nice introduction to the passage. Once we get into the trade winds it should be a bit more boisterous already going to get some bigger waves from the side which is going to throw us around a little bit. So it's sort of make the most of this light and gentle stuff rather than getting frustrated by it. But doing two knots does mean we're going to do 48 miles a day. It's like less than half walking pace. It's quite ridiculous really. Later that day the wind picked up a tiny bit so we're gliding along beautifully over the calm sea. It feels so good to be out here the sailing conditions we couldn't ask for better really it's just incredible nice fairly flat seas enough breeze to fill the sails and keep us moving and we're just both feeling elated to be out here and to have an empty horizon and hundreds of miles ahead of us it's just such a good place to be. It doesn't really matter how many times we've set out on a long passage or an ocean crossing and we get caught up in that kind of pre-stress of leaving and you're constantly thinking about what you could have forgotten what could go wrong have you picked the absolute best weather window and it's it's not a really nice time to be honest when you're getting ready for an ocean passage there's a there's a lot of anxiety and that doesn't really go away no matter how many crossings I think you've set out on and and then you just leave and you leave all of that behind and it feels so good to be out here. Before we started sailing around the world I used to wonder what it would be like to lose sight of land and and to me that was previously kind of an anxiety inducing moment but now it's one of the things that I look forward to the most it's it's one of my favorite bits of ocean sailing is is getting to that point where we lose sight of of land and there is nothing on the horizon I love it. Well here we are out in the South Atlantic Ocean and it's a beautiful day out here sea state's pretty steady despite it's still making us roll around a bit because we're going almost dead downwind but this is what we have to do when we're at sea we have to do this a couple of times a day is we get a wind shift and we have to change the sails so we've been sailing along overnight and most this morning with the wind coming over this quarter of Florence so that's catching it nicely with all the sails we've got set at the moment but now we've had a wind shift and we need to now sail along with the wind coming over that quarter of Florence which means we now need to change all of the sails over to the other side and most of that one of us can do by ourselves so we don't need to wake the other person up but changing this pole over to the other side especially when the boat's rolling it's much easier and safer to do with two people so for that I've woken Amy up from her mid-morning nap and then this will take us about 20 minutes maybe half an hour to change everything over and then Amy can go back to bed again and I'll go back to keeping a lookout until it's time for my afternoon nap this afternoon first we release the preventer on the mainsail then we pull the mainsail in hard so that we can keep it under control as we steer through the gybe once we have gybed the mainsail we swap the preventer onto the other side and attach it to the mainsail again the preventer prevents the mainsail from accidentally gybing across the boat and means it is much safer for us to move past it on deck that's the mainsail done so now we can furl the genoa with the genoa furled we can take the pole in now the pole is out of the way we can gybe the staysail this is the simplest job just let one rope out and pull one in on the other side that's the staysail done so back to the genoa we need to swap all of the ropes that were holding the pole across onto the new side once he has swapped the ropes over we can put the pole out on the new side finally we unfurl the genoa onto the pole and we are done that is until the wind shifts again of heading back towards africa it's not intentional but the wind has completely died and we've been drifting unfortunately drifting in the wrong direction we're totally surrounded in fog we have been for a lot of the night and it's very wet and as you can see quite cold on deck we could motor and we'll probably have to for a couple of hours at least just to charge the batteries because they're not going to get any solar power we can only carry enough fuel to motor about four or five hundred miles but we've got 876 to go and if we were to use all of that diesel up we'd have to fill it up by a jerry can in st helena it's quite a difficult process and it costs £2.25 a litre so we're not doing that so i think we're gonna drift for a little bit longer and wait for the wind well it looks like we've just escaped that fog bank we were drifting around with all sails down for a couple of hours we're in the fog bank for a link four hours since amy swapped over watches with me this morning and i thought it might take until late afternoon for us to get some wind but it's lunchtime and we've just popped out that fog bank into beautiful blue skies flat water 12 knots of breeze and some awesome sailing now hopefully what should happen now if this is the true breeze we're expecting is it's currently coming from slightly in front of us it should shift around to come more from the side and then more from behind and then we'll pick up speed and be making really good progress towards st helena and hopefully this should be us in the wind for the rest of the way now it's a lot warmer now we're not in the middle of the fog bank don't need like four layers having reached the steady trade winds with florence making good speed towards the island of st helena it was all going a little too smoothly africa is 500 miles that way the tiny island st helena is 730 miles that way and we've sprung a leak it always happens in the middle of the ocean happened to us halfway across the atlantic we had a thousand miles behind us and a thousand miles to go and we sprung a leak then now this time it's not crazy we're only taking on somewhere between half and one liter per hour so nothing that the bilge pump can't cope with but not something that we can just ignore because it could get worse so we've been through the seacocks and everything in front of the boat we can't really tell where it's coming from yet and we've discounted those they're not leaking at all discount the water tank i don't think it's i don't think it's the water tanks in the boat it could be i tasted it and it didn't seem really salty but it didn't seem really fresh so i couldn't really tell which it was there are some jerry cans of water in here which could be leaking that could be it um or we've got a couple of other seacocks in the lazarette here which so now i've got to empty everything out lazarette and then everything down to cockpit locker and just track down where it is i mean even if we can't fix it we need to know where it's coming in from so it does suddenly get worse and we can make some decisions about what to do because we are in the middle of the ocean i guess as far as the eye can see you've got a beautiful sea as far as the horizon there is no one else out here there are no ships we're out of radio range of anyone so we have to fix this just because matt said we're alone out here we were then suddenly on a collision course with this ship he's luckily changed course a little bit that'd be a good thing if we were sinking yeah we would have obviously been very happy to see them if we'd have been taking on more water than than we are and there's water in the bottom here okay well looks like this might be the culprit oh that's all right i think i found the source of the leak this pipe oh yeah exactly uh it's supposed to be connected to the drain that goes around this hatch and it's just not attached there's quite a lot of water down below and so what i think must have happened is it didn't matter when we were leaving walvis bay and it was all calm and then as we've got into the trade winds overnight we've been having a lot of water on decks we've been charging along at seven knots heeling over and slopping around and a lot of water's been going down the side of the deck and draining through this hatch and obviously it's all been funneling straight into lazarette but because florence doesn't have a clean run of bilge there's lots of ribs in here there's various compartments which are about yay high which it's clearly been cascading down to and i can tell that because the lower ones are more empty than the top ones if you know what i mean it's definitely started at top and gone downhill and and then gradually it's overcome those ledges and gone into the bilge forward and and even though we've not got water on the deck at the moment we're still gaining water in the bilge because as we're rolling it's just slopping about and eventually going over each rib at least that's my theory at least that's definitely one source of a leak okay so this is the pipe that's come off and this is the drain where it's supposed to go onto that comes down from the surround around the cockpit now i guess i probably should have this bolted to the bulkhead somehow so it can't get knocked off uh well you live and you learn or at least you do if you don't sink what you can't see is that as we're rolling back and forth i'm having to hold odds and just not get thrown about it's a lot more difficult doing these sorts of things when you're at sea i think what's happened is as we've been rolling something in lazarette has just moved and hit this and the hose clamp's not been tight but there's not space for two hose clamps on that everything that goes out the bottom of the boat or is below the waterline has double hose clamps on it um but that isn't well that's not as bad as i feared so i've got a big bailing out job to get all the little nooks and crannies in here dry it all out obviously fix that and then bail the bilge out one more time and then fingers crossed it'll stay dry one of the things that we find difficult to share when we're sailing is the motion of the boat and the perspective of where we are at sea and the best way to do that would be to fly our drone we've only got a little mavic air and launching and recovering that at sea from a moving boat is really difficult and obviously there's a high risk of us losing that drone over the side and it's our only one but since we left cape town we've been using this which is insta360 one x2 combined with a three meter long selfie stick and we've been getting some really good results with this it allows us to achieve drone like shots without the risk of flying the drone the software that comes with it automatically removes the pole from the shot to be honest before we got this we were a bit skeptical about it but now after months of using it we would not be without it we can use it in any conditions without worrying and we're constantly finding new angles to capture with it both at sea and on land once we have shot the footage on the 360 degree camera we take it off and we put it into the software that comes with the camera on the laptop this allows us to transform it from a 360 degree view into a standard view that we can use in the videos that we make we can choose where within 360 degrees we point the view that we want to see we can zoom in and out and we can also dynamically choose different angles at different times in the video clip and the software will automatically smooth out the transitions between those angles for us once we have manipulated the view to get what we want we export the video clip and load it into our regular video editing software where we add it to the clips from our main camera from our drone from our gopros sound from our various microphones and voiceovers to make the videos that you watch on youtube we hope you've enjoyed the new angles we've been able to get with this let us know what you think in the comments below the video and if you want one of these for yourself there is an affiliate link in the description below the video next time we encounter squally conditions as we sail florence on westward across the south atlantic ocean and we reach possibly the biggest milestone of our entire voyage so far don't forget to subscribe to catch the next episode we release a video every two weeks if you'd like to find out more about behind the scenes on florence track our progress across the oceans in real time find out where we are right now or ask us pretty much anything then please head over to our patreon site and join the crew we'd like to thank everyone who supports us to make these videos possible and a special thank you to our staff patrons