Vomit Comet

There are many slang terms for the word "vomit", such as "puke" and "spew". Some of these are distinctly regional - where I'm from, we say "boke". In South Africa, the relevant term is "kotch".

Today, for the first time in well over a year, I kotched while at sea.

I had foolishly agreed to go out with Shaun and a couple of the other students, Evan and Alex, to take some more sun sights for the Ocean Yachtmaster exam. These have to be done out of sight of land, so the plan was to get on the boat at 5am and head directly offshore. The forecast was for a benign fifteen knots of breeze. The intention was to take it easy and perhaps do some fishing.

It was not to be. The breeze built fairly quickly, so that before long we were on a close reach with two reefs and our number 3 jib. The wind wasn't actually too bad, maxing at about 25 knots (Force 6, disparagingly known to salty sea dogs as a "yachtsman's gale"), but the sea state was a mess. We got hit by two proper greenies, one of which lifted me right up in the air before plonking me rudely back on the deck. (For those not familiar with the term, a "greenie" is the sort of wave that makes the whole world go momentarily green as you get completely immersed in water.)

All of this was most distressing, as I have long ago committed myself to a more gentlemanly kind of sailing, which mostly involves loafing around the yacht club bar in a blue blazer, loudly expounding my views on capital punishment and slurping large pink gins. Nonetheless, today I found myself in the sadly familiar position of struggling to hank on a headsail at the wet end of a wet boat on a very wet day.

I suppose things weren't helped by the fact that the L34 is nowhere near as stable a platform as good old Cardiff. It's half the size for a start, and it's really a very light (though sturdy) race boat. It all gets very bouncy.

As did the contents of my stomach. Deviating from the usual script, I was more or less fine as we headed upwind, and only started to turn seriously green when we bore away back home. As always, however, it's better out than in, and the world was a happier place after I fed the fish. It wasn't too embarassing: a couple of the other guys were also sick.

Perhaps it was nerves. My exams are confirmed for next week. Theory on Monday, practical prep on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then a monster twelve hour practical test including night sailing on Thursday. The Ocean exam (incorporating the celestial navigation) is on Friday. It's going to be in Cape Town and Langebaan (about sixty miles north of there) as Durban is not an approved RYA exam centre, so I am catching a flight on Monday.

Obviously, you think, I will be feverishly poring over my books, polishing up on my COLREGS, GMDSS, MARPOL and all the other acronyms that infest sailing these days. No, I won't actually. The good people of Professional Yachtmaster Training have invited me to their Christmas do, which is a weekend camping in Rocky Bay, south of Durban. I believe the plan is to drink beer, burn the flesh of dead animals, and talk rubbish. I suspect it will be a lot better than most office parties I have attended.

So the plan for the next week is to party, and do exams. I feel like a proper student again. Next, I'll be collecting for Rag Week and going to Socialist Worker demos.

Except I won't. Next, I'll be packing up my kit and heading back to the UK. I have come to a momentous decision in the last couple of weeks: I'm heading back to Real Life. It's not really a financial decision, more that I don't want sailing to be a job. I would rather have it as something to look forward to.

So I will be in the job market next year. I won't be going back to the markets, as I have that t-shirt already, but given my skills, abilities and experience I do expect I will be settling into an office job sometime in the next few months.

Yuk. I need to kotch again.

South, But Not Too Far

Durban, relatively painlessly. Rather weirdly for this trip, things went more or less according to plan. We weighed anchor from Clube Naval early on Monday morning.

Along for the ride was a chum of Neil, called Nuno Quartin, who is a Portuguese Mozambican who now lives in Durban. We had drained his brain of his comprehensive local knowledge for our survey over the previous few days. He is something of an aristocrat among the great and the good of the Clube Naval, having been a member since about the time of Henry the Navigator. He is, of course, a ridiculously experienced sailor. He and Neil have cruised together extensively. I won't recount the story of their traversal of Suez since that will no doubt be in a book of its own some day. Let it just be said, the man has miles.

It's rather irritating that a full circumnavigation with the Clipper race only just gets me into the "promising youngster" category in this part of the world.

Anyway, back to the sailing.

The plan was: motor out to Inhaca island early in the day, catch the North-East wind as it blew up mid-morning, run downwind to Richards Bay in short order, consider ducking in if the South-Wester threatened (as was forecast), then zip down to Durban when it passed.

And, lo, so it was. More or less. The North-East came a bit later than we thought but otherwise the Richards Bay leg was a 20 hour sprint. The South-Wester did loom as we made the harbour entrance. We had to clear in through the usual blizzard of officialdom, and there was no pontoon to berth at so we were perched at a stone jetty in the small craft harbour. Apart from that, it was all sweet: beer, portuguese food, and talking crap. The finer things in life.

The international cruising yachties are starting to arrive in South Africa from the Indian Ocean islands as they flee the cyclone season. They are a salty bunch, sailing a variety of alarmingly tiny looking cruising boats. They clearly watch out for one another, and there was evident relief when one of their companions, sailing single-handed, pitched into the Bay several days late after nineteen days at sea.

Also there was one of Neil's delivery skipper buddies, Terry Cox. Usual thing - about two million miles experience, three circumnavigations, and skin you could make a saddle out of.

As I said, it's irritating.

The balance of the trip to Durban was a bit dull, but mercifully quick. The wind was light, so we chugged down stinkboat-stylee, but at least we weren't beating. We made Durban in an uneventful fourteen hours. At least we had plenty of opportunity to observe the humpback whales again. As I said before, this coast is just infested with them. Honestly, they should get some Japanese sushi scientists in to sort the problem out. Apart from anything else, they are a legal hazard. The rules say you shouldn't get within 300 metres of them. However, no-one has told the whales.

We passed close to one doing its favourite party trick of floating vertically with its tail waving in the air. Those tail flukes are just, uh (consults thesaurus), big - so big you just stare slack-jawed at the thing and say profound things like, "Bloody hell, that's big."

We managed not to hit any.

My plan to take celestial sights almost came a cropper when the North-Easter rather atypically brought a grey, overcast sky with it. In theory, I know how to fix my position using stars, planets, the Moon and the Sun. Clouds, however, are tricky. I did eventually manage to take some sun sights on the way down from Richards Bay. I didn't do anything as keen as actually reduce them on the boat. I'll do that at my leisure here on shore. Mr GPS got us home safely.

(Actually, we didn't even use that. The passage plan was : Keep Africa on the right, and head in when you see a massive city. Don't let anyone tell you that this navigation stuff is hard.)

So, we are back in Durban. There is much to do. Apart from reducing sights and getting geared up for some exams, there's the boat to clean, a load of rancid laundry and other similarly exciting tasks.

Plus, of course a bit of net surfing, blogs and the like. Todays favourite is to read about the unfolding drama about 1100nm more or less directly south of here.

The competitors in the Velux 5 Oceans are currently heading into the Southern Ocean. This is a single-handed race - not quite non-stop, but with very few breaks. They sail Open 60s, which are to Clipper 68s what a Formula 1 Ferrari is to a Volvo 740 estate.

Early on Friday morning, the keel dropped off Hugo Boss, sailed by former Clipper skipper Alex Thomson. This is bad. At 45° south it's lethal. The Open 60 is a very wide design, and so it can stay up without its keel. But what changes very much for the worse is its angle of vanishing stability, which measures how easily it will recover after being flipped over. Without a keel, it won't.

So, cue some heroics from another competitor, a legendary solo sailor called Mike Golding in Ecover. He turned his boat around, sailed back 80 miles upwind and rescued Thomson.

That's a short sentence to describe what must have been a hellish time. The Open 60 doesn't go so well upwind, and down at those latitudes nothing goes well upwind. The Challenge 72s, which are steel boats designed for it, come back to the UK with massive dents from the battering they take. Plus, Golding didn't have an engine, so manoeuvring must have been torture. Apparently it took four hours to get Thomson on board.

And then, only a few hours later, Ecover's mast broke. So now Thomson and Golding and Thomson are struggling back to Cape Town (about 1000nm). They are most seriously in the poo.

Hopefully, they will get there safely, but both will be shattered. The first time I saw Thomson, and Hugo Boss, was alongside the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town two years ago when he was forced to retire from the 2004 Vendee Globe with a mast malfunction. He will probably want to puke when he sees it again, and this time having abandoned his boat to the sea.

Check out the news at the 5 oceans website. It's just bonkers.

I'll be heading over that way for my exams. I might get to see them come in. Here's hoping they are both OK.

Talking Heads

Our time in Maputo is nearly up. As I write, Neil is out on the boat with our Mozambican students, putting them through some final paces before their exam this afternoon. As the weather forecast looks good for a North-Easter, we will probably leave tomorrow morning.

Our last few days have been, as usual, a bit mixed. We got out of the marina at High Water on Thursday without much trouble, which was a relief. We anchored in front of the Clube Naval, which is also beset by silt and cannot accomodate large keelboats. It is not an ideal anchorage, being exposed to both the common wind directions here, but we had little choice as we had to be able to easily transfer the students on by tender.

The first hiccup was that John had to leave us abruptly, due to a personal problem back in Durban. We were sorry to see him go. He is a remarkable man, who has created a life where by rights none should be possible. His attackers placed a nine-millimetre pistol directly to his head and still he survived. His injuries were so severe, he even has a death certificate. I was brought up to pay proper respects to the deceased, and I am very happy to accord John more reverence than normal.

Friday was perhaps our most succesful day. We took the students out for their first real day of sailing. Conditions were perfect - strong enough to get the boat moving convincingly yet not strong enough to cause too much stress. They all enjoyed themselves thoroughly.

Saturday was a smidgin less enjoyable. The day progressed as follows.

• 4:30 am - awake on the boat with growling tummy, and definite signs of imminent African scoots syndrome.
• 5:00 am - wind picks up from south-west. Boat starts to pitch violently at anchor.
• 6:00 am - visit heads to dispose of contents of African tummy.
• 6:05 am - flush heads.
• 6:06 am - block heads.
• 6:10am - strip, don foulies, get bucket, sponge and toolbox.
• 6:20am - boat touches bottom on falling tide. Abandon heads to move anchorage.
• 6:30am - resume heads maintenance.
• 7:30am - boat touches bottom again. Repeat previous two steps.
• 8:30am - admit defeat. Seal heads unit, wipe up shit.
• 9:00am - go ashore.
• 9:05am - discover water off and showers inoperative. Cry, and want my mummy.
• 9:10am - torrential rain starts.

It goes on, but I shan't bore you any more. That, of course, is a fairly bare outline of what happened. I don´t think you want me to wax too poetical about the exact feeling of being wedged into a tiny heads compartment, on a pitching boat in 25 knots of breeze with copious quantities of African diarrhoea swilling around the compartment and more making its presence felt in my gut.

I finally fixed it this morning. The problem was with a component called (honestly) the joker valve. Why is it called that? If I told you what I had to do to fix it, you´d say "You must be f...ing joking!"

It hasn´t all been awful. We had a great meal out with our hosts last night. More of those amazing prawns. But the bad stuff is tending to dominate my thoughts at the moment.

Never mind. Off tomorrow, and hopefully a good downhill run to Durban. En route, I have to take some celestial sights to qualify for my Ocean Yachtmaster exam. Should be interesting.

Discovering Maputo

Well, as detailed in my last post, it hasn't been a great start to the Maputo experience, but things are getting a bit better, and we are beginning to achieve things.

Our purpose here is two-fold: to teach a Day Skipper course for some local sailors, and to survey the Bay of Maputo for suitability as an RYA training area. (I hope to be the first beneficiary.)

Objective One ran aground (literally) on Saturday (although the theoretical classroom-based component is going well). However, we hope to get sailing again tomorrow as we get closer to spring tides. Hopefully there will be an extra half metre of water in the harbour at High Water, which will float our boat. If not, we are in trouble. The only remaining techniques available to us involve steel cable, slings and Chinook helicopters.

We began on Objective Two yesterday, and yet again things started inauspiciously. The plan has always been to scoot around the bay in a motor boat taking bearings, checking depths and generally assessing potential anchorages. We had reserved a small boat for the purpose, courtesy of one of the many helpful souls at the Clube Naval. However, half a mile outside the marina, the engine started to labour and we found that a valve in the fuel line was faulty. Back to base.

We were rescued by the club president, Miguel, who is one of those people who just exudes a kind of tireless "can-do" energy. He provided us with the use of his large ski-boat which he uses for fishing. To my sailing mentality, there is something just rude about skimming across the water on an airless day at 30 knots. But there is no denying it gets you around. We achieved much, surveying the perimeter of Xefina Island (which bears no relation to the image on the most recent chart). Today we zipped around the paradise island of Inhaca, spotting frigate birds and cranes along huge, perfct beaches.

Apart from that, I have just been getting the feel of this place. It is really easy to write bad stuff about Mozambique. It is very poor (it was once the poorest in the world), it had a horrific civil war in the 1980s that killed a million people and it's vital statistics are still fairly chilling. Here's one: the average life expectancy is 37 years. I'm an old man here.

If you want to know more, click on the Oxfam link on the left. They have all the news on the country, plus what they are doing about it.

So bad stuff aplenty. Maputo bears the marks of a poor Third World country - rubbish, squalor, poorly maintained buildings and infrastructure. But as so often, it is side-by-side with signs of prosperity and luxury. Near where we are berthed, a roadside advertisment for Mont Blanc pens looks down on an open sewer.

Part of me wants to believe that these are signs that things will improve for everyone. After all, it is impossible to expect the whole population to start increasing their standards of living at the same rate. But that life expectancy number needs a lot of work before Mont Blanc pens become accessible to the bulk of the population.

Having said that, the visitor sees little evidence of out-and-out misery. People are friendly. I feel pretty safe here (much more so than in the Philippines, for example). The markets thrive. The colours are vibrant. The music has that pleasant mixture of Latin and African also found in Brazil. Out on the bay, lateen-rigged dhows sail up and down carrying fishermen who work the bay as their forebears will have done for centuries. There is plenty to please the senses.

The only real problem for us has been the infestation of mosquitos. We came prepared, with insect repellent and coils to burn inside the boat. The Moz mozzies laugh in the face of such measures. Come sundown, they zoom into the boat, inhale the aroma appreciatively and chow down. I think what is marketed as mosquito repellent in South Africa is actually akin to Chanel No19 for these buggers, judging by how utterly unfazed they were by it. Neil is a flinty-eyed veteran of numerous African hellholes and has never seen anything like it. We have upped our anti-bug arsenal to include the mozzie equivalent of cluster-bombs, napalm and sarin nerve gas but still they come. Last night we zapped the boat with so much insecticide it set off the gas alarm. It did us more harm than it did them.

None of this is particularly pleasant in a malaria zone.

We are offshore as of tomorrow hopefully, so maybe it will be better then.

I hope.

No, I pray.

Mozambique

As a child, I learned that the capital of Mozambique was Lourenco Marques. At the age of thirty-five, to my shame, I have only just learned that it is now called Maputo. This knowledge was revealed to me as we arrived into the harbour here on Saturday afternoon, which is cutting it a bit fine.

Getting here has been a bit of a "performance", as South Africans tend to label any particularly laborious process - "in five acts" if they want to emphasize the point.

We left at noon on Tuesday. The boat was provisioned for, provisionally, two to three days at sea for the 240nm coastal passage, plus a ten to fifteen day stay here. So far, things have not gone totally to plan.

To start with, just completing the paperwork to get out of Durban was something of a "mission", as South Africans say when they feel they are over-using the word "performance". The procedure for clearing out of a South African port is clearly the brainchild of a particularly efficient bureaucracy. Note that I do not mean that it is particularly efficient at regulating traffic in and out of the port, but that it is highly efficient at being a bureaucracy.

That means forms. Lots of forms. And stamps - big, heavy ones that make a satisfying thump when they are whacked down on the forms. It means multiple grim offices, in multiple grim industrial locations. It means quizzical eyebrows and exasperated sighs when it transpires that this sadly ill-informed client has failed to obtain Exemption Certificate 87X1C (Part A). All very expertly done in this case.

Me, I'd have placed the Port Authority office somewhere slightly less obvious than in the actual port. I would perhaps have encouraged the imaginative use of carbon paper to increase file sizes. But on the whole it was a satisfyingly laborious, tedious, and complex process.

Nonetheless, four hours of wrestling with officaldom saw us on our way.

Ideally, the timing of a passage would be made with due regard to suitable weather conditions. In sailing "weather" basically means "wind". On the South-East coast of Africa, it's pretty easy. They have two kinds of wind: North-East and South-West - in other words, up the coast or down the coast. If you want to go up the coast, leave when the wind is blowing up the coast, and vice versa.If you want to go up the coast, don't leave when the wind is blowing down the coast because that is stupid. It involves beating to windward, and as we all know gentlemen don't sail to windward.

Much to my mother's shame, I am sadly no gentleman, and my life actually and metaphorically often involves a large amount of beating upwind - hence the title of this blog.

And so, since Neil was contracted to start a sailing course on Saturday 11th, we had to leave on Tuesday despite a brisk North-East breeze.

It wasn't too bad to start with, and came from slightly more to the East. We were able to sail close-hauled in pretty much the right direction for a while. Even when it did eventually back to the North-East, it was light enough that we could drop the sails and motor into it. It's not elegant, but it gets the job done.

The net result was that we made decent progress and fetched Richards Bay (the last port in RSA before Mozambique) by breakfast time on Wednesday. We had clocked 85 miles. Not brilliant, but not bad either.

Then the breeze kicked in properly. It became impossible to motor into it and so we hoisted the sails and began to beat to windward.

I've explained this process before, but perhaps the basic facts bear repeating:

1. It's quite a trick. Sailing boats can't sail exactly into the wind, but they can zig-zag ("beat" or "tack") at about 45 degrees to the the wind.
2. It's a complete, absolute, vertically-integrated, surgically-enhanced pain in the arse.

It can also be ridiculously slow. Suppose the boat can sail at five knots. Not bad. You can make 120nm in a day, which is progress. However, if you are beating you zig-zag at an angle to the wind which, in the best of conditions, adds about 40% to your journey. So of your 120nm travelled, only about 85 miles is progress.

And conditions are rarely that good. Add in the effects of an adverse current (there's real doozy off this coast) and the fact that a strong breeze knocks the boat sideways downwind and you get to the stage where you have sailed 120nm in twenty-four hours, but are only thirty miles closer to your destination.

The effects are cruelly apparent on a coastal passage when you find that, after half an hour of thumping around, that interesting rock on the beach is only about five hundred metres further away.

Thusly we found ourselves on Wednesday afternoon. We were in no danger, just damp and frustrated. However, the situation deserved some thought. Standfast is an adapted race boat designed to be sailed comfortably by six to eight people. We were three. We faced the prospect of two or three days more of this torture, at which point we would be endangered by our own fatigue.

Such were Neil's thoughts. He's not a softie by any stretch (he has 150,000 miles of sailing under his belt), but he was pretty clear that continuing on would put us in unnecessary jeopardy. The coast of Africa is sparsely populated and there would be no port of refuge or anchorage until Maputo. So, reluctantly, we turned back for Richards Bay, which sadly wasn't that far away for all our efforts.

At Richards Bay we found showers, loos, beer and pizza, which as any yachtie knows are (almost) the only necessary ingredients for a truly happy life. We had a night's sleep before heading off again - not without the inevitable five-act bureaucratic performance, of course.

The forecast was for a stiff South-Westerly which would propel us up the coast at warp speed. It was pleasant, as we smashed through the chop thrown up by a diametrically opposite wind, to ponder the remarkably high levels of illegitimacy among employees of the South African Weather Service. Nonetheless, we knew that the vaunted South-Westerly was actually blowing in Durban, so we had reasonable grounds to believe it would catch up with us soon.

It didn't. Well, it did, on Thursday evening for a couple of hours before it died. We dreaded the return of the wind from the North-East, but happily it did the second most decent thing it could, and just stayed light and calm.

The result was that Friday and Saturday were dominated by motoring. That's not too much fun, but at least the rock on the beach recedes at a reasonable rate. We rounded Inhaca Island at the edge of the Bay of Maputo on Saturday mid-morning, and made Maputo itself at about 3pm. It had taken over four days to do 240nm, and we counted ourselves fortunate.

In truth, it wasn't bad at all. The sights, sounds and smells of the African coast are not hard to bear, provided they past by at a reasonable rate.

The tourism authorities here employ a troupe of rather flamboyant and theatrical humpback whales to entertain coastal sailors here. They breach, they spout, they lazily wave around tail flukes rather larger than I am - the whole Discovery Channel thing. It's all a bit "Look at me, I'm awesome" for some tastes, but it passes the time if you like that sort of thing. Which I do.

It was unfortunate, then, that we ran one over. At least we think we did. If you are sailing in a clear twenty metres, you weigh five tons and are travelling at five knots, it takes a bloody large fish to stop you dead in the water. It takes something even bigger not to care. That was on Friday afternoon, and it did cause us to collectively purse our lips in mild consternation until we established that there was no damage to the keel.

Our arrival in Maputo was, of course, late. The local guys who were booked on the sailing course at the weekend were now missing a day of sailing. Nonetheless, they were kindness itself in arranging formalities for us and welcoming us in. They had arranged a berth for us in the municipal marina. Getting into that turned out to be one of these missions that we were getting increasingly used to. It is heavily silted up, and even close to high tide it was clear that a significant portion of our keel was dragging through the mud. However, we were assured that there was noooooooo problem - that we would get out without hassle at high tide.

You can see this one coming, can't you?

We arranged that the students would arrive just before high tide the following morning, and that we would sail all day to make up the lost time on the course. We then retired for showers, beer and two kilos of luscious Mozambiquan prawns, all of which made the world seem like a very happy place.

Yup. We failed to get out of the marina the following morning. We managed to get the boat about ten metres off the pontoon before sticking fast. We pondered the wisdom of gunning the engine to force ourselves off, considered eventualities such as sticking again at the marina entrance on a falling tide with the boat tipping over, calculated the likely repair bill, and aborted the mission. We managed to get the boat back on to the pontoon. We tied up. And then we threw ourselves upon the mercy of our hosts.

They could have been annoyed, angry, frustrated. If they were any of these things, none of it showed. We were whisked off to the local yacht club and treated to many kindnesses - particularly from Carlos, the Commodore of the club, and Jorge and Monica who run the dinghy school. We then dispersed to enjoy a Maputo Sunday.

And so it is that I find myself sipping Laurentino beer (entry 4563 in my forthcoming work Beers of the World - A Sailor's Guide) in a bar by the bay. It is hosing down with rain brought by, you guessed it, an enthusiastic South-Westerly wind that would have deposited us on the beach here about twenty minutes after leaving Durban.

I look forward to finding out more about this place. I already like the beer, the food, the ambience, and the people. As I write, I am engaged by a couple of friendly locals, Edgar and Sergio. Edgar is 28 today and requests a mention here, which I am happy to provide. Happy Birthday.

More about Maputo, and Mozambique, soon.

Sailing a Desk

I've not been very communicative for the last couple of weeks, I know. For the first time in quite a while, I have been spending large portions of my day in front of a computer screen, and I'm not quite used to it yet. Spending yet more time typing a blog hasn't seemed an appealing idea.

Not that there has been a huge amount to write about. I've been concentrating on celestial navigation, so much of the time since my last entry has been spent in a classroom or at my desk grappling with such mysteries as the PZX triangle, local spheroids and the exact definition of Civil Twilight. It gets my blood racing, but then I am a not-quite-reformed maths geek with strongly nerdy tendencies. It doesn't matter that GPS has made all of this knowledge almost obsolete. I enjoy it as an exercise in itself.

Having said that, it has been hard work. The concepts aren't too difficult - if you have sufficient spatial awareness to visualize lines on a slightly squished sphere, you are pretty much there. The problem is that actual sights, reductions and plotting have to be very accurate, and there are dozens of little corrections and adjustments to be made before the answer is reached. It normally takes me about forty-five minutes to turn sights data into a position on a chart, and I usually end up somewhere in the Barents Sea, leading me to suspect I may have made an error.

Apparently, the RAF navigators on the WWII had to be able to do the whole process of sights and calculation inside seven minutes, presumably while freezing in the cockpit of a Lancaster bomber and being machine-gunned by Messerschmidts. I have some way to go to reach that level yet.

The other task of the week has been to write a mammoth 8000 word tome describing our Atlantic passage last July. I have to give an account of such a journey as part of my exam. Needless to say, no-one reading it will be left in any doubt that only my meticulous planning and supreme navigational skills got us across alive. The examiner will either resign and offer me his job on the spot, or have me arrested for fraud and attempting to pervert the course of justice.

The good news is that the fun sailing starts next week, on Tuesday. I will be heading up to Maputo in Mozambique with Neil Schwegmann, Colin's brother. We'll be there three weeks or so, which we will spend getting in all the practice I need for my yachtmaster in the tricky shallows and streams there, plus doing some surveying work and training some locals. I may take some of my practical exams up there too.

I have no idea what to expect. Mozambique suffered a particularly nasty post-colonial civil war in the seventies and eighties (bad even by African standards) but is reportedly much better off now. Still, I don't expect that things will be terribly advanced. Apparently, there are still remnants of Portuguese grandeur there, but I haven't seen so much as a photo of the place so I'm quite eager to find out.

Coming along for the ride will be a friend of Neil's, John Skelton. John was shot and seriously injured about fifteen years ago, suffering severe brain damage which has affected hismemory, speech and physical abilities (he has no sensation in the right side of his body). With typical South African sensitivity, he is universally known as "Dof John" - "dof" being Afrikaans slang for "stupid" or "dim".

He is coming along to see whether he can feasibly crew, or indeed skipper, a yacht outside of the harbour. He owns a boat here in Durban, but has been understandably reluctant to sail it. Neil agreed to instruct him to Day Skipper level, taking into account his difficulties. Not that he is being mollycoddled: a typical comment from Neil is "We need to think up a watch system, but it's going to be hard with just three people and two and a half brains."

They're a caring bunch, these Saffers.

The passage will take at least two days each way, plus fifteen days of pootling around up there. We've already done most of the prep - I've been down cleaning bilges and out at supermarkets buying victuals. It's all on quite a cute, cuddly scale compared to prepping the Clipper boats.

We'll be sailing on Standfast, the first yacht I ever sailed on, so I will be feeling nostalgic. I expect the work will be quite hard, but I expect to enjoy it.