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.