Day 3 we flew the main and Code D. The conditions were the stuff that sailing marketing videos are made of. The wind was a steady 20 knots from the starboard rear quarter, with following seas. We set the current speed record for the trip thus far: 21.9 knots.

The wind decreased on day 4, which meant it was time to break out the parasail. It’s shaped like a regular spinnaker, but there are two important differences: both clews have both a sheet and a guy attached to them (four lines total), and the “waist” of the sail has a section of the fabric cut out and reconfigured to form something similar to a windsock that runs the width of the sail. It forms a “wing” perpendicular to the front surface of the sail, which provides a lot of stability to the sail and eliminates the need for a spinnaker pole. Since there is no longer a pole, the sail can be moved freely to either side of the boat depending on the conditions (i.e. no jibe required). If the sail is trimmed properly, there are a series of telltales above the cut-out that should be pointing straight down, and a series of telltales below the cut-out pointing straight up.

Coda is maufactured by Outremer, a French company. The following sticker appears on the bulkhead behind steering wheel:

We interpret it to mean “learn how to sail or your catamaran will be upside-down, which is bad.”

We are within 24 hours of arriving at St. Helena Island. Immigration, customs and the port authority have been notified of our impending arrival.

Here is an idea of the amount of traffic on the ocean right now:

And yet we’ve only actually seen 4 or 5 ships the entire leg, most of them barely visible above the horizon…

20˚18.603’ S, 2˚02.896’ W

The crew has been discussing time and how it changes when one is at sea. I think Dan has summed it up the best thus far: “We’re traveling through space, but not traveling through time.”

Indeed, time is completely different right now. It’s not so much that time has stopped; it’s more like we’ve been repeating the same 24 hours since the continent of Africa disappeared over the horizon some unknown number of days ago. If one strips away the clocks and calendars and computers and internet, the only natural indication that one day is different than the next is the moon changing shape each night.

Thinking back to our time on the dock in Cape Town, time was very linear. It was filled with the tension of all the work and planning and running around that was important to the success of the voyage. All that is done now. Our only deadline is the horizon and our only schedule is the sun and moon passing overhead.

What is sometimes tense and straight, and sometimes slack and coiled over and over on itself?

Another unique aspect of catamaran sailing is that due to boat speed, the difference between apparent wind and true wind is much more dramatic than with a monohull. Because of that, a catamaran has a wider selection of headsails, each of which has a narrower set of optimal conditions in which it should be used. Coda‘s current headsail inventory is (from smallest to biggest):

1. Staysail
2. Genoa
3. (A brand new replacement genoa that we hope to avoid using)
4. Code Zero
5. Code Three
6. Code D
7. Parasail

When the sun rose on day 2 of the trip, the seas had settled down a bit, and the wind had decreased. Our next exercise was to put up a larger headsail better suited to the conditions (because 8 knots of boat speed simply isn’t enough!).

The genoa has a luff bolt rope that affixes it to the head stay, and the head stay has a built-in furling system that we had used the previous night to reduce the size of the genoa by only partially furling it. The genoa is the only one of the headsails that attaches to the headstay. Except for the staysail (which attaches to an inner stay, not the head stay), the rest of the headsails are “flying” sails, and are not attached to a stay. They rely on halyard tension and a downhaul to shape the luff of the sail.

We furled the genoa completely, then set about running a new set of guys and sheets used with the flying sails. We also set up a furling wheel that would be used to furl the flying sails. When it was all said and done (an hour and half later or so), we hoisted the neatly wrapped Code Zero. The next step was to slowly unfurl the sail by easing the line, but Wes warned us we would need sailing gloves, because once the wind filled the sail, the furling line would go out rather quickly (which is exactly what happened).

But 10-12 knots of boat speed was too slow! And now that we were old salts at handling headsails, it was time to switch to the Code D. So we furled the Code Zero, dropped it into its sail bag on the foredeck (which is more trampoline than deck), switched the lines to the Code D, and repeated the hoisting process all over again.

The beauty of not attaching the larger sails to the headstay (which itself attaches to the deck on the boat’s centerline) is that the tack of the sail can be moved to either side of the (rather wide) bow of the boat. This creates all kinds of interesting trimming possibilities to optimize the sail shape in various conditions. In our case, the wind was pretty far aft, which meant the headsail was somewhat in the wind shadow of the mainsail. By moving the tack of the headsail to the port bow, the headsail was exposed to more of the wind.

With speeds sometimes exceeding 16 knots, the skipper was finally satisfied with the performance of the boat; the rest of us were speechless that something could go so fast with just the power of the wind.

I forgot to post a photo of Coda and her crew:

We waited for an email giving us clearance to leave South Africa as calmly as we could. At about 9:30 a.m., it finally arrived. Wes then radioed both the harbormaster and the swinging bridge operator to request permission to leave the harbor. Permission was granted, and at first we thought we’d be able to leave quickly, but the swinging bridge operator decided to wait almost 25 minutes before opening the bridge to allow us and two other boats out of the East Quay.

It only took us about 20 minutes to make our way past the end of the breakwater and out into open ocean. While the harbor had some wind, there was very little on the open water, so we continued motoring northwest for awhile past Robben Island. We eventually found enough wind to raise the main and unfurl the genoa headsail.

A critical aspect of catamarans is that their mainsails have very little capacity to spill the wind if they are overpowered (unlike a monohull, which just heels over and/or rounds up to dump excess power in the mainsail). Coda‘s mainsail has three reef points in it, which allows four different “sizes” of mainsail.

Because winds were light, we raised the main completely. As the afternoon wore on, the wind continued to build, so we were obligated to begin adding reefs to the main, a process that involves three people (at least for a crew unfamiliar with it):

1. One person to take in on the reef line on the front edge of the sail
2. Another person to take in on the reef line on the trailing edge of the sail
3. Someone to ease the mainsail halyard to slowly lower the sail.
4. Someone to steer the boat (in this case, we have a very capable autopilot)

There are “lazy jacks” to guide the mainsail as it goes up and down, and there is a sail bag attached to the boom where the sail is stored and that keeps excess sail from flopping around when the main has reefs in it. Because the main has full battens in it, the process of lowering it through the lazy jacks and into the sail bag requires coordination and close attention.

Electric winches are used to haul in the reef lines, and the lines for the front edge reef lines are on the opposite side of the boat as the trailing edge reef lines. As the wind builds and the sails flap, a lot of hollering is involved in making a coordinated effort at lowering the sail.

Being near the coast, we seemed to be in a spot where the wind and the current combined to create very steep swells about 10 seconds apart. In order to get the mainsail down through the lazy jacks, the boat had to be pointed into the wind and the swell, which meant the bow was going up and down 12 to 15 feet every 10 seconds or so.

The lines were stiff from salt and lack of use which made all the hardware groan and pop, the wind was loud, the deck was pitching, and there were moments when it seemed like we were tearing the boat apart. But with much hollering and on-the-spot instruction from Wes, we managed to get three reefs in the main and the genoa partially furled just before sunset. Needless to say, if we had to have done a similar procedure in the dark, it might have gone much worse.

The boat settled down, and night came on, but none of us except Wes were used to the sounds of a catamaran going 12 knots across the water. The swell was behind us, so the stern would lift, the boat would accelerate from both gravity and the force of the wave, and the whole boat would rumble and shake as the crest of the swell passed between the two hulls. Waves would occassionally break against the hulls, making loud smacks or thumps. The most disconcerting sound was when a wave would crest under the boat and punch the underside of boat and send a jolt through the floor the main salon (if you feel a jolt in the floor of a monohull, it most likely means you’ve hit something or run aground).

The first night was a mostly sleepless one, and some of us later admitted that we went to bed wondering what we’d gotten ourselves into…

28 52.357˚ S 7 26.112˚ E

It’s actually Friday, January 19, 2024, our fourth day at sea. There is so much to share about what has happened in the last few days, but it’s going to take time to get it all written down, and sailing the boat is the priority right now.

Coda might as well be a clipper ship with all of the changes to sails and sets. She is a magnificent boat, and when the tuning is right, she screams across the water. But doing 7 hours of watch per day, most of the cooking, and a deckhand for the sail changes, I’m a little gassed. More to come…

33.90752˚ S, 18.4213˚ E

As It Was Foretold

The plan was to await the arrival of Dan (Wes’s brother) and his son Auden on the evening of Sunday, January 14th. They would have a few hours to visit the cape on the morning of the 15th, and then the boat would leave the dock that afternoon. Other than our excursion to visit the cape on Saturday, all of our energy had gone into boat preparations. I had in my mind that I’d like to get a drone shot of the boat as we left the harbor, but I hadn’t had a chance to practice flying the drone since leaving San Francisco.

There were still a few last-minute provisions I was responsible for picking up, so there was just a little bit of time to get in a practice drone flight before the shops opened. I reviewed the instructions, got set up on the dock next to the boat, and pressed the button for the drone to hover at 5 feet. Things almost immediately went wrong. The drone couldn’t seem to find a GPS signal, but even worse, it wasn’t able to maintain its position while hovering, and started drifting almost as soon as it was in the air (which wasn’t a behavior I’d seen during my earlier flights). As was foretold, my piloting skills were not enough to keep the drone from drifting into a concrete wall and falling in the water. Rushed takeoffs often end badly…

Scratch the Launch

While I was mourning the loss of the drone and doing the last-minute shopping, Wes was settling up with the boatyard owner Manuel (the guy who’s sailed around the world four times). Manuel pointed out that it might be better for a crew unfamiliar with the boat to have as much sailing in the daylight as possible, so an afternoon departure might not be the wisest. Wes took his advice to heart and decided to delay our departure until the following morning. Given the morning’s drone omen, we all heartily agreed.

During our last walk around the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, we had a chance to pop in to see the inside of the Silo Hotel, which also houses a museum. It’s even more interesting on the inside. Then we went to the customs office to get our passports stamped for departure, had a crew dinner together at a nearby restaurant, and then an early lights-out.

34.35759˚ S, 18.4752˚ E

On Saturday (1/13), Wes hired a driver to take Brianna, him and me to see the Cape of Good Hope. We left the boat at 8 a.m. We drove east past the northern end of Table Mountain, then turned south toward False Bay. We drove on a narrow windy road through many seaside resort towns (I had panic attacks every time our driver approached cyclists…while beautiful, it’s not a road I would ride on). We stopped in Simon’s Town to get cash from an ATM and to see the penguins. Then we piled in the car and headed south again to the entrance of the Cape Point National Park and on to the lighthouse overlooking the cape.

The peninsula is entirely devoid of trees, covered by all kinds of interesting brush and shrubbery. We saw baboons, ostriches and common elands (the baboons scampered off into the bush before I could snap a pic).

The funicular up to the lighthouse was out of service, so we walked up a long series of stone steps to reach it. We found a trail that seemed to go unnoticed by most people that led around the eastern side of the hill the lighthouse sits on out closer to the actual point. We had almost a half-hour with the place to ourselves.

We drove back along the west side of the peninsula through Scarborough Beach (which narrowly avoided being destroyed in a recent wildfire) and Hout Bay. We stopped at a grocery store in Camps Bay to load up on non-perishable provisions for the trip, loaded it all in the back of car and headed back to the boat in the East Quay.