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Cape
Verdes bound for Argentina - 21 Oct
by
Kate Laird
4 miles to Mar del Plata
We're sailing along in a gorgeous wind. Ten knots, and doing 5.8 with full main and yankee. The high rises of Mar del Plata are visible in front of us, and we're just four miles from the breakwater.
We're enjoying it after a hideous night last night - a big pampero came through (lasting about 8 hours) with shocking amounts of lightning, winds gusting from 5 to 40 knots, and a sudden 180-degree wind shift in the middle while in the midst of a fleet of fishing boats. I had to suddenly come around 180 degrees to keep the sails under control while I got rid of them - just the sort of thing to make Yachties very unpopular. Hamish had a watch with so much lightning crashing around the boat that he spent the watch darting up to take care of the sheets, and then diving back into the protection of the raised saloon. When the rain really started to pour he would have to go out and stand in it to look for fishing boats, which were everywhere, and since they were small and wooden, didn't show up on radar at all, even with all the rain tuned out.
We don't like lightning!!! Theoretically, a metal boat with a metal mast is about the best place you can be, but theory is hard to buy when millions of volts are zooming around the place. At one stage we had the VHF, radar and iridium antennas disconnected, but then needed the radar and VHF again as we wove through the fishing boats. (Once we saw their lights, we could usually fine-tune the radar enough to find them and then keep an eye on their range.)
Hamish and Helen saw our first wandering albatross of the trip. Very exciting - Helen was awestruck.
Another amazing show of phosphorescence while the lightning shot all around the place. Sea glowing, sky bursting with fire (just like the magazine photos with a jagged lightning strike going into the water. When Hamish was on watch it was right overhead - the booms were simultaneous with the strikes, and not very much fun at all!
Darwin describes the phosphorescence in Voyage of the Beagle:
| "When sailing a little south of the Plata on one very dark night, the sea presented a wonderful and most beautiful spectacle. There was a fresh breeze, and every part of the surface, which during the day is seen as foam, now glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus, and in her wake she was followed by a milky train. As far as the eye reached, the crest of every wave was bright, and the sky above the horizon, from the reflected glare of these livid flames, was not so utterly obscure as over the vault of the heavens." |
It was just like that. No moon, and the added spikes of lightning making it almost day-bright at (too frequent) intervals!
Lovely to be making a light-wind daytime approach to Mar del Plata. Last time we sailed in, I had complete laryngitis and was doing the nav on the radar. I had to write things down like "P 5" on a piece of paper, and our friend Andrew would shout up to Hamish "Port Five!", as we came in with lots of wind and pitch black night. Hamish's visit before that was even worse: a northerly gale with breaking seas in the entrance. (This was before I met him.) Hopefully we have had our Mar del Plata kick already last night.
Helen and Anna are surprisingly disinterested in the sight of the urban sprawl in front of us. They're playing Legos.
We're now at a mooring in Mar del Plata, waiting for about 5:30 pm for higher tide to get through the sill into the yacht basin. This is sailing central, with lots of people sailing out of the 40' wide gap in the breakwater from the Yacht Basin (and several running aground spectacularly, and crashing into the sides of the breakwater). Major dinghy wipe out in the surf pounding on the main harbor breakwater as we came in. The World Champion Optimist sailor usually comes from Mar del Plata, and you can see why! Hamish has seen the Opti fleet out of sight of land, with the swells so big that the whole Optimist, mast and all, would disappear behind it. The only way to see the fleet was because half of them would be on top of the waves at a given time.
Girls slightly wild to see land and steak and ice cream so close, but to not be able to get in. Once we're in the harbor it will be a long while to clear customs etc. They have just had digestives with dulce de leche (bought in the Canaries!) on them and are totally hyper...Coals to Newcastle...
We plan to be in Mar del Plata for about three weeks, before heading south to our charter seasons to Cape Horn and Antarctica.
For more information about Seal (and now for the advert: most of the season is booked, but we still have a couple of places available for two weeks to Cape Horn/Tierra del Fuego in March...) see www.expeditionsail.com.
Kate &
Hamish
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