We wanted to remove him {the white man} from our table, strip the table from all the trappings put on it by him, decorate it in true African style, settle down and then ask him to join us if he likes.
With a permission from the port control over the VHF, we slip in between a constant flow of ships, to the port of Durban. The Point Yacht Club is full but fortunately the marina fingers are far enough apart and we squeeze Aliisa between two yachts in the international jetty. The marina manager lets us stay there and later I see that double parking is the norm during the busy times.
Durban is a big city. The paranoia that I thought was limited to Richards Bay, extends here too, perhaps covering the whole country. The lovely girl in the Point Yacht Club Office wasted no time in telling us that we can't walk anywhere because it's just not safe. Then the police visited the international jetty at the Point Yacht Club and told us the same again.
I'm getting a bit sick of the warnings. I cross the street and everyone greets me with a smile. People drive in their cars with windows open and jobless people try to sell stuff or beg money at the traffic lights. Even they are friendly and have a small talk about the weather while I'm waiting to cross the street.
Yet, we see adverts for anti-kidnapping devices for cars! What the hell is an anti-kidnapping device?
I'm starting to get sick of the South African port clearance procedure too. There is a huge effort to boost employment which means that there are a lot of officials in a lot of different offices. A lot of them have no idea what they should be doing, or perhaps the person somewhere in the government who is supposed to tell them what to do, is telling everyone a different story. In Richards Bay we made the mistake of trying to clear out on a Saturday morning. No good. Can't get a stamp from port office. To travel 85 miles within South Africa. While in R.B. we were required to see Customs, Port Capt and Immigration, in Durban we had to only check in with Customs but departure required a trip to port captain and two visits to customs. Who's making up the rules here and what drugs are they taking?
Apart from walking around in the city centre, our Durban visit is spent waiting for the right time to leave. We get to meet Fred - the famous Fred - who has given us weather info on the SSB from Chagos to here. Fred, a quietly spoken man with a heart almost as big as himself, pickes us up in his car and takes us for a tour around Durban. Later we, together with some other yachties, get invited to his house for lunch. Eva, his wife fills the table with enough food for the neighborhood and we feel like visiting granpa and granma.
The couple has adopted all the cruising people as their children. Fred gives important weather info for yachts in the Mozambique Channel twice a day. Before we leave, Eva transfers 10 yachties between customs and port captain in their car and sends a few bags of apples for the two single handers in port.
We spend Christmas stuck in Durban but at least do that in good company. My only Christmas present is a wind vane. (THANK YOU KEVIN!) The old Navstar had been lying in Kevin's locker, as a spare and he must have felt sorry for us, after all our only autopilot was already playing up. Unfortunately the vane was removed from another yacht with an angle grinder and despite my honest attempts, I could not work out how to put it together. But there was hope. All the basic bits were there. After being "stuck" through the Xmas holidays, the weather forecast was finally showing a good window for continuing south.
In Durban the police made a special trip to warn all international visiting yachts about the crime in the city. "Don't walk there and don't walk there" and so on.
On the 29 December a fleet of almost 20 yachts made the move out of Durban and entered what is said to be the most "dangerous" part of South African coastline. (None of the yachts were sailing "in company", but rather stuck in port waiting for the right weather.) The 250 mile "Wild Coast" between Durban and East London has no anchorages and the Agulhas current rages down, sometimes as strong as 6 knots, running right inshore. Getting caught in a SW gale can have... will have serious consequences.
East London
We break the speed record again, 11 knots over ground and as the northerly wind picks up above 30kn. Half the fleet continues to Port Elizabeth but a dodgy forecast and lack of courage makes us and a few others duck in to East London for New Years Eve. We arrive with the trusted Cmap on, in the middle of the night and tie up alongside a charterboat, against a decaying wooden wharf that looks like it's going to fall apart any minute.
Next day, 31 December 2005, we buy a couple of one-dollar rockets for fireworks and walk the town. Industrial looking place with lots of streeet vendors lining the dirty footpaths. We return to the harbour and party at the waterfront bar, which turns out to be a private function. All the yachties are welcomed to the party but a group of well dressed black men are asked to leave. Nobody can honestly tell me why so I gather that I'm partying with racist assholes and move out to continue with the blacks instead. They are gracious, intelligent and polite. Later they are drunk too, but so is everyone else, including me. Happy New Year!
Fred with a hobby. Weather information and genuine care for all yachties, twice a day, every day. With a nice collection of SSB radios too.
Next morning a quick phone call to our weather expert Fred in Durban confirms it; time to continue. The SW wind never came, nor did any other wind. But East London is shithole so we're glad to leave. (Apologies for any E.London residents, but that just happens to be my honest opinion. It was the only place where we actually had hands in pockets when walking in town. Weren't our hands either.)
Mossel Bay
The Yanmar gets another workout as we motor most of the way in light winds towards Mossel Bay. After passing Port Elizabeth we get out of the Agulhas current. The coastline starts to bend to the west and only the famous Cape (of Good Hope) and Cape Town separates us from our next Ocean. We drop anchor in just outside the harbour breakwater. The boat rolls in the swell. The weather is rainy and cold. I have sailed barefoot for the whole passage and decide to buy a pair of cheap rubber boots incase the Cape turns out as bad as they say. I quit smoking and buy a box of Zyban (anti-smoking drug) from the local pharmacy.
We visit the museum and I pay extra to climb onboard a replica of Bartolomeu Diaz, the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope (originally called the "Cape of Storms"). Like all great replicas and their commemorative voyages to retrace the paths of their 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th century originals, this was a fake job from the beginning to the end. While the ship builders do a wonderful job in recreating the famous sailing ships from the past, there is no crew on this planet that will have the balls and the skill to do the job the way the original ships did. No, onboard the replicas you will always find satellite navigation, hot showers, SSB radios and big diesel engines. Diaz, Columbus, Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Balboa, Cortes, Pizarro, Drake, Hudson, Cook, Flinders and many others truly made history. No man is game enough to do what they did, without the modern gadgets installed in their seemingly original replicas.
The rest of the Mossel Bay visit was walking in cold drizzle up the hill, getting daily weather info from Fred and getting ready for the last bit of South Africa. So we left, after five days of rolling at the bay.
The the southernmost tip of South Africa and the "border" between Indian and Atlantic Oceans is called Cape Agulhas. For some reason the small rocky headland about 70 miles further west called Cape of Good Hope is the famous one. The South Africans rarely use that name but talk about Cape Point, the very tip of the cape. We picked our weather well and sail in light winds all the way to Cape Agulhas, before being forced to motor in flat calm around the Cape. I'm freezing my balls off and Paula - tucked in bed under two blankets - can't be bothered to come up to celebrate the Cape. Yep. After a lot of warnings about the cold Benguela current and its effects on temperature, I had bought a pair of rubber boots and three pairs of socks in Mossel Bay. This was the first time I had worn such things on Aliisa. (Must try underwear one day too...)
Cape Town
For a change, it was seals that were jumping out of the water. Just as well, I've had dolphins up to my ears. We tie up at the Royal Cape Yacht Club with the spectacular Table Mountain right infront of us. We fill in the paperwork and get the old story again: "You must check in with customs" and "Do not walk anywhere, it's just not safe". I decide to ignore both. My visa card does not work and I suspect that I may finally be out of money. I've been whinging about the lack of it for some time now but the prospect of actually being penniless was a little scary.
I find out that the last visa bill has not been paid yet. The card would work in a few days, with 500 euros on my account. Hmm... I also noticed that that the Marina gave a 40% discount for members of those clubs with reciprocal rights. One of them was Moreton Bay Boat Club in Australia. I acted quickly and within a few days I had a carefully written letter typed up on a fake letterhead and faxed in, supposedly from Australia. It is quite scary how easy it is to tempt a poor man to commit a fraud, but neverhteless, it paid off almost half our marina fees.
A week later I wish the bloody rock (The Table Mountain) was somewhere out of sight. 50kn winds rushing down the mountain, three days in a row, day and night, yachts heeling over and smashing against the jetty which is barely holding on itself. One marina finger flipped upside down. No kidding, the worse time in a marina you can ever imagine. And if the half sinking jetty, wildly thrashing boat and the icy cold gale wasn't enough, just imagine being surrounded by yachts with wind generators. Fuck man! The sound of them drives me crazy as it is, let alone when it's gusting 60kn and there's four of them next door going on overdrive. At night I felt that I was sleeping in the engineroom of a Japanese bullet train, though I've never been in one. (Suppose they just hover on some magic magnetic field, yeah?)
Table Mountain and Royal Cape Yacht Club.
I write a humble e-mail to my dad, requesting a loan. He first refuses but then takes pity on me and puts two thousand euros in my account as a one-off. I know that any further cries for help had better be a serious emergency. It is time to attack the most important equipment - the wind vane pieces from Durban. Within days it is welded together and after fashioning a rudder from a piece of wood and the vane from a piece of ply, we had again hope for a pleasant Atlantic crossing.
The final reminder of South Africa's status as a third world country comes in the last day. First I am unable to change any remaining South African Rands back to any other currency, wihtout proof of where the Rands came from and that I used foreign currency to get them. An ATM receipt would not do. I storm out from the Thomas Cook Money Exchange and tell them to shove it up their ass. (Of course it wasn't their fault that some idiot writes rules that make no sense, though it's still their choice to follow the stupid rules.) Next came the Customs. "Where is your safety certificate?" she asked. "What is that?" I replied. "We can not let you leave without a safety certificate". My temper, which has taken a turn to the worse, came out again. "You can stamp the paper or not, I will leave the country tomorrow and I will not have a safety certificat when I leave". Finally she gave me the stamp.
The Immigration wasn't much easier. "Why have you not checked in when you arrived in Cape Town?" the man asked angrily. I said: "We have checked in Richards Bay and played this stupid game in every port. If I hire a car and drive from Cape Town to Durban, I don't need to check in with Immigration do I?". This man was tough and we ended up arguing for a while, him quoting his rule book and me quoting common sense - the two things that rarely exist together. Finally he looked at our passports and saw that the paper pusher in Richards Bay had already stamped our passports with "Departed" when we left there, two months ago! "You have been illegally in the country for two months!" He yelled. "If the harbour police find you, they will throw you in jail!" (Jesus Fucking Christ man, is this country crazy or what?)
My comments about the Durban harbour police nodding on our passports and the full paper trail from up the coast did nothing to calm this man down. He was drowning in his swamp of rules that were ingraved in his brain that surely was capable of thinking at least in some distant past. Finally he threw our passports back without a stamp and we left. Paula was soon sick of my raving about the stupidity of things as I kept ranting and going on about what an idiot the immigration official was and how fucked up the whole system is. There is nothing I hate more than the shit dribbling bureaucrats quoting their laws and rule books with total diregard to the fact that humans actually have a freedom to use their brain for thinking rather than memorising instructions.
"Let them bring me prisoners, and I'll find them law"
- Lord Braxfield, 1722-1799 -
I think it's time to head north. Ocean number two. More inspiration, I hope. More excitement, I hope. I feel that both have been missing from the cruise as well as from this website for some time now. Let's see...
