The Cosmos Adventure - News

Joe Dorr Report from St. Helena

Cosmos

13^o 02’ South – 011^o 03’ West

February 6, 2003

I think we are experiencing the best sailing of our entire circumnavigation.   Cruisers, such as us aboard Cosmos, are not necessarily the best sailors.  We cruise.  We don’t race.  We are most concerned about getting there safely and maintaining a level of comfort.  We are inclined to go along conservatively with less working sail area than a racer might.  We have only flown a spinnaker under ideal conditions.  Therefore, we have not gotten a lot of experience with the spinnakers and we have not learned the ins and outs of raising and lowering this huge kite under various configurations and conditions.

We have two spinnakers on Cosmos.  One is symmetrical for flying more directly in front of the boat, and the other is an oversized jib that attaches only at its three points, instead of all along one edge, like a mainsail or a jib.  Three days ago we began to have perfect weather for flying the symmetrical spinnaker, sometimes called the chute, I guess short for parachute.  Our chute is beautifully large and colorful with green, turquoise, red, yellow, pink and purple stripes radiating from its middle.  It is the chute that is shown on the home page of our web site.

I mentioned in my last report that we had lost two spinnaker halyards and a sheet between Luderitz and St. Helena.  That has all been fixed with what lines we had on the boat, and our spinnaker is back in business.  As a matter of fact, it has been in business for three days and two nights straight, except when we have practiced raising and lowering it a couple of times each day.  

The sail is so big, and floats so freely, that when raising or lowering it, there is great opportunity for tangling things up, blistering hands, or losing the chute under the boat, not to mention more serious potential injury.  With practice, we have gotten much better.  Actually, what we are doing is developing the best methods for launch and retrieval.  We are definitely learning, but we will continue to practice, including night practice in controlled conditions, so that if a storm comes up at night, we have a good chance of being able to douse the chute without losing it or anyone on board.

Why is the spinnaker so important?  Because, Emily is coming.  She and my good friend, Bill Whiteford are going to meet us in Tobago on the 5th of March.   Right now, we have to sail about 3,200 miles in 27 days.  Using the spinnakers as often as we can will make that more probable and might allow us to make a short stop in Isle de Salute of the coast of French Guyana. 

The spinnaker has also become more important because along with increasing our speed by about 30% over any other sail configuration on a run down wind, the spinnaker now generates the most comfortable ride we have had on Cosmos.  The reason we are more comfortable is that we sail closer to wave speed so fewer waves pass under the boat and therefore, the boat is rocked less often.

When I bought Cosmos, I was taught to launch the spinnaker only when the main sail was up to shield launch and recovery operations from the wind.  Now we have learned to launch the spinnaker using the genoa to protect it from the wind as we raise and lower it..  This is important, because after the launch, we can furl the genoa leaving the spinnaker as our only sail.  This allows all of the wind to get to the spinnaker, further increasing our speed.  This also eliminates the flogging of any other sail that might be in the wind (the other sails are all made of much heavier cloth and the wind will not fill them when we are going almost as fast as the wind, so they flog back and forth as the boat pitches on waves).

Well, so much for spinnakers.  Now back to the wonderful island of St. Helena.

What a fantastic place St. Helena is, and we were privileged to have visited the island.  Only people traveling by boat can come to St. Helena, because there is no airport.  The only regularly scheduled ship is RMS St. Helena which takes ten days from England, and five days from Cape Town and carries only about 20 passengers.  Once every few months, a luxury cruise liner stops.  Sometimes the weather and waves prevent any passengers from going ashore for their entire stay, because St. Helena has no protected harbor.  The largest number of visitors comes by yacht.   On average, about five yachts were on anchor while we were there.  Adding twenty people to the island population of 5,000 tells you how unspoiled the island is by tourism.  There is no hotel there that has been built since the 1800’s.  There are no restaurants with regular hours and no stores that sell books, let alone book stores.  When visitors walk up and down the street, they are regularly stopped and asked where they are from, how long will they stay at St. Helena, and how are you enjoying your stay.  No commercial solicitations whatsoever.

From the ocean, the island looks like one huge rock.  There is only one place to land and that is at James Bay, an ocean anchorage.  Jamestown is the administrative center of this British colony.  Jamestown is comprised of hundreds of stone homes, a couple of hotels, churches, post office, police, etc, all in stone buildings built in the 1800’s or earlier.  The old buildings are marvelously maintained.  Along Market Street, two buildings were under major renovation while we were there. 

Jamestown lies in a cut down to the sea.  On the high cliffs all  around Jamestown, are stone fortifications from the 1700’s and 1800’s.  We visited one of the fortifications overlooking Jamestown.  The barracks and dependencies have been turned into lovely living quarters for islanders.

Getting on and off the island is an athletic event.  Thank goodness there is a launch service that serves the fishermen, and for one St. Helena pound per day (equal to the British pound, but strictly St. Helena currency), they will haul yachties to and from the landing quay.  As mentioned earlier, James Bay is completely exposed to the ocean.   We were there on days of average weather, with prevailing tradewinds that put us in the lea of the Island.  When the launch pulled up to the quay, timing and agility were everything.  Ropes hang from ten-foot tall pipes mounted in the concrete quay.  The idea is to grab one of the ropes and then wait for the launch to reach the right level on a wave and quickly step ashore.  Sometimes the launch falls to 4 feet below the quay and and then rises above and onto the quay and we stepped into water washing across the quay.  Since we had very good weather while we were there and we experienced these challenges, it is no wonder that the last time QEII visited St. Helena for three days, the captain allowed no one to go ashore because the weather was bad.  For me, it is sad to think of the opportunity missed by all those passengers.

The island is 11 miles long and 6 miles wide.  Although it appears to be one big, barren rock from the ocean, the inner parts of the island are lush and green.

We took a tour with Robert Peters, the “best” tour guide as told by several people we met.  He took us to Longwood, Napoleon’s home prison from 1815 to his death in 1822.  The home is very well preserved.  They allow no more than 12 people to tour the home per day for the five weekdays.  We walked into the rooms that still contained the actual furnishings that survive from Napoleon’s time there.

The island is separated into fertile valleys by high rocky mountains (highest being 2,685 feet).  Each valley has a completely different look.  Some are more residential, some pastoral, level planes, and some almost ferry-like in appearance (one valley is called Ferryland).

Saturday afternoon and Sunday all commerce shuts down on St. Helena.  Daniel and I took some time to climb Jacob’s Ladder, a set of 699 steps imbedded in a steep cliff rising 600 feet from Jamestown to Signal Hill.  I don’t know if this is the steepest or tallest set of steps in the world, but it sure felt like it must be when we reached the top.  The record climb is four and one half minutes.  Daniel and I took about 10 to 15 minutes to make the climb, stopping on three occasions to take pictures of Jamestown and James Bay below.

While we were on the island, Ann, the proprietor of Ann’s Restaurant, took us care of.  She not only prepared our meals on numerous ocasions, she also made arrangements for our tour, arranged for a photographer, and did our laundry.

While we were in Jamestown, we were stopped two times and asked if we were from one of the monohulls in the harbor.  We answered no, but inquired about the reason for them asking.  We were told that one of the monohulls was dragging anchor.  Dragging anchor can be a nightmare, particularly on St. Helena.  The anchorage area is a narrow ocean anchorage.  It a boat drags eastward, it quickly is onto the rocks of St. Helena’s shore.  It it drags westward, it is quickly moving out onto the open ocean.   If it drags north or south, it is very likely to run into other boats on anchor.

We returned to James Bay to see what was going on, and two boats dragged anchor, including a French boat that dragged right past Cosmos, but thankfully did not collide.  After the incident, I asked Port Control if I could move Cosmos to some abandoned, “Governor’s Cup” moorings on the southwest end of the anchorage where few other boats are located.  We picked up three moorings because I had no assurance what the moorings were connected to.  Once this was done, I felt much more secure.

We sadly left St. Helena on the 4th of January, headed of the equator at 32 degrees and 30 minutes west and then on to Tobago.  This will be the longest nonstop sail of our circumnavigation at 3,600 miles.  We might make one stop along the way, but I will talk about that later.

Joe Dorr, Captain of the Cosmos