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Monday, 2 February 2004 -- Rescue Diver Extraordinaire?... The instruction was basically "watch this video and do all the exercises in the book". They didn't have enough books! Pretty sad.... Tuesday, 3 February 2004 -- Substandard Gear... We did a pleasure dive in the AM. Wasn't much of a pleasure as dives go ---- 15m visibility, some cool fish, very cool feather worms, no sponges of merit, low (height) growth coral and and the end, a mouth piece that came off my regulator. Breathe = H2O; "oh, shit!!"; breathe again = H2O; "Oh, Shit!!!!!"; grab octopus, breathe again = H2O; "OH, SHIT!!!!!!"; remember to purge, then breathe - priceless! Just before the regulator fiasco I heard high pitched squeaks. I signaled Mark (buddy) LISTEN (point at ear) DOLPHINS (made porpoising motion with hands). He looked at me like I had a horn coming out of my forehead. I spotted the dolphin and pointed. Then the regulator fell apart. By the time things were cool again, it was gone. 40kg yellowfin were surrounding it. Pretty cool sight for 10 seconds... In the afternoon it was up to the pool. They gave us a brief demonstration and we tried the techniques. Badly. Then a review of the written questions from the book and we took the exam. Wednesday, 4 February 2004 -- Rescue Diver Extraordinaire!... We did an AM dive to try out the search techniques in open water. THE DIVE FROM HELL. Yesterday I wore a 1piece 7mm suit (yuck!) and 10kg of wt. Today I took off 2kg then discovered that some jerk had nicked my kit. New mask, new fins, new BD, new suit - the term "new" is inappropriate, read it as "different" - this is all crappy old gear. Today I got stuck with a 2 piece 7mm suit (super yuck!). I thought I'd be fine because I was so over-weighted yesterday. Not so. I could NOT get down. The instructor and other 2 were down before I realized the severity of it. My buddy (Mark) and I hailed the chase boat. He gave me an extra 3kg weight to stick in my pocket. Now I'm over-weighted again. We go down, 5m visibility. Nobody in sight. I look over, Mark's tank is unstrapped. I fix it. His first stage is leaking. Still no sight of the others. We ascend. The boat picks us up and tows us again to the float marker. During the tow, my tank came free. Mark descended, skipper fixed my tank, I dropped. What an ordeal! Got to the bottom and had enough air to do 2 of the 3 search patterns. Badly. Huge surge; poor vis; just awful. Got to the surface with 90bar remaining (per instructor's pre-dive request) and waited. Other, non-student, divers finally surfaced, but not the divemaster. Oh, what a surprise - this must be our rescue scenario test. We would have killed him: DCS, broken back, asphyxiation - you name it, we did it! But we passed.... hey, it's Africa.... Back on shore we all decided not to do another dive - why bother in such crappy conditions? Lunch, a walk and off to watch some cricket on the tube. Spent a nice evening with the boys. Drinks aplenty and a good meal. One of the other DMs was with us - if what he says is true, we've seen nothing. There's an AM dive. We'll see!
Thursday, 5 February 2004 -- Beachcomber Jim... The weather was crappy, big surge and lots of mixing. I took a walk on the beach rather than dive with no viz. Saturday, 7 February 2004 -- Frenetically Frantic... The dive course is done - what should have taken 5 days took two and a half. No more dives, the surge was too much. We left there Friday. Now we're trying to get prepped for sailing north to Mozambique. The boat still needs to be provisioned... no time to add more right now... Sunday, 8 February 2004 -- From Jim's mass mailing... We got back to dreadful Durbs and almost immediately set sail north. Our goal was to make it to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, about 320nm away. But damn near everything that could go wrong did. We started out with a leaky stern gland (AKA stuffing box). This allowed too much water to seep in where the prop shaft passes through the hull. There was also, unbeknownst to us, a small hole in the fuel line. The combined result was a slippery, diesely mess on the cabin floor. The whole floor. Then it was on our feet and hands, then it was pretty damn much everywhere we went. Dreadful. We decided to make a call in our old favorite, and home of the Slipway Bar, Richards Bay. This time we passed the time pretty much...drunk... We had intended to stop only to fix the gland, re-provision a bit and get a wee bit o' rest. Then the wind howled from the NE, exactly where we needed to go. Sailboats can't travel directly into the wind. If we wanted to tack out to sea, we faced a strong (3kts) current against us and what was described on the chart as occasional "abnormal waves" of 20m (66ft). Ah, that won't work! But if we did not tack out, we would run aground since the African continent was there. The solution was to drink, errr, I mean stay put. After 2.5 days we thought the weather looked favorable. A late night of boat prep, a sunrise wakeup and we were off. The weather change never materialized. We spend 2.5 MISERABLE days beating into the wind. Watch the fathometer closely, tack when we hit 20m or 40m of water. Then the fathometer crapped out. We pushed on. Only after spending 15 hours going back and forth, never gaining more than 1nm/hr towards our destination (150nm away) did we give up. Thursday, 12 February 2004 -- Running away... So we turned and ran (literally, a sailing term to sail downwind) back to...the town that really needs an AA chapter...yes, RBay. Where we spent another 1.5 days...drunk... Never, ever, ever do I want to return to RBay. Never!
Monday, 16 February 2004 -- Glorious return... Another run, this time under full spinnaker, brought us back to Durban. Here's Pete, hard at work while we ran towards Durban! For the better part of 3 summers of small boat sailing I was afraid of taking the helm, especially running under the kite. Wow, was that foolish! It's an absolute blast when you get the hang of it. We made the full 80nm trip home with the spinny up, right into Durban Harbour (really, right down the shipping channel!) If it had not been 0200 there might have been marching bands and press coverage, but alas, all we could do was impress a few late night fishermen, the Port Control Tower and the hookers and johns hanging out on the waterfront. Oh well, it was still a rockin' good time. Tuesday, 17 February 2004 -- Messy Cleanup... Cleaning up the fuel mess on the boat was...UGGGHHHH!!!!! Wednesday, 18 February 2004 -- Testing... Exam day - actually just a mock exam - for the day skipper part of the course. I caught my mistake before handing in my paper - the time zones on the tide tables and the exam questions were different. I missed it when I first did the calculations... checking my work enabled me to correct it. Thursday, 19 to Saturday, 21 February 2004 -- Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Park... We had earned a break. So after cleaning the boat and resting a few hours we were glad to get one. The course includes a 3 day safari. We loaded a VW minibus with gear, 8 cases of beer, enough steak, chicken kebobs, sausage and potatoes for 9 people for 2 nights and set forth. Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Park is pretty damn cool! BTW, Hluhluwe is pronounced "shush-louie" - Zulu is not gonna come easy to us midwesterners... Just 35 years ago there were a grand total of 30 white Rhinos on the planet. Today, over 2,000 roam Umfolozi. It is pretty damn amazing to see one from 25 feet... behind the chalet you're staying in! We saw white rhinos (lots), impalas, (too damn many), Cape buffalo (some), blue wildebeast (some), nyala (a few), waterbuck (a few), Chacama baboons (a couple), zebras (by the score), giraffes (enough to be jaded), hyenas (so damn close it was scary since we were just finishing the steaks!) and the coolest of the cool... 12 wild dogs (only 30 in the park) and a leopard (only 20 in the park). Pretty special stuff to see. We all wanted to see elephants and lions but struck out on that. Still a remarkable and wonderful few days. (I've posted the pictures in a separate gallery. Since I wasn't at the park, I'm not exactly sure what everything is... I'll leave annotation to Jim when he gets a chance to do it....) Back in Durbs, we frantically repacked and left for Cape Town the next morning. Sunday, 22 February 2004 -- The West Coast... We flew Kulula.com, SA's answer to Southwest Airlines, to Cape Town. After less than an hour here, we knew that Capt Town is MUCH MUCH MUCH nicer than Durban. So, of course, we left. We hopped in another VW minibus and went north to Langebaan on Saldanha Bay. It's a little resort town on a nice bay. Where the wind howls! We arrived in 30+ kts of SE wind. Since the goal was to sail to Cape Town, 60nm SE of us, this was not good. Not good at all. We went to Club Mykonos where we moved on to the boats . These are Leisure 42s. After the L34s, these things seem monstrous and down right comfortable! Remarkably most of us remained sober. |
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