7 April 2017 Kadufushi, Kolhumadulu Atoll
The rest of the rally is travelling down to the south of this atoll, planning to get to a village called Veymandhoo tomorrow, so we decided to stay here for the day and travel down tomorrow as well. There’s a dive called Marea Kandu at 02°31.711E 72°58.056, which is on the outside corner of the pass. We briefly considered doing the dive this morning, but with the 15 knot NW wind, we felt that the waves and conditions could be a bit gnarly for our small dinghies. I think that it might be good in settled conditions though…
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Glenys did some serious spring cleaning in the boat and I was totally lazy, filling two dive tanks and then going for two dives on our House Reef. I had a fabulous time. I know that you’re not supposed to dive by yourself, but it’s bliss for a photographer. Normally I’m under pressure to keep moving by my dive buddies, but this morning I spent 20 minutes in one spot, photographing a nudibranch from various angles and changing the strobe lighting. I’m not sure of the name of the creature, but it was some kind of Chromodoris.
I sloped off for another hour long dive in the afternoon. I couldn’t find any more nudibranchs, but I took macro photographs of Coral Polyps and found a stunning clam. It was only 1½” long, but through my macro lens, the colours and the detail of the eyes & tiny tentacles was amazing.
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Our mini fleet went ashore to the deserted island for sundowners, which was nice apart from the terns dive-bombing us to protect their nests. They’re only small birds, but are quite scary when they zoom a couple of feet past your ear screeching (and they have very sharp looking beaks…)
8 April 2017 Kadufushi to Veymandhoo, Kolhumadulu Atoll
We’ve been living on Alba for exactly six years today, so I worked out a few statistics. In the past twelve months, we’ve sailed 4,369 nautical miles bringing our total to 31,339 since we moved aboard. We’re now at 73 degrees of longitude, meaning that we’ve done 63% of our circum-navigation.
In the last year, we’ve run the engine for 523 hours, which at 5 knots equates to 2,618 miles and means that we’ve spent 60% of our time motoring. This is a horrible statistic, but we didn’t do much sailing in Malaysia and Thailand and since Sri Lanka, the winds have been light to non-existent. Hopefully, we’ll be sailing more for the rest of our Indian Ocean Crossing.
It was a lovely day with a light 6-12 knot wind on our starboard quarter, so I dragged out our asymmetrical spinnaker. We haven’t used it since we laid the new teak deck over a year ago. When I went to fit the short bowsprit, I couldn’t lock it in place because the bracket bolted to the deck was at the wrong angle. It took me half an hour to remove it and pack it out with some washers. Once we had the spinnaker up, we had a fabulous sail for a few hours, sliding through the calm waters at 4-6 knots in the light winds.
We arrived at the anchorage at Veymandhoo in the middle of the afternoon. Fortunately, there was good sunlight, so we were able to see the tiny channel through the reef at 02°11.4634 N 073°05.4404 E. Although it’s quite deep with at least 4 metres of water, it’s very narrow and “Hokulea” who are a 10 metre wide catamaran couldn’t get through into the anchorage. We anchored at 02°11.34N 073°05.29E in a clear patch of sand in 7 metres depth. There are a lot of shallow bommies about, so I’m glad that we had good light.
After snorkelling to check the anchor, we had a quiet afternoon and then went over to “Atea” who hosted a sundowner party for the whole fleet of about 20 people. It was a quite a crowd on their small 45 foot monohull.
9 April 2017 Veymandhoo, Kolhumadulu Atoll
It was a bit of a bouncy night. The reef surrounding the anchorage doesn’t give much protection and the remorseless south-east swell came rolling over making us pitch a lot. “Atea” hosted a planning meeting for the rally boats. Most of us have had enough of the welcoming events at the villages and want to spend a week in more isolated anchorages and get some snorkelling and diving done. We cancelled the next two stops and will spend a week chilling out in the North Huvadhoo Atoll.
Just before lunch, Glenys and I went ashore to buy some petrol and provisions. The petrol was simple because there is a fuel store next to the dock in the small fishing harbour. Glenys bought a few vegetables and some soft drinks to go with our rum. The village has about 1,000 inhabitants and as usual the streets are hard packed sand.
The Maldivian people are very reserved and the women are all dressed in dull coloured, full length gowns with head scarves. To my western eye, they all look pretty miserable - a huge contrast to the colourful joyful people that we saw on the small islands in Polynesia. Everyone in the Maldives is Muslim - it’s an enforced religion. I guess that I’d be miserable if I had to pray five times a day and had to wear sweltering, full length clothes and scarves.
There were no restaurants, other than a gloomy looking café full of men, so we abandoned the idea of eating out for lunch and returned back to Alba. It was an unpleasant afternoon in the 2 foot wind waves - not my favourite anchorage.
In the late afternoon, we went ashore for a welcome event. We were given a drinking coconut and sat for 30 minutes watching a group of young men sing traditional songs accompanied by three drums. Meanwhile, the women of the village kept a distance from the event huddled together in a glum cluster of robes and hijabs. We didn’t bother to go on the tour of the village.
10 April 2017 Veymandhoo to Kunahandhoo, Hadhohunmathee Atoll
After breakfast, we pulled up the anchor and had a good sail down to next atoll, which has the unpronounceable name of Hadhohunmathee Atoll . We entered the atoll through a narrow pass at 01°54.93N 073°14.44E, which was very pretty with a couple of deserted islands. After a further ten mile sail through the atoll, we arrived at the small village of Kunahandhoo, which has a narrow channel leading to the small fishing harbour.
There are two passes through shallow reefs to be negotiated at 01°48.02N 073°22.26E and 01°47.67N 073°22.21E, neither of which are very clear on Google Earth. However, they are both marked by short poles, so we were able to get into the anchorage without any traumas. We anchored at 01°47.42N 073°22.10E in 10 metres on good holding sand. Again it’s not a very well protected anchorage in these strong west winds, so we were pitching - we’ve decided to move on tomorrow.
11 April 2017 Kunahandhoo to Koolamafushi, North Huvadhoo Atoll
The alarm went off at 05:30 and, with over 60 miles to go, we were pulling up the anchor at 06:00, just as the sun peeked over the horizon. “Jackster” was first off the blocks and motored towards the first pass, then suddenly stopped as they hit a shallow patch of reef. They backed off and circled around, while we motored towards the pass. I must admit to a little chuckle and I was looking forward to pulling Dave’s leg about going aground.
I was on the bow and Glenys was on the helm as we approached the markers for the pass. We’d had at least 4 metres of water when we came in the previous day, so I wasn’t overly concerned. Unfortunately, we passed very close to the starboard pole and (you guessed it) we came to a grinding halt as we hit the same shallow spot that had caught “Jackster”. In the poor light, I’d only spotted the shallow coral a few seconds before we hit, so Glenys had no time to react to my frantic instructions to turn to port.
We backed off, circled and went through again, but this time favouring the port side of the channel. Following us, “Jackster” and “Ngalawa” made it through safely, but interestingly “Luna Blue” hit the same spot when they came through 10 minutes later. Call ourselves Ocean Voyagers - 3 out of the 4 yachts went aground…
After checking the bilges to make sure that we weren’t sinking, we headed out to sea and started to sail. Unfortunately, the wind was too southerly for us to hold the rhumb line and there were 2 metre waves against us, so if we tried to point too high then we were stopped by the waves. We knew that we had to maintain at least five knots to be able to make landfall before sunset, so we had to put the engine on and spent the whole day bashing into the waves and the 15 knot wind.
It was very unpleasant, particularly because we had a ½ to 1 knot current against us for the last 25 miles. Despite leaving at 06:00, we only just made it to Koolamafushi before sunset. Fortunately, the pass at 00°51.99N 073°10.89E, is ½ mile wide and at least 15 metres deep, so entry in the fading light was safe. We anchored at 00°50.77N 073°11.18E in 17 metres of sand.
In retrospect, it would have been a much more pleasant trip if we’d travelled overnight - without the pressure of maintaining a 5.0 knot average, we could have sailed rather than motoring. The highlight of the day was catching a large Dorado - the first one for ages.
12 April 2017 Koolamafushi, North Huvadhoo Atoll
It was very rolly last night with a two foot swell coming around the corner through the pass, but we decided to stay for the day with the rest of the fleet. We went snorkelling in the morning close to the island to the north of the anchorage - not particularly inspiring with lots of dead coral, but some live coral hanging on. There wasn’t a great variety of sea life, but a large shoal of Parrotfish gave some interest.
We spent the afternoon pottering about on-board. I ran the water-maker, but after half an hour, the damn generator started hunting again and stalled the water-maker pump. I still think that the problem is loose contacts on the fuel pump relay, but I couldn’t motivate myself to do any work on the hot generator.
It was Eric’s birthday, so we were all invited over to “Hokulea” to help him celebrate.