See Ya! Bye Bye Nosy Be/Madagascar!

We worked our worked our way down the islands around Nosy Be quite slowly, stopping in every place that looked appealing to us (well, that kind of means we stopped in every place possible!).

Quite a few exciting and interesting experiences took place on the journey away from Nosy Be, but there was ONE that really made it to the top of my awesome thing list: the once-in-a-lifetime chance of getting to swim with mantas. We were doing just another regular day hop to an anchorage named “Honey Creek” when we got a call from our friends saying that there were some Manta Rays that they were, at that moment, swimming with. Sure enough, at the same time we were on the radio with them, a fish started pulling on the line and came to an early death two minutes later.

Soon we were whizzing (well, not whizzing really – we don’t have a good enough outboard to go fast with now) across the sea towards where we saw some fins poking out of the water! For me, the swim with the mantas really was just great! We got to see them doing their twirls and spins underwater, whizzing about and going crazy with the excitement of swimming next to us! For the three of us (my Dad, Raul and I), that really was just one of the most stunning things in nature we had ever seen.

So, you must be thinking now: “well, that’s all well and good, but Madagascar has taken you SUCH a long time to write about Oskar! What about SA? We want to hear of that scrumptious belly-churning meat they have in the restaurants!”

Well, of course we soon had to do the most complicated passage to Richards Bay. So after saying quick “Goodbye’s” to our friends on the other boats we did our lightning-fast provisioning, and, as quick as a flash, we left.

The first day and a half we had quite good sailing, until the problems started popping up.

The engine wouldn’t start.

This wasn’t the only problem that actually happened, but it was one of our main worries. In the end, Daddy (after reading his mechanic book – seriously, that thing is GREAT!) cleaned up some wires, and soon we were revving our engine – making something like 4.5 kts.

And, as there is never a dull moment to sailing, we woke up one morning to find that we couldn’t see our actual cruising chute on the bow of our boat! We rubbed our eyes, slapped and pinched each other until we realized that the sail was not there anymore. Daddy was devastated; he thought that it was just knocked in to the sea by a wave that came over our bow.

 And, even after THAT, there were still some crazy scenes going on in the great Mozambique Channel: I thought that losing one sail was enough to last us a LIFETIME! But as usual, there always had to be another catastrophe. We were sailing at around 5.6kts when all of a sudden, we dropped down to 3.0kts, as quick as a flash, we saw the genoa fall into the water!

We didn’t lose it, but we were all so surprised when we found out there was a problem with the shackle at the top of the forestay: it had just completely broken! We put on one of the haliards at the top and just hoped for the best.

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