A quick look around established the course he was likely to take and we scurried off to port to get out of his way. He passed a green marked and then turned hard to port, aiming straight for us. We went to starboard, gunned the engine and cleared off to where we thought would be safe water. Minutes later the ship gave a short blast on his horn and turned hard to starboard and again he was bearing down straight onto us!! This dance continued for about thirty minutes until with a heaved sigh of relief we watched him steam off leaving us safely in his wake.

Our strategy was now to continue hugging the coast for another 200 miles at which point the crossing to Madagascar was at its narrowest and our charts showed that the Agulhas Stream was also narrow and would be easier to cross. The shallow bank that had been constantly with us was no gone and we sailed easily up the shoreline with the current mostly neutral and sometimes positive.

Two days later we had done about 300 miles and we decided it was time to cross the channel and make for Nose Bé in Madagascar. Terry wound up the SSB and we waited for the routine connection with our weather router back in Durban so that we could get some data from him for the 400 mile trip across. The operator came on the air and after giving him our current position, Terry told him we were about to cross the channel and asked after the weather. There was a long quiet spell after which Terry called again thinking we had lost comms. Bill said “No, I’m still here, have you not heard the latest weather report? There is a Category 5 cyclone bearing down on Madagascar and it is unlikely to stop there. It is heading directly at your current position!!” He suggested we make for Ilha da Madagascar which was the only haven on that part of the coast. He urged to make best speed – not a recommendation we were hoping for.

The wind was favourable for us – except a little too favourable. It was midday now and our destination was 85 miles north. If we continued sailing at our present speed we would arrive off the entrance in the early hours of the next day. Given my philosophy of not entering new ports in the dark, we shortened sail and reduced our speed to that which would get us there by daybreak.

The wind continued to build and backed to the east, the seas were also starting to grow big and steep. By nightfall we were in 40 knots gusting 50 and we doused all the sails. A drogue out the back slowed us down to 4 to 5 knots. still too fast. We decided to heave to for 5 hours and then continue on our course. By 23:00 the wind was up to 45 gusting 55 and life was getting quite unpleasant. Lisa and Terry were by now down below and trying with little success to get some sleep. I stayed on watch because although we had plenty of sea, we were on a lee shore and besides there were ships in the area, we had seen one pass us just before dark.

By midnight I estimated we were 50 miles from our destination and the wind was backing further to the north, if we didn’t start making way soon, we’d be beating into 50 knots. I pulled in the drogues and turned the bow downwind. In moments we were sailing under bare poles at a comfortable 4 knots with a quartering sea. Our ETA was looking good. Terry awoke when he felt the motion change and came on deck, followed by Lisa and we headed for the safety of Ilha da Mozambique.

A ship passed us heading south and the waves were breaking over her bow in vast white sheets. In the spray around us, daybreak arrived with the wind now almost in the north and we had a jib out halfway, still not happy to hoist a main sail. With the growing light, up ahead, right where we expected it, a lighthouse appeared out of the gloom. We were nearly there! Terry got onto the SSB and asked Bill if he had any information regarding the approaches to the entrance since once again, we had no detailed charts and these entrances were badly marked if at all. Bill gave is a commentary from the Coastal Pilot which Terry diligently wrote down in the log book and with that information we motor-sailed into the sanctuary behind the island picking our way between sand banks and rock outcrops, with the weather growing wild again as the cyclone came nearer. We heaved a collective sigh of relief as the anchor buried itself in the sandy bottom. We were home (for now).

 Cyclone Gafilo – outline of Madagascar visible to the left (Source: NOAA) We were 450 miles east of the centre of the system.

The island of Ilha da Mozambique is a relic of the Portuguese rulers that colonised the area and a huge derelict fort dominates the entrance to the bay. A museum that was originally the Governor’s holiday residence holds some interesting treasures and we spent a good few hours wandering around the vast property. But the single most impressive thing was the pride with which the residents tended their town. All the streets wear unpaved with the tarmac surface long since disintegrated and removed. The streets were nonetheless swept immaculately clean, not a sign of refuse or litter. Buildings that had last seen paint decades before were washed and clean, those that had windows had spotless glass in them. The stores were scantily stocked but clean and tidy and the local market held almost no produce. And yet the town and its people exuded pride and love for their home. We stayed for three days waiting for the cyclone to move on and when Bill finally said it was safe we said farewell to our second and by far our best unscheduled stop. unfortunately we experienced our next gear failure. When we weighed the anchor it was stuck under some obstacle, possibly a rock, perhaps a wreck. We tried to shake it loose and suddenly it yielded but the ease with which we could pull in the chain told us something was wrong – the flukes of the CQR had broken off at the knuckle and only the tang came aboard at the end of the chain.

The weather on our departure was near-perfect – 20 knots from the south-west an almost flat sea and sunny warm weather. We hoisted a cruising genakker and a full main and set a course for Nose Bé, 400 miles to the east. The current had been so badly disturbed by the intensity of the recently passed storm system that we barely felt the effect of the usual south-bound torrent. With a daily distance of 160 miles or more, we made landfall with the Madagascan coast 10 miles south of Nose Bé on the night if the third day. We sailed along the coast, again harassed by a small tanker that seemed to be wandering every which way before again leaving us safely in his wake.

By daybreak we were picking our way amongst the reefs and rocks along the shoreline of the small island of Nose Bé heading for the sign-in port of Hellville, a forbidding name indeed. As with all the coastlines we have encountered so far, the buildings from a distance appeared to be in good shape, the town appeared to be quite large and, knowing that this was a popular cruising ground we discussed our imminent visit to the chandlers where we would replace broken gear and maybe a new anchor.

The sign-in was a joke with a 6 metre shipping container serving as the customs office manned by a local young lady who looked like she’d stepped off the front cover of Vogue Magazine. The police chief arrived to interpret (nobody else spoke any English) and swiftly relieved us of US$100, a nice round number for three temporary visas. He then quoted a figure for our stay that was a few hundred thousand francs and our calculations showed a figure of several hundred US$> we decided not to pay it.

We went into the town and saw the result of one of the poorest economies that had just been raped by a Cat 5 cyclone and it wasn’t pretty. And yet, the people again were cheerful and helpful, the beer was icy cold and dirt cheap and the bank was efficient in the most elementary fashion. The process was simple: The building was too small to have a queue inside. So what everyone did was go to the counter were a line of documents, including cash, credit cards and cheques, were lined op on the counter. This was the queue.! when your documents were next, you went to the counter and got served. I don’t believe we have seen this level of trust anywhere else in the world. It is probably also the only place in the world where bank notes are printed with two different currencies – the French franc and the Malagasy franc. The second is worth about 1% of the first. Now we understood the fee for our stay was less than $30 for a week’s stay.

Hellville Market – not exactly world class!

The town was in better shape physically than most of Mozambique but only because there had not been a civil war here before. The buildings were in sad condition, the streets and other infrastructure were in poor shape and there was litter everywhere. This was real 3rd world stuff. Except the bank and, incongruously, the post office which was bustling and efficient – a letter posted by Terry reached South Africa 4 days later. That seldom happens in South Africa.

We moved from Hellville to Crater Bay which was the main anchorage but the actual Crater Bay was alongside the anchorage (see below). We anchored in a safe and comfortable spot and were immediately approached by a “boat boy” who would be our appointed delegate and servant for the duration of our stay.

We saw so many unique things that they can’t be left from the narrative:

We attached ourselves to a taxi driver who ferried us wherever we wanted to go for small amounts of money. On one trip to fetch provisions from Hellville, we spotted a burger bar and told the taxi man we were going there for lunch. We invited him to join us and he declined saying he would see us when we were done. When we came out from restaurant he was nowhere to be seen. We ranted for a while about all our stuff in the taxi, pondered whether we should bother with the police and ten minutes later the taxi slewed into the parking space alongside us, the driver profusely apologising for being late. He had been taking other fares while we had lunch. Not only honest, enterprising too.

We saw a goat who head-butted Terry in the bum as he walked by. Terry cussed the goat and walked on. On the walk back, the goat was lying on a table, totally dismembered and body parts carefully laid out for sale. Terry felt bad that his curse may have come true.

We saw what appeared to be a homeless man on the beach below our restuarant window, playing a home made musical instrument that resembled a guitar but was actually very different and he serenaded us with a curiosly catchy refrain. When he was done, instead of asking for a tip/donation, he tried to sell us copies of his latest CD!!

We saw police officers stopping what we would refer to as a fully derelict taxi (ours) and inspect the driver’s papers without paying the slightest attention to the obviously unroadworthy condition of the vehicle.

But then we saw the ugly side of poverty – in the middle of the night, our boat boy came shopping for a dingy, found ours unprotected and we never saw it again. That was to cause us considerable difficulty in the rest of the voyage for wherever we stopped, we were essentially unable to get ashore without considerable difficulty. That was to be our last distasteful contact with Africa and its neighbors.

When the storm had cleared we sailed along the shoreline to see that a line of ships that we had seen through the gloom of the storm were nothing but hulks of rusted wrecks lying firmly beached. Local residents had created elements of informal housing in some of the hulls and in the gathering night, flickering lights from candles or kerosene lamps could be seen. At one point we heard people shouting at us and when we paid attention it appeared that they were actually cheering, probably because they couldn’t believe we had got through the storm in one piece. For what it was worth, neither could we.

We approached a small-craft harbour that was packed with fishing boats and went in looking for a place to tie up. There was nothing that we could see and the locals were indicating that it was already shallow and the tide was ebbing. They also made it clear that the boats would leave early in the morning and we would no doubt be in the way. We decided to find somewhere else.

Actually, there was know-where else. We had no idea of shipping movements and there were some cargo freighters tied up to the main wharf which could leave at any time. So prudence suggested that we needed to stay out of their way. We moved to a spot that was directly off-shore of what was obviously the control tower for the docks and then found a spot on the opposite side of the channel where we could safely anchor even at low tide but that would be too shallow for a ship to reach even at high tide. We dropped the anchor and got ready for bed.

The following morning we awoke to a ruckus outside which turned out to be the local tug circling us and telling us to move because apparently this was the space he used when he was manoeuvering ships in and out. We moved to a spot he indicated would be OK and then set about trying to raise the harbour authorities on the VHF. That proved to be an impossibility.

We called and called literally for two days without success. We started thinking that our VHF was faulty and requested a radio check on Channel 16  from whoever was listening and had crew members of the ships telling us that there was no fault with our radio. Still no response. The captain of the tug came around and we called him alongside and told him we were trying to get hold of the authorities and he said he had heard us calling but offered no further advice. Then we told him we were running out of fresh water and he responded like any decent seaman – he told us to come ashore and they would provide whatever we needed.

Then our next piece of equipment failed. We pumped up the roll-up inflatable dink and with a painter secured to the ring at the bow, we dropped it in the fast-flowing tide. As it hit the water, the rubber patch that secured to ring to the bow parted and the dingy went racing off down the river and on its way out to sea. What happened next was with blinding speed and not one of us looking back could understand how it actually worked out.

I ran down the deck an leaped over the side into the dingy. There were no oars, paddles or anything else in the dink and the tidal stream was probably 4 knots. As I dived overboard, Alan grabbed a line that just coincidentally was lying coiled on the deck. He threw the line to me, it landed in the dink and started uncoiling fast as the dink was swept downstream. I frantically grabbed the line, got a hold of the last foot and hung on. Alan and Terry reeled me in and we got the dink back on board. Nobody spoke for 5 minutes. That was probably the only constructive thing that Alan did (other than bake delightful bread) on the whole voyage this far.

Long story made short – we got the dink fixed and Alan and I went ashore and on to the control tower, asked to see the harbour-master and were taken to his office. He said he had seen us there for two days and had wondered what we were up to. He had no idea that we had been calling his people on the radio all that time. He was incensed by the inefficiency of his people but then he acknowledged that we were the first private yacht to enter the harbour in twenty years and his people did not know how to handle our arrival so instead they rather did nothing.

He said that the local customs and immigration people had no way of dealing with us so our passports could not be processed and as such the rest of the people on the boat could not come ashore. We explained that we needed only to collect some parts that were being flown in and we’d be on our way. He took us down to another building alongside the modern control tower. The office we went to had no glass in the windows, no flooring and no furniture other than an old wooden desk with empty cavities where the drawers used to be. Sitting on the desk was a fellow who the harbour-master introduced to us as “Goyti” (or that’s what it sounded like). Goyti was a customs official and was to be our official chaperone who would shadow our every move while we were ashore. This obviated the need for any immigration paperwork – a simple solution to the problem. Goyti turned out to be an absolute gem of a man who helped us with so much.

Alan then started discussing with me his payment for the delivery and said that he needed to buy stuff for himself but had no cash on him. After some discussion I agreed to advance him some of his fee, a total of US$2000 and we went to the bank where we got forex with amazing ease and efficiency. Alan then went to a post office where he allegedly called his mom in South Africa because “she wasn’t well”. What I didn’t know at the time was that he was calling the airport to book a flight out of Beira!!

The city of Beira (shown below) looks from a distance like any other but it is not. The small bay in the centre front is the small craft harbour. The darkened shoreline to the right is littered with the hulks of ships, the tower on the front is the control post for the harbour officials. The dark area at the right front is a shanty town

It is very similar to Maputo, bombed out, many vacant windowless buildings, streets pot-holed and in places unpaved, traffic lights dark and useless. Most store-fronts were boarded up, houses along the waterfront that had once been obviously grand were now derelict and windowless with impoverished folks living without any utilities. A vast park in the city centre had returned to a proper jungle that we were told not to go into even in the daylight and definitely never at night.

Electricity in the city at large was browned out from 08:00 in the evening and blacked out from 11:00 until morning. And yet, amongst all the debris of war you find shining state-of-the-art banks, well stocked supermarkets, gracious restaurants and incongruously, brilliant telephone kiosks with the latest micro-wave technology making calls anywhere in the world easy and cheap (to Alan’s apparent delight). Very difficult to imagine.

Our chaperone was there the following morning when we came ashore and accompanied us to the DHL office where we were told the parts would only arrive the next day. He then took us into a section of the city that was no different from the squatter camps in South Africa. He told us that this was actually the commercial heart of the city and that anything we needed could be bought here for a significantly reduced price.

The shanty town included the derelict ships that we had seen from the boat and to our astonishment, there were several of the vessels on the beach that were still in daily operation. Goyti told us that the small craft harbour we had seen was too small and too expensive and some of the fishermen simply beached their vessels shortly after the tide started receding and then floated them off again when the tide came in.

Goyti then took us to a “building” that had sounds of boisterous activity emanating from it and when we went in, we realised why we could not get hold of the harbour officials on the VHF for a few days. They were all in the bar we had just found and they were all rollicking drunk. We were introduced to each of them and then for US$2 I paid for a round of beer for the whole bar and became everyone’s best friend.

Later that day Alan and I sat down in a restaurant for lunch and halfway through he said he had to make another call to his “mom”. Still I was too stupid to see what was happening. When he returned I asked after his mom and he said she wasn’t well and he was “really worried”. The following morning we returned to the city and went to the DHL office where we found the spares we needed. We said to Goyti that we were going to sail straight away and when we got back to the boat, Alan broke the news.

He was going to have to return home to see his ailing mom. Yeah right. He had checked and there was an airport in Nose Be on Madagascar and he would fly in and meet us there in a week or two. The silly man actually thought we believed him. But then that defined his general level of intelligence. The kids looked at me and smiled. They bade Alan farewell and I took him ashore were he again said that he would see us in Madagascar. As we sailed out of Beira we watched him walking along the dock with Goyti in tow, heading for the airport. We would never see or hear from him again.

We suddenly realised that all three of us were actually happy he was gone and Terry and Lisa felt they now had enough experience to be confident to continue without him. And so to us Alan Morkel became forever known as “The Two Week Guarantee Skipper”. Only South Africans would really understand the nature of that nick-name.

Next: Beira to Madagascar

The Mozambique Channel is not a place for the faint hearted. We sailed from Richards Bay with the plan to head directly for Zanzibar in Zaire and that meant all the way up the Channel with the Agulhas Stream against us all the way.

“No problem” said our intrepid skipper, he knew what the state of the game was and we should be able to navigate the trip without incident. Well, that belief was soon shattered. After passing Maputo, we were sailing right up against the coastline trying to avoid the fierce wash that threatened to take us all the way back to Durban. Even at this early stage of the trip I tasted the first bitterness of trying to sail against the current. Let me explain.

It is one thing sailing against the wind because that allows a normal sailing boat to run about 45° off the wind. This allows you in turn to tack the other way and gives you an effective 90° area of which one can sail up both sides and one can make reasonably good progress to windward even when the wind is dead ahead.

However, when there is a counter current, it multiplies the effect of the angle off the wind. In other words, it only needs a small amount of current when you’re beating into the wind to widen the tacking angle out from 45° to 60° and often more. The reason is because even though the boat is pointing where you think it is going, it’s actually going somewhere else, influenced by the current. The net result of this is that you can end up sailing for 100 miles up and down the tack angle to make good 20 miles up your chosen course. This was to become an absolute nightmare later on in the trip and I never really recognized it at this time.

The skipper never really understood what was happening with the current at all and it needed careful explaining to him before he realized that with a persistent north-easterly wind, we would be getting a lot older before getting to Zanzibar.

In his wisdom he decided to go out to sea and “get across the current” into more benign water since the long-range weather forecast spoke of north-easterly winds for the next few weeks. His thinking was that we should go via a small little archipelago called Basos do Indio and then on to the west coast of Madagascar. There was according to him a positive counter current to carry us north.

After slogging along for a day or more, I said to Alan that the course we were on was actually taking us south. He showed me the compass and said that he was comfortable with the course which was pointing sort of north-east.

By now I understood how little he knew. I showed him the GPS which clearly indicated not only a boat speed that was less than half of what we showed on the instruments but also a course that was 50° away from the compass. As described above, the compass merely indicated which way the boat was pointing, not which way it was travelling. He said that he knew what he was doing and soon we would be out on the other side of the current and everything would be OK. So we said goodbye to Africa as it slipped below the horizon and went on our way.

I went off watch to get some sleep and when I awoke in the morning, Alan had had a change of heart and headed back to the coast and there was Africa, back again in all it’s glory. We had now actually picked up a favorable counter current close to the beach that pushed us merrily on our way. But effectively we lost two days.

We worked our way up the coast and saw some beautiful places and enjoyed some really pleasant weather and sailing conditions. Things were looking good. We cooked some great food including lovely fresh game fish that Terry had caught. There are some terrific resorts along the Mozambican coast line. We saw lots of people on the beaches and it seems as though there are segments of the economy there that are making a good living.

We then had our next mechanical problem; the water pump on the engine leaked incessantly into the boat and it seemed that if we were to be safe and comfortable we would need to replace it. Seemingly it had been damaged during the overheat situation we had experienced shortly after leaving Durban Marina. The only way we could get the pump fixed that was to stop at Beira but there were several problems connected to that.

Firstly, with the economy in Mozambique the way it was it was certain that there would be no such spare parts in Beira so they would have to be sent from South Africa. Then we didn’t have charts for the approaches or entry to Beira and none of us had even a rudimentary knowledge of the area or the approaches. Couple that to the fact that the authorities there did not encourage recreational vessels to enter and it was altogether quite challenging but it was effectively our only choice.

We contacted Terry’s father in Johannesburg who arranged a new water pump to be sent from Cape Town via DHL to Beira and it would arrive there at a time that was coincidentally quite good for us. So we decided that it was just as well that we didn’t manage to cross the current and head for Madagascar as was the skippers’ earlier plan.

We set course instead for Bazaruto where we would spend a day relaxing before making rendezvous with the water pump in Beira. This meant sailing up the coast for a few hundred miles and we did this happily because the scenery was good with plenty to see and the wind was favorable for that course, without any negative current

Then, at one point Lisa looked over the side of the boat and commented that the water was really clean, that she could see the fish amongst the rocks. Terry and I jumped up to have a look, alarmed by what she said. Alan who was on watch and sitting at the helm just continued doing what he was doing. Terry and I concurred that it wasn’t that the water was so clean but that it was so really shallow!

We asked Alan what the depth was, being that he was “watching” the depth sounder and he said “Relax, we’ve got 6 metres under the keel”. Terry sidled over to the depth sounder and sure enough, it said 6 metres. Then he noticed that the idiot skipper had the sounder set to the demo mode and what was being displayed was a software-generated picture and not the depth at all!

This galvanized us all into action. When Terry reset the depth sounder it read one metre and at times less. We panicked and changed course to head out to sea, picking our way between coral heads (bommies, as they are called), trying not to hit one. Luckily the water was clean and visibility was excellent so we could thread our way between the coral heads and rocks.

Then one of the (retrospectively) funniest things about the incident happened. A guy who was snorkelling on the reef suddenly stood up alongside the boat and looked at us in absolute astonishment as we sailed past him some two metres away with him standing on a bommie not more than knee-deep!! He could have reached out and touched the boat!!

The incident was enough for me to have stern words with Alan about shallow water and what happens to boats that run aground at 6 knots. He seemed unperturbed and it was only later that Lisa, Terry and I agreed that he was probably so accustomed to sailing on catamarans that he probably never realized that we had a 7 foot keel hanging out the bottom of the boat!

This situation again raised its ugly head later the same evening as we were approaching Bazaruto, sailing a course that Alan had laid for “Baz” along the shore. The chart clearly showed a string of shoals of varying depths down to one metre and the course he had laid on the chart went straight over the top of them.

As it happened, our helming was dead accurate because at midnight the depth alarm (which was no longer on demo mode) screamed at me and when I looked it showed a depth of less than a metre. And the boat was powering on a reach at over 7 knots!! If we had touched the bottom at that speed, the boat would probably have sunk in about 30 seconds.

In fairness to Alan the rest of the trip to Beira was unavoidably like that all the way with the whole coastline made up of a wide and shallow shelf that went many miles out to sea and shoaled up frequently. The alternative to sailing over it would have meant a trip way out to sea, probably another two days of sailing to the Beira stop. Some areas had us sailing ten miles off shore with sandbanks right alongside us big enough to support some fair-sized trees.

Anyway, in another panic, I turned out to sea again and then sailed along the forty metre line until we arrived off Bazaruto 05:00 the following morning. This was the first place since Richards Bay that the lighthouse actually worked. All other navigational aids along the Mozambique coastline were dead and some of them were not even visible in the daytime, the original structures having been destroyed for the building materials they held.

And then our next mechanical failure hit us. Terry went below to get some cold drinks and came on deck reporting that the beers were not cold anymore. A quick inspection revealed that the fridge that we had repaired in Durban had stopped working. We decided to try to keep it cold for as long as possible but the process of re-heating that happens naturally when a fridge stops cooling started very quickly.

It wasn’t too long before we spent an hour throwing all our “frozen” meat and vegetables over the side, a grizzly process that had us unwrapping everything, throwing the produce over the side and then washing and stowing the plastic wrappings. Then, the worst of all, scrubbing out a fairly rotten fridge.

This also meant that from here on in, we were going to be living off canned foods and pasta or rice and, some solace, we could still have freshly baked bread. Some of the meat was still good so we had a bit of a feast and then never ate for a day or longer. We also still had the benefit of Terry’s not inconsiderable fishing prowess which saw us enjoying fresh game fish whenever the fancy took us.

Bazaruto is a really beautiful place but once again, we had no charts to get us into the archipelago. It was a feature of Alan’s planning that he had made no provision amongst his charts for any “bolt holes” that we could use in an emergency. The whole trip up to and including Seychelles was done on large-scale charts with no detail at all. The problems connected to this were to have far-reaching consequences down the line.

So at Bazaruto we had to be satisfied with an anchorage off Paradise Island where we parked off and swam and slept the day away, drinking warm beer and eating a decently cooked meal. On the side we anchored there is a derelict hotel and resort deserted other than for heavily armed guards watching us so we decided not to go ashore. What we didn’t know was that on the other side of the island was a flash new hotel that was fully functional.

In hindsight I was quite pleased that we found that out on leaving the island because it would have been a tough task dragging the others away without another days’ stop and I had a need to keep moving.

The anchorage was quite rough so we decided that if we were in any case going to have a bumpy night, we might as well be making way. So we set off to Beira, all the while watching the depth sounder like a hawk and having some real scares with depths suddenly shoaling up under the boat to less than a metre deep.

Our approach to Beira was really something. Along the shoreline which was now about 5 miles east of our track, a huge storm was exploding with the most incredible lightning we had ever seen. Lisa has since discovered that it is a natural phenomenon seldom seen called “ball lightning”.

What it is, is lightning that shoots right out of the top of the cumulo nimbus clouds high into the sky. The lightning appears colored in a wild array of spectacular blues, reds and greens, almost neon in their intensity. Awesome to see, an almost unbelievable sight. One of the strange things at sea is that unless the storm is right on top of you, there is an almost total absence of thunder because it has nothing to bounce off of and dissipates very quickly.

So here we had this sensational storm alongside us while we searched for a really convoluted channel into the harbour of Beira in the gathering dark. We eventually sailed into the harbour area to discover that it isn’t actually a harbour at all, rather just an open, strongly tidal river area with a wharf along one side. Scant protection from any strong wind.

We had taken the main sail down and folded it and were sailing in on a half-furled jib when the wind suddenly died altogether. We furled the jib fully in, intending to motor into the wharf area when the air temperature dropped instantly from a balmy 26° to about 15° and I mean instantly!

Then without warning the wind hit us at 60 knots accompanied by absolutely torrential rain, so much so that we could no longer see the harbour, the beaches or the ships around us. Real scary stuff. And now we heard the thunder! We had lightning striking the water 50 yards from the boat and launching huge plumes of water into the air. I still don’t understand how we never got struck because we were literally in the middle of an extraordinary storm, the same one we had been watching all the way up the coast. You could feel the static charge building up in the air as the hairs on your arms and the back of your neck prickled and stood up. Then with an almighty bang the lightning would strike alongside the boat and the smell of the discharged ozone strongly in the air.

Then, to top it all off, Alan, who had furled the jib in, had not cleated the furling line properly and with an almighty crash, the sail fully unfurled itself into the raging gale. Well, it was a really character-building time for all of us with the boat now screaming off under a huge jib in a shrieking wind, in a harbour we had never seen with visibility down to about 20 metres.

By the time we started getting the boat under control the wind dissipated and the rain slowed to a mild torrent and soon enough we were drifting a total calm, getting our minds around what had just happened. Subsequent research tells us that what we had experienced was a “pressure burst”, a sudden and severe drop in atmospheric pressure from probably 1026 millibars down to about 980! So quickly did it happen then revert to normal that my digital barometer, which has a memory, never even recorded it.

Next:Beira

After a short stay in Johannesburg to give Lisa and Terry an opportunity to wrap things up and sort out issues of home rentals and pet arrangements, we packed Terry’s dad David’s station wagon full of everything that we thought we would need on our adventure.

The car was bursting at the seams and it occurred to me that there probably wasn’t going to be enough space on the boat for all the stuff we had in the car. We groaned out onto the highway on an early summer morning and headed for Durban and the 600 kilometre journey that would set us off on our trip.

As we pulled into the parking lot at the Royal Natal Yacht Club, we were greeted by a darkly tanned, broadly smiling man who said “There will never be enough space for all that gear!” I met Alan Morkel for the first time and didn’t for a moment suspect what a tough decision he would ultimately have me make.

We went to the club for a bite to eat and invited Alan to join us before we unpacked the car. Durban was already a place where a car loaded full of stuff would soon be emptied by nocturnal visitors and we had to be sure that everything was removed or concealed before nightfall.

Lunch provided an opportunity to start talking about our strategy for the voyage and it was not long before I was informed that Alan had earlier met with Lisa and Terry over lunch. Seemingly the hoary old chestnut about how dangerous the Southern Ocean was and how ill-advised any trip to that part of the world would be had already been discussed at some length and decisions had already been made.

Cutting directly to the chase, the skipper and “his” crew informed me that there was only one choice, we would be going north or we wouldn’t be going at all. After some discussion I allowed myself to be lured into the plan change by mental images of warm islands as opposed to freezing icebergs, of sultry tropical breezes as opposed to screaming polar gales and, to their credit they did a good selling job.

By nightfall it was settled, we were going north. All that had to be done was decide the route. I guess in hindsight this was the start of the rot and all things bad that happened on the voyage had their roots in this decision.

Over the next ten days we would victual the boat and carry out some repairs that had to be done. New sails that had been ordered would be delivered and plans would be made to accommodate extra water and fuel provisions.

Alan assumed the responsibility as skipper to manage the whole process of preparing the boat and I provided the technical support and management based on my experience with and knowledge of the boat.

We spent some nights in the yacht club discussing the route and names that conjured up exotic images came under review. We would go from Durban directly to Dar es Salaam and  Zanzibar. We would stop at Kalifi Beach in Kenya and from there we would pass over the top of Seychelles en route to Chagos. Our next stop would be Cocos Keeling archipelago and then on to Darwin in Australia.

It sounded so good I started to get totally absorbed in the possibilities and the concerns that I had had about tropical storms and adverse wind and current evaporated before the lure of island life and everything that it promised. The fact that we had amongst other obstacles, to travel the entire length of the Mozambique Channel was lost in the euphoria of a tropical cruise.

Preparations went on at a whirlwind pace and David Harvey, Terry’s dad, joined us in the marina to help with things that had to get done. Alan started to show that he was a great organizer but not really into the physical side of work. He was always conveniently busy with charts or safety regulations when the hot and sweaties had to be taken care of.

And he was also curiously always present for mealtimes at the club and amazingly absent when the bill arrived. In hindsight, I cannot recall Alan ever buying me a drink or even paying for his own meals. It became apparent that he assumed his appointment as skipper meant that his stay on the boat before the trip was on an “all found” basis.

Another alarm bell that started ringing was Alan’s resolute dismissal of any suggestion that we should go sailing to test certain bits of equipment or the new sails or anything else that had been newly introduced to Omatako. The very first time that Alan Morkel actually sailed on Omatako was when we pushed off from the jetty to leave South Africa.

All the while we chatted about tropical storms and the status of the cyclone season in the Indian Ocean and at each such discussion it was again reinforced that the season was all but over and by the time we get far enough north, there would be no tropical storms.

What was never discussed was that the cyclone season was to be replaced by the south east monsoon which would reverse all the favorable prevailing winds and some of the currents as well. We studied routing charts and used a whole bunch of excuses to rationalize the changing season.

What did become clear was that we had a weather window up to mid-May at which time progress to the east would become and arduous task that would see us beating into predominantly easterly winds and currents that would make every day a trial.

We waited for a local weather window and all the while carrying on working like Trojans to get everything ready and all along I said to Alan that we needed to go out to sea and test certain bits of questionable gear. He kept agreeing but cunningly avoided actually doing it until finally we were sitting in the RNYC lounge waiting for a westerly to leave on and Alan had not left the mooring on the boat yet. The very first time he sailed on the boat was when we left for New Zealand.

From the left: Alan Morkel, Terry, Lisa Jane, Andre

At around 19:00 a westerly buster came through and we sat at the club and waited for it to abate and at about 21:00 we decided it was time to go. We went to the jetty, said our good-byes. The wind was still blowing 30 to 35 knots and the howling of it through the rigging of the boats berthed on the marina was quite intimidating. Nevertheless, we cast off and started on our journey.

Before we reached T Jetty, the overheat buzzer on the engine started screaming at us. The drive belts on the engine had snapped and the engine started to overheat. All the people who saw us off at the marina had left to go to North Pier (Thirsty’s) to wave goodbye. We didn’t want to turn around and disappoint them so we sailed around T Jetty and decided that with the wind the way it was, we would sail on to Richards Bay and get everything fixed from there.

After some tense moments of sailing around the end of T jetty with a ship close to our port beam, we sailed into the channel and got clearance from Port Control to leave for “foreign waters”. We sailed past Thirsty’s to a screaming pack of relatives waving us on our way.

About two hours out of Durban we started getting the boat ready for the long haul as it were and I set about activating the windvane steering. I couldn’t get it to hold a decent course and after battling with it for an hour, asked Alan if he had any ideas. He said that he had never sailed with a windvane steering before and had no idea how it worked! Not bad for a professional delivery skipper.We were on a downwind run and I had been told many times by assorted users of the windvane that it didn’t like being asked to work downwind. We put it down to that idiosyncrasy and set the trusty little wheel pilot instead.

We actually had a great sail to Richards Bay except that we also discovered that the SSB radio was not getting very good reception. We could hear the Durban radio service but could not speak to them.  Drat!! we couldn’t risk a voyage without communication. Another reason to stop in Richards Bay.

But we had a good strong tailwind and a following sea and the boat was flying and we sent Lisa and Terry to bed to get them settled into the sailing way before setting them on watch. I spent some time in the engine compartment during this leg of the trip and made a makeshift plan to be able to at least run the engine when we got to Richards Bay so that we had some control over our entry.

When we got to Richards Bay, we couldn’t raise the harbour control on any of the radios but that turned out to be poor watchkeeping by the authorities and our VHF radios at least were in good shape.

As we pulled into the entrance to the marina, the furler on the front sail (jib) wouldn’t furl the sail in, completely jammed. The wind was still blowing quite hard so we couldn’t risk going into the marina with a sail up so we went back out into the channel, and found a lee across under the banks on the southern side of the channel where we quickly ran aground. The depth sounder alarm had not alerted us to a sandy shoal in the harbour entrance! Never did discover why the depth alarm didn’t work because it never gave us any trouble after that incident.

After a few sweaty-palmed moments, we got back off the sand bar, managed to release the furler, got the sail furled in and chugged our way into the small craft harbour with the engine on the fringes of an overheat. In the marina we met up with two sailing school boats who left before us and got beaten up by the buster in the night. At least we got one thing right and that was leaving Durban at the right time.

We were really pleased to get a cold beer, a hot shower and the opportunity to fix some equipment but the 80 miles we had covered had shown up some disturbing equipment  problems considering we still has over 9000 miles to go.

After dinner the first evening, Lisa generously offered to clean up the dinner stuff and without further ado, emptied the ash from the barbecue over the side. Along with all the fire grates and other loose fittings in the bowl. From that moment on, the Cobb was a useless piece of kit that I trailed a third of the way around the world before finally binning it when it got wrapped up in the gennaker sheet and was partially crushed.

Richards Bay is fortunately a well-found sanctuary for yachts and we managed to get everything fixed that had broken with the exception of the windvane steering which nobody had any clue about and the Cobb which was quite revolutionary at the time and again, nobody had a clue about.

After a two-day rest, largely brought about by having to wait for certain spare parts and several unhealthy arguments with the customs and immigration authorities, we were cleared to leave and sailed out of Richards Bay and away from the relative sophistication of their maritime environment and started our journey into darkest Africa.

With the passage of time, our plan started leaning towards ending the journey inNew Zealandwhere we would make a life for ourselves that would see our older years amongst the South Pacific islands and in an environment conducive to comfortable retirement.

In this process the move to New Zealand started to take on a whole new importance for the entry requirements were age-restricted and we were fast approaching the threshold of non-compliance so our efforts moved from the concept of sailing around the world to one of establishing ourselves in New Zealand and doing our sailing using this as our base.

From having a derisive attitude to New Zealand, we slowly changed our perspective to one of actually looking forward to going and we set ourselves off on the long and arduous trail of compliance. Finally, when the word came down from theNew Zealand officialdom that we were accepted for permanent residence, we were faced with an almost unwanted decision. Do we really want to do this?

We decided it was for the best and although our original motivation was driven by the desire to be in an environment more conducive to sailing, we now started to ponder the direction in which South Africa was politically headed and our resolve to move became less difficult to rationalize.

We discussed the options with our daughter Lisa who initially wondered why we would want to heave off for shores unknown seemingly without a thought spared for what would happen to her. But as far as we where concerned, Lisa was now in a firmly committed relationship with Terry and we were able to leave her to sort herself out.

Terry, Lisa’s partner was also a stable entity in our lives, his love for and devotion to Lisa clearly evident and his parents Dave and Angie now long term friends and probably, imminent family. So we were more comfortable with the prospect of leaving our daughter inSouth Africa. We set about the task of getting ourselves to New Zealand, all the time having the prospect of sailing in one form or another to get the boat there as well.

We had already gone through the growing pains of having our first yacht, a Petersen 33 named Black Pepper that had taught us a lot about sailing, boat ownership, seamanship and a host of other elements about our prospective future, both good and bad.

Our discussions seesawed between the euphoria of the decision to go cruising and the trepidation of the leap into the unknown. We graduated to a larger boat a 36-foot Corrida, a GRP sloop named Omatako, which really crystallized the decision to go cruising, and we set about rearranging our lives for that eventuality.

We entered into the Vasco da Gama ocean race, which was a race from Maputo in Mozambique to Durban which necessitated of course, a sailing trip from Durban to Maputo, my first voyage as a skipper and by far the longest trip anyone on the prospective crew list had ever done. The truth was, not one of the other crew members had ever spent a night at sea!

The race turned out to be a personal success with a better-than-imagined result and served to strengthen my belief that cruising was for me. Despite several equipment shortcomings, we did respectably well in the race and the boat lived up to all my expectations. The resolve grew stronger.

Long trips from Johannesburg to Durban almost monthly, racking up 1200 kilometers each time just to get to the boat, often ended in little progress with the cost of preparation being almost prohibitive in the arena of international pricing for boating equipment. The Corrida was after all, a boat built in 1977 and was now twenty-five years old with all of the redundancy that age brings.

Being a “modern sailor” I had an uncanny ability to ignore sage advice from friends who had done this stuff before and I persisted with the belief that everything had to be as modern as possible, a trait that was to cause me considerable stress down the line.

I also rationalized inherent boat design and made excuses for shortcomings of the boat. Yes, I understand that a long keel may be preferable on a cruising boat but fin keels were prevalent these days and anyway, those old guys only had access to boats with long keels. My spade rudder was also as good as any other and would do the job.

I set about equipping a vessel with bits of technology that would, in the fullness of time, display only one consistency, that of untimely failure. Discussions with other sailors who had successfully single-handed their boats around the world with little lip-service paid to technology, fell on deaf ears and my passion for technology continued to dominate my thinking until comparatively huge amounts of money had been spent on what would essentially end up as useless toys.

Still, the time came when we believed we were just about ready and happily, this coincided with our planned departure for New Zealand. The plan developed into one where we would go to New Zealand, establish ourselves to a point and then later the same year return to South Africa for Lisa’s wedding and finally, the start of the trip.

This plan ended unfulfilled and for reasons outside the scope of this narrative, we decided that the time was not right for the voyage. Choices of route and weather windows along with crew issues in respect of experience and qualification were all components that at the time did not gel into a cohesive desire to go.

We returned to New Zealand without any further plan on where the cruising dream would end for our lives were in serious need of stability that could not be provided by the prospect of sailing off into the distance. Once back in New Zealand we settled into the routine of jobs and a home and establishing ourselves but for me, the continual nagging of the boat still back in SA just would not go away.

We spent hours debating the concept of selling Omatako in SA and buying another boat in NZ but the differential in price made the choice very difficult. After all, the vessels that we looked at inAucklandhad no real equipment on board. No Inmarsat, no radar, no this, no that. Imagine going to sea on such an ill-equipped boat! Imagine what it would cost to end up with the same boat inNew Zealandas what I had waiting for me inSouth Africa?

We looked at boat after boat, agonizing over the specifications and the perceived difference between boats designed for the rugged South African coast as opposed to the relative tranquility of the Hauraki Gulf. I found nothing that satisfied my need for strength and my hunger for fancy equipment.

No, there was only one thing for it, I had to go back and fetch the boat. Slowly but surely the new plan began to evolve. And along with it, an insidious scheme to involve Lisa and Terry as potential crew, even though I knew that they would probably not be interested.

Electronic discussion arrived at a point where I had eroded most of their resistance they became not too averse to the concept of the trip. Still, they had one real remaining fear. With their limited knowledge of sailing, what would happen if I were to have a heart attack or fall over board? How would they cope? There had to be another person on board capable of ensuring survival in such and event, no matter how unlikely. I pondered this eventuality and the logic was inescapable. They were right.

I started doing some research on the internet that culminated in advertisements around the sailing fraternity in Durban. I was contacted, amongst others, by one Alan Morkel who distilled out to be, for me, the most likely candidate to act as skipper for the voyage. Looking back, I cannot for the life of me understand why.

When this was shared with Lee and Terry, they became more enthusiastic and before long, we had a commitment from them to do the trip with me. I was delighted. I secured the services of Alan Morkel and the plan started coming together. I resigned my job in New Zealand and booked my passage back to South Africa.

All of trip planning was done on my assumption that we would go on a southerly route, much the same as the one that we had planned for our earlier voyage which we had abandoned. But, as with all good planning, this was to be thrown into disarray further down the line.

The empirical research I had done on the route for the previous voyage was revisited and all of the motivations rationalized then were still evident now. The routing chart for the area for the time of year indicated that a trip down the 37˚S parallel would yield mostly westerly winds and negligible currents that were in any case favorable.

My perception, flawed or not, was that the southerly course could almost be used as a throttle. More speed needed? Go further south. A little too rough? Head back north. The overriding nervousness I had was that the distance was awe-inspiring. Over 4000 miles on the first leg of the journey, ending in Fremantle, Australia.

Still, if we were to make the voyage in a respectable time, we couldn’t hang about and this route would ensure a fast passage with the wind mostly from the back with a following sea. Sounds great.

For once, I heeded advice from friends that had done extensive cruising and had crossed the Indian Ocean between Darwin and Durban traveling from east to west. Their experience had been that theIndian Oceanwas the bumpiest of all the places they had sailed world-wide and despite the apparent dangers of going south, they supported the idea simply because the trip they had done had been really uncomfortable. They could not imagine how uncomfortable it would be going the “wrong way”, against the prevailing wind and ocean currents.

This gave me encouragement and with a firmly cemented plan in my head, I set off for South Africa and the start of the adventure of my life.

We were going sailing for the weekend. We had our very good friends Dave and Debbie on board and the plan was a quiet trip to a local anchorage on Kawau Island where we could go to the local yacht club, have a quiet meal, watch a game of rugby and back to the boat for a peaceful night.

As we motored out of Mahurangi Bay, the buzzer on the engine panel started screaming, A quick look at the panel showed no oil pressure on the gauge. A panic tug on the stop cable stopped the engine and the buzzer was turned off. I went down below, opened the door to the engine room to see what had gone wrong. What I saw beggared belief.

The well below the engine was full of engine oil and the dip stick showed no trace of any. The engine had quite literally pumped all the oil from inside the sump into the boat. It was now lazily making its way down the slope that takes it to the main bilge and, whilst the prospect of a major problem in the engine was uppermost in my mind, there was also a strong sense of disaster when thinking how difficult it was going to be to clean up five litres of pitch black oil!!

When I inspected the engine itself there was no apparent source of an oil leak that severe. No sign of spray, no splashes of oil on the engine, just a thin trail of oil down from the back of the engine block, over the starter motor and into the well. It looked so benign that it is hard looking back and believing that such a little trickle was to cause us so much trouble.

Back on the mooring ball, a fuller inspection which involved putting another five liters of oil in the engine and starting it up, revealed that the little trickle was actually a little river! It pulsed and coursed down from the space between the engine block and the flywheel housing. So what could be causing this? An oil seal popped out? No, that would cause the oil to run out the bottom of the housing. Oil cooler? No, that area was dry with no signs of oil around the cooler. There was only one thing for it – the back of the engine would be stripped and the problem identified and fixed. It sounded so easy.

After looking at the workshop manual it became evident that there was a frost plug in the back of the engine covering the back end of the camshaft. So without being able to see into the gap, it was decided that the plug must have corroded through and the oil was leaking out of the hole. So this was an easy fix – a lot of work but an easy fix. Just strip down, replace the plug and put it back together. Yeah RIGHT!!! This was to be the start of five weekends spent on the boat making this problem right and a seemingly never-ending stream of solutions doing nothing but leading to new problems.

First the gearbox has to come off. So that’s going to be easy. Just undo the back engine mounts, prop-shaft flange bolts off, bell housing bolts out and the transmission is off. Actually no. The engine mounting bolts were rusted and in a place where the spanner big enough to fit the nuts could not be swung. The nuts came off in movements of one-eighth of a turn at a time, tight to the very last turn. It took three hours just to get the two nuts off.

Then the cockpit drains had to be removed to drop two cable hoists through to lift the back f the engine. With the prop flange loose, the engine was lifted and all the bolts around the bell housing taken out. And the gearbox tugged rearwards with an unexpected result – nothing. No movement. The gear box was as solidly in place as if the bolts were all still in. What had happened was that the input shaft was rusted into the drive plate and was going nowhere. Without going the details of how it was done, it took three people whole day just to get the gearbox off the engine!

The rest was relatively uncomplicated with the drive plate, flywheel and flywheel housing coming off as expected. Everything was rusted and looked terrible. The flywheel housing held another surprise – it formed part of the sump mounting area meaning that the sump would have to come off to replace the gasket. But that was unimportant now – let’s see what the frost plug looked like. Yep – it was rusty alright so lets get it out and replace it.

Normally a frost plug comes out with a light tap on one side which tips the plug and out it comes. Well I eventually drilled a hole through the plug to lever it off, then I took a small chisel and split the cup from middle to edge. Still no movement. So I picked up the edge and started peeling it back until I had worked my way around more than half of the circumference and STILL it wouldn’t come out. With a strong sense of foreboding I went to the front of the engine and gave it a quarter of a turn on the crankshaft.

When I went back the the back of the engine, my fears were fully realised – the frost plug was in a different position – the camshaft had welded itself to the frost plug. The immediate importance of that was that the plug would have to be chiselled off the camshaft so that wasn’t so bad. Was it? Well yes it was because in the first instance the plug has been turning with the camshaft. So the hole into which the new plug would have to go was bigger than the new plug and the surface onto which the plug must seal is roughly “machined” and probably incapable of being leak-proof.

And then the chiselling of the plug off the camshaft would place impact force into the bearing and that could have far reaching implications for the durability of the bearing. All in all this was not good news and images of a new engine started to become more and more realistic and that had another whole plethora of problems attached, not the least of which the cost of a new engine.

It was the middle of the night when the solution came to me and it was so exciting that I couldn’t sleep for the rest of the night. The space between the flywheel housing and the engine was used for nothing else so why not fill it with aluminium and seal the back of the camshaft hole with a gasket?

More to follow

The solution that I had dreamed up in the middle of the night was to form a new portion on the side of the flywheel housing that would cover the area where the frost plug originally sealed off the back end of the camshaft. Sketches were made, measurements taken and the flywheel housing and I headed off to the machine shop to see whether the plan would fly.

The first job was to clean out the area on the surface of the housing that faced onto the engine on the milling machine so that an aluminium section could be accurately inserted to fill the gap. The dark area within the “white” area is where the end of the camshaft is located

Then a block of aluminium was machined to fit into that space and was welded into place. Once cooled and stabilised, the housing was clamped back into the milling machine and the surface of the aluminium block was milled down to the exact level of the rest of the face that bolted to the engine.

What I now had was an extended flywheel housing that covered the engine where the camshaft was so that the gasket that used to seal just the flywheel housing now also sealed the back end of the camshaft.

I figured that by bolting the housing to the engine, enough clamping pressure would be generated to seal the camshaft off. I was to be proven wrong because when the engine oil pressure was up, there was sufficient to force oil out between the gasket and the newly formed housing. This was of course only discovered after six hours had been spent re-assembling the whole thing, gearbox, propshaft and all.

Well there was nothing else for it, it had to be stripped again. So the next weekend was spent taking the gearbox off again, flywheel off, housing off and back to the machine shop. Then another idea occurred to me.

When the engine runs, the oil that is pumped into the camshaft journals escapes out of the sides of the bearings and runs back to the sump. The rearmost bearing is no different except that with the frost plug before it and now the newly formed cover bolted in place, the oil only came out on the inner end of the bearing. But with the cover off or the frost plug gone, the oil would come out on both sides of the bearing. And that was no different to the other cam bearing journals. Right?

So the solution was to mill a tiny slot from the centre of the new housing face from the centre of the camshaft back to the crank case to relieve the pressure in that area. That would stop the pressure from blowing the gasket out and the oil leak would be no more. It sounded like a good plan. So the groove was duly cut and back to the boat the following weekend.

Another trick that I had used in years gone by also now came into play. Because the flywheel housing also formed a part of the sump mounting face along wth the bottom of the block. the sump would ideally need to come off to put a new sump gasket on. But this meant a whole new mission that was not part of my agenda for now. So a piece of cork gasket was cut to fit on the protruding sump area and liberally coated with non-hardening gasket sealer and the cover carefully replced without disturbing the new gasket section. This sometimes worked and sometimes not. I prayed that it would work this time.

Another seven hours and it was all back together and with some trepidation I started the engine. The oil leak had stopped. The plan had worked. Well, almost. Firstly when the engine reached normal operating temperature the oil pressure on the gauge was noticeably lower than it was before the modification. Not enough to scare me but noticeable. Later I was also to discover that the trick I had used to prevent the sump having to come off had also not worked and although the main oil leak had been quelled, there was now a much lesser leak from the rear end of the sump gasket.

My most recent thinking is that the engine is going to have to come out soon enough for a re-build so for now, I am happy to live with slightly lower oil pressure and a slight oil leak that can be captured under the engine by one of those oil-absorbing sausages. So far so good.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see how long it will be before the BIG engine job needs to be done.

With the help of my friends at Southern Cross Marine engineering, all the shaft components needed to transfer the drive from the flywheel back to the alternators were turned and drive gears were modified to fit the purpose. The best gears I could find were a camshaft pulley from a Subaru flat four, two idler shaft pulley from a Mitsubishi V3000 and two idler bearings from Nissan V6 – quite a mixture.

These were added to custom brackets and mounts and connected together with a toothed belt to provide positive drive – a target that ended up presenting more problems than it solved but more on that later. Then it became apparent that even though this was a really compact setup, there was space to fit a raw water pump which was supposed to go at the front of the engine but had no space there.

A mini taper-lock pulley was added to the main drive shaft between the main frames to create the required drive for the pump and the assembly ended up looking like this:

A three-toothed dog-type coupler was applied to connect the generator unit to the engine and the only simple method of mounting this to the drive shaft was to thread both the coupling and the shaft and screw them together with some Loctite to keep it together.

Now we’re ready to bolt this assembly to the engine and run it and see what happens. If it works, it will be stripped again for the bracket components to be properly finished with either paint or electroplating. The budget would decide which.

The assembly finally done and a garden hose connected to the raw water supply, the engine starts. For a little while everything seems OK and looks good. A few minor adjustments to stop the toothed belt running on and off the sprockets and the systems appears to be running well.

Then, after running the throttle up and down a few times the engine keeps running but the alternators slow down and it becomes immediately apparent that the locating pin in the large sprocket is inadequate and has sheared. The inertia of the alternators slowing down is more than I expected.

So I drill out the 4mm pin and install an 8mm pin. This one lasts just a few minutes longer before it too shears off. So next step is to simply weld the pulley to the shaft. That’ll fix it. Yeah, right.

On test run No. 3 after a slightly more respectable time, a light clattering noise appears. After some searching I discover the next flaw in the drive system. With the inertia caused by the weight of the alternator rotors, the threaded coupler on the main shaft has come undone. The clattering is caused by the generator-side coupler unscrewing, moving out towards the engine and making contact with the engine-side coupler.

So I strip the generator assembly off again. This time the coupler is re-fitted to the shaft with Loctite and a hole is drilled down the thread between the couplet and the shaft and a grub screw is installed to act as a key. This will stop the coupler unscrewing. Well, that worked, it never unscrewed again but after a short while there is just a “click” and once again, the engine keeps running but the alternators don’t.

Strip it again. This time the inertia caused by the alternators is far more obvious. The shaft has been turned off like the end of a carrot. Cleanly broken at the coupler. So now it is obvious that I will need to re-engineer the drive system to absorb the inertia and soften the transition from accelerate to run to decelerate.

Another element of the design that is exacerbating the inertia problem and had not occurred to me before was that the positiveness of the toothed belt was adding to the inertia since there is absolutely no slip factor and the abrupt stopping and starting of the diesel engine was being transmitted unrelentingly into the drive system. At this time I don’t know whether this will also need to be re-engineered or not.

The plan is to use a drive plate similar to that used between a marine gearbox and its engine. The easiest source is of course the automotive clutch industry using a standard sprung clutch disc with the linings removed and bolted directly to the flywheel. The problem is I need to find a way to fit such a component into half the space it would ordinarily take.

That shouldn’t be too hard. Watch this space . . . .

Next: Electrics, controls and more.

Several positions were tried but no good – they weren’t going to fit. So I swung them around and revised the thought of putting a drive shaft through between the alternators and fitting the pulleys and belts at the back end. Still didn’t fit. Patience!! it has to fit. After repositoning the alternators several times I started getting space to wriggle. Slowly, millimetre by millimetre I started getting more confident that I could make this work.

Change the pulleys. Try again. Pulleys too deep and fouling on the back panel. Back to the original pulleys. Not enough wrap around the pulleys to be sure the belts won’t slip. So what about multiplex belts? The belts were likely to work but the pulleys again were too fat. No space. Last choice – what about using timing pulleys off an engine that used a toothed timing belt? Modelled a set of pulleys and they JUST fit – 2 mm to spare. Are the pulleys clear enough to get adequate adjustment? Yes but . . . . .

The alternators are so integrated with the frame that they can’t be moved to adjust the belt tension – they’re going to have to bolted solidly in place and the belts will need a jockey pulley to adjust the tension. Will this fit? Yep, looks OK. So far so good.

So then I set about designing the support plates and modelling the required bits and pieces like bearing carriers and couplings to support and drive the through-shaft. The parts modelled are then pulled together into an assembly model that puts them all together into a very accurate 3D representation of the real thing. From this all the parts can be massaged and manipulated, edited and reshaped until they fit properly.

Once the assembly model is done, the software allows for an interference calculation. This highlights all places where one component uses the same space as another and these are marked in red. All the interferences are then sorted until everything fits without touching in the wrong places. From here on to the finite element analysis (FEA) to establish which parts are going to be weak and which are not. The FEA shows no particularly weak spots and those that are weaker than the rest are easy to reinforce so that gets done and the FEA is run again. OK, so now it’s as strong as it needs to be.

The model is then converted into a drawing that can be printed at full size for me to make a wood pattern and actually assemble the frame in real life. Ordinarily this would not be necessary but I still haven’t enough faith in the model to have steel cut if it is wrong. The next thing to do is to build the model and see how it works.

Cutting the model out of inexpensive almost cardboard like material results in a strong enough model to mount an alternator to check the fit, it fits OK but a bit of massaging around the edges of the cut-outs makes it easier to get the alternator into the space. It’s interesting how one tends to concentrate of the space that the alternator will take but when the alternators has to be actually inserted into the space it can’t be done. Anyway, now the space is big enough and the drawings have been changed accordingly.

So now the next step is to get the plates cut from steel but first I want to actually install the model into the generator casing, actually bolt it to the engine and settle the whole assembly into place. The worry is that the model is not going to be strong enough to support the weight of the engine without folding up.

We’ll have to see.

The original alternator was taken to an armature rewinder who had a look at it and said “Yes, of course I can rewind that. It’ll cost you about NZ$750.”

“What sort of power would it be able to put out?”

“About 320A at 12V should be OK.”

So that was easy. All I need is a way to rectify the output to DC and to regulate the power. Since the original diode bank was partly still there, all in need to do was add one missing diode to the pack and then get a regulator. But the diodes proved to be very expensive and then the regulator was even more. Then closer inspection of the magnet pack revealed that rust had set in between the magnet segments and the retaining ring had swollen to a point where the magnet pack no longer fitted inside the windings in the alternator.

Research and some assistance from FP revealed that there was a dealer near me that stocked the magnet packs but that a new one was going to cost another NZ$750. The total cost of doing all this to get the alternator to charge its first battery was going to end up at several thousand dollars.

And then if anything went wrong with it out there in the deep blue yonder (or even your average Pacific island) how would you get it working again? A diode could pop. The windings could go tits-up. What would you do then? Parts like this are not going to be easy to source. So what about Plan B?

Was it possible to re-engineer the whole thing to take two standard alternators? Well, yes, maybe.

I started by downloading images from the Balmar website and found some with basic dimensions of the Balmar Series 95 large-frame alternators. Using an expanded image, I scaled the dimensions that weren’t on the drawings. Having worked a little with Google Sketch-up I started modelling the alternator and got a pretty decent computer model that looked like it could work.

Whilst it may not be 100% accurate it is close enough to represent all the major sizes that would influence its ability to fit into the space available in the enclosure and give me a good idea as to its suitability. Then it was a case of stripping out the stuff that would no longer exist and measure up the area that would be occupied by the new alternators.

Once measured, I set about modelling the area from the engine rear face, including the flywheel, starter motor, the exhaust system downstream of the mixer and of course the box itself.

Then I started to design a bracket that would offer the rear of the engine a support base in place of the alternator casting that was being replaced and adding two alternators to the mix. I decided to examine the option of running a central spindle from the rear of the crank shaft using a spider coupling. This would mean that the alternators could be turned around, a position that would simplify maintenance, especially changing drive belts.

So the first pass on the assembly looked like this:

The alternators on this model are mounted with the intention of being able to swing them on the normal type of curved bracket used for tensioning the drive belts. The pulley ratio was 2.5 to 1 to lift alternator RPM from 2500 (engine RPM) to around 6300. This would place the alternator speed at a reasonable level to get a proper charge rate.

It all started looking quite good but then – problems. I had forgotten to insert the exhaust system into the computer model which, when in place took up half of the space that the left hand alternator occupied. Another two hours of scheming and moving stuff and I thought I had it beat. Then another problem.

The alternators were actually too long for the space allowed!! The problem with Sketch-up is that it doesn’t automatically highlight space conflicts and it took me a while to spot them but when I did it became glaringly obvious that the large-frame alternators never had a prayer of fitting.

That’s when I made contact with a very helpful man at Balmar in the US called Rich Homan who told me that the next best thing was to use a 7 – series Balmar. Rich expressed the concern that the original FP gensets had water-cooled alternators and the Balmars would have a good likelihood of overheating in the enclosure. Whilst I had seen evidence that the water-cooling was fitted to later models, this particular unit is air-cooled. And given that the 7-series Balmar has twin internal fans, I figured that they would be a decent match. All I needed to do was have a forced air flow which I would achieve with a decent sized engine room blower into the already-available cooling duct on the enclosure box

To cut a longish story short, I wasted a whole lot of time by modelling another two Balmars with te same results – when it was all said and done they were just too long. So another compromise looks obvious. I would have to start looking a light-frame automotive alternators. My local auto electrician Greg showed me a selection of alternators that he had ion his used equipment store and it quickly became evident that the best solution would be a Bosch model that could deliver 125A continuous, also had dual internal cooling fans and was the right size to fit. The only thing was that they were internally regulated which is not desirable.

Quick discussion with Greg revealed that they could be modified by removing the regulator and wiring the field windings to connect to a Next Step regulator. Not only did this fix the problem of undesirable charging profiles, it also removed another 15mm off the back of the alternators, making them even easier to fit into the model.

More to follow . . . . .

Several positions were tried but no good – they weren’t going to fit. So I swung them around and revised the thought of putting a drive shaft through between the alternators and fitting the pulleys and belts at the back end. Still didn’t fit. Patience!! it has to fit. After repositoning the alternators several times I started getting space to wriggle. Slowly, millimetre by millimetre I started getting more confident that I could make this work.

Change the pulleys. Try again. Pulleys too deep and fouling on the back panel. Back to the original pulleys. Not enough wrap around the pulleys to be sure the belts won’t slip. So what about multiplex belts? The belts were likely to work but the pulleys again were too fat. No space. Last choice – what about using timing pulleys off an engine that used a toothed timing belt? Modelled a set of pulleys and they JUST fit – 2 mm to spare. Are the pulleys clear enough to get adequate adjustement? Yes but . . . . .

The alternators are so integrated with the frame that they can’t be moved to adjust the belt tension – they’re going to have to bolted solidly in place and the belts will need a jockey pulley to adjust the tension. Will this fit? Yep, looks OK. So far so good.

So then I set about designing the support plates and modelling the required bits and pieces like bearing carriers and couplings to support and drive the through-shaft. The parts modelled are then pulled together into an assembly model that puts them all together into a very accurate 3D representation of the real thing. From this all the parts can be massaged and manipulated, edited and reshaped until they fit properly.

Once the assembly model is done, the software allows for an interference calculation. This highlights all places where one component uses the same space as another and these are marked in red. All the interferences are then sorted until everything fits without touching in the wrong places. From here on to the finite element analysis (FEA) to establish which parts are going to be weak and which are not. The FEA shows no particularly weak spots and those that are weaker than the rest are easy to re-inforce so that gets done and the FEA is run again. OK, so now it’s as strong as it needs to be.

The model is then converted into a drawing that can be printed at full size for me to make a wood pattern and actually assemble the frame in real life. Ordinarily this would not be necessary but I still haven’t enough faith in the model to have steel cut if it is wrong. The next thing to do is to build the model and see how it works.