A Dream Come True: Arrival in Chagos

We made it! I can still hardly believe it. As we secured the anchor on the sandbank next to Takamaka island in the Salomon atoll in Chagos, I looked at my watch: 7:00pm on the dot. 7:00pm on July 23rd, 2017 we officially arrived in Chagos. Dave put his arm around me and said, "Can you believe we are actually here?" For as long as I have known him, he has talked about one day coming to Chagos, one of the most remote places in the world. For him, a dream had come true. We stood on deck and took in our surroundings. Even in the fading light we could see there was something special about this place…something different. It was the colors…the greens seemed greener with tinges of yellow, and the water had so many shades of blue and turquoise, it was hard to comprehend it. As the light dimmed, we breathed another sigh of relief – a tough passage was over. We were safely anchored and looking forward to the next 3 weeks in this magical place.

On Friday we had dropped one of the reefs in the mainsail and sailed with one remaining reef and full jib. When the squalls came through, and the wind came up, we furled the jib and rode them out. On Saturday, we dropped the last remaining reef and our sail plan now was full main and full jib. We flew them wing-on-wing, as the wind was directly behind us, but we couldn't put the spinnaker up, because the weather was so unpredictable. The grib files we downloaded showed winds in the 20's, but the grib files can't predict the squalls that consistently came bearing down on us. But with a full main and jib, we made slightly better speeds, but we still battled a current that was against us the entire time. By Saturday afternoon, 9 days into our journey, our arrival in Chagos was predicted to be anywhere between late afternoon and late in the night on Sunday. Our options were to slow down and make sure we arrived on Monday, the 24th in the morning, thus guaranteeing a
daytime
arrival, but producing another night at sea, or try and speed up, and ensure arrival the following day, on Sunday, the 23rd. Dave, being the racer that he is, couldn't even entertain the thought of slowing down, so in the early hours of Sunday morning, as I took over the shift from Dave, he said, "Wake me up at the first sign of light…we are getting that spinnaker up!".

And so I did. As soon as it was light enough to see, we furled the jib, lowered the main, and hoisted our big blue and yellow spinnaker. Immediately life seemed better. We were able to go directly downwind and the boat was nice and stable. We still had the huge swells, that are born in the deep southern Indian Ocean, and make their way across the sea, with nothing in the way to break them down. But we were able to surf them, and Cool Runnings was making great speeds, surfing at up to 10 and 12 knots. Dave hand steered for hours, making sure we were headed straight to our target, and maximizing the surfs in the big swell. By late afternoon, the wind had come up again and we were experiencing between 26 and 28 knots, but it ensured our arrival in Chagos at between 6:00pm and 6:30pm. With the sun setting at about 7:15pm, we had to make that arrival time, or we would be entering the lagoon in the dark.

It was cloudy and rainy when we arrived at the entrance just after 6:00pm, the remnants of yet another squall, but Loic on Moby had sent us coordinates for his track into the lagoon the previous day, and we had put the waypoints on the chartplotter. Carefully following Loic's track, it didn't take us long to make the 2 mile journey to the anchorage and an enthusiastic greeting by Loic, Benedicte, Victor, Arthur and Anna, all standing on Moby's deck waving us in! It was great to see them again, and we later traded stories of our passages over a beer and glass of wine.

The squall passed, and it was in this brief time between the storm and sunset that we were able to look around us, and take in the beauty of the place. We were in Chagos: Dave's dream, which by default had become our dream, had finally come true!

Sent from Iridium Mail & Web.