Pete Lucas arrives in Orphee, a rough-looking steel hull yacht about forty feet long that represents much of Wolf's retirement money. He had very still weather almost the entire way from Dar Es Salaam and has had to motor most of the 1,000 plus miles.
A leak in the diesel pipe to the Perkins engine meant that he got through 6 litres an hour rather than 2 (normally, a generous estimate of maximum consumption). As a result he almost ran out of diesel. He was saved by a friendly passing trawler but the delay cost six hours or more. He has had only a few hours sleep in five days.
The good news is that, after extraordinary adventures in Tanzania, he has the steel Wolf had asked for. It is lashed to the decks so that the Orphee looks like some sort of crazy gypsy boat and lies disturbingly low in the water.
Pete is in his twenties and more or less from Cornwall. He is quite small but very wiry (like most sailors), fair and with sticking out teeth. He is intensely practical, has a good sense of humour and is very streetwise. "On the sea you are clearly responsible for your own actions. You have absolutely no one to depend on except yourself. In normal life you can always blame somebody else. At sea there is no excuse".
Pete's brother Matt helped in Tanzania and on the crossing. He is just eighteen (hardly out of the wrapping paper, as Hartmut puts it) with red hair and very light skin that has gone a worrying colour in the fierce tropical sun. Matt catches a flight back to England, where he is studying glass-blowing in Stourbridge.
The third member of Orphee's crew is Tiger, a small cat who as a tiny kitten (Pete claims) fell through a roof of a bar somewhere in Malaysia straight into his pint of beer. Tiger has had key female parts removed, but there was no time to remove the stitches so she has blue twine still visible through her fur.
Because of our delayed departure, we plan to stay for until around 27 March rather than 19th or so as originally planned. Those who can stay the extra time try to rearrange their flights. Roman, Caroline, Steve, Frank and probably Peter Goreau have to fly back to Europe on 22nd March. One of the three boats (the Ceres, which is the fastest) will have to run them back while the other two stay Saya to continue the work. It is hoped that Gaby can delay his return journey, but changing his tickets (with onward flights from Europe back to Panama) is problematic and likely to be very time consuming.
Tom spends third day another day dealing with bureaucracy at the airport and the Ministries of Finance and Environment, who have passed him backwards and forwards, been 'out' or closed. This time he wins: materials for the Seychelles coral nursery project should be available tomorrow.
Wolf, Roman and Gaby work hard of improvising new steel braces to hold the Eurydice together. The boat was bought off the internet and the people who sold it did not include some crucial parts. The Johnson 35 that is to power it, turns out to have had serious wear on some of the parts. It is hoped a local mechanic will have been able to fix it by Thursday.
6th March. Caroline, Roman, Steve and others do most of the heavy work on provisioning. Everyone runs around like crazy with a hundred different tasks.
After a week of bureaucratic delays the shipment of materials for a coral nursery for the marine park on the island of St Anne's here in the Seychelles is finally cleared. It has taken much longer to clear than shipments destined for Saya because the stuff is being imported while the Saya loads are only being trans-shipped.
Tom and Peter Goreau and Gaby take it out to St Anne's and build the geodesic dome in two hours. It's ready to go in the water, but an electrical cable set up by the marine park authority has not been connected to an available power source and this will probably take many days. Tom has lost an opportunity to get the thing in the water and attach corals before we leave, which would have allowed for valuable comparative work upon return from Saya.
Will there be hurricanes at Saya? An area some way to the east of the bank is where many form, but according to the sailors, they tend to swing away from Saya direction. The season for hurricanes is November through February, with probability of occurrence after February steadily decreasing (notwithstanding increasing occurrence of freak hurricanes out of season, which is attributed to global warming).
Wolf believes that Saya itself remains largely unaffected. Tom thinks that the reason coral at Saya is largely in the early successional stage is not because of storm impacts but because the whole area was trawled by the Soviets until ten years ago.
Nevertheless, according to Tom's reading of the satellite data, a really big cyclone is forming right over Saya at the moment. If our boats face difficult circumstances, the most prudent course of action will probably to cut and run for the calm waters of the inter-tropical convergence zone, only a few degrees to the north.
I help Wolf move more steel from the Seychelles Marketing Board warehouse. A mini epic, but we get some great help from two local gents.
Frank and others, with advice from experts here and in Europe have spent man-days trying to configure the satellite phone so that it will send email (voice calls seem to be no problem. A problem of this kind was not foreseen with a piece of technology so familiar and widely used. Eventually Steve, with help from Medita (Director of Atlas communications here in the Seychelles) figure out an ingenious way to get around the problem...we think.
In late afternoon we hear that Nico, on the Ceres, is lying just outside the Victoria approaches. Like Pete on the Orphee the previous day, he will not come in until first light tomorrow because the channel is difficult and apparently not lit as marked on the charts. We work like mad to load the boats and recheck equipment. Evening - the Marie Antoinette restaurant - the only decent one on the island. There are giant tortoises in their garden. It's one thing to hear about them, another to see and touch them. A moment of wonder. Over an excellent meal general discussion includes the essential question of whether the boats have enough safe and palatable fresh water for the expedition.
Every member of this expedition has a high degree of competence in their own particular areas, but there is a seat-of-pants aspect to the operation as a whole. In Wolf's phrase "Ve vill improvise!"
On what is likely to be our last night, I stay over at the Scout Building rather than the Vake-lele in order to have a last sleep on terra firma.
Caspar Henderson
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