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November 19th, 2009 – Cayenne, French Guiana
by Herb McCormick
The color of the water changed from green, to greenish brown, to light brown, to a color that could be called Liquid Fudgicle, a thick, murky, almost chocolate-like substance made all the more bizarre by the wind and current stirring its flow. Honestly, here on Ocean Watch, over the years we’ve notched some serious sea miles under our collective keels, but none of us had ever seen anything like it. The coursing waterway coming into Cayenne, French Guiana, bears the ironically lyrical name of the Fleuve Mahury, but Dave Logan, at the helm of our 64-footer, had a different handle, one that quite accurately described the scene we were witnessing.
“It looks like the river where cappuccino comes from,” he said.
On Thursday morning, the crew of Ocean Watch was anchored in the ripping tidal flow at the head of the Fleuve Mahury, preparing to clear customs and take on a fresh cache of fuel. For the first time in their voyage Around the Americas, when they gazed to shore, the view was of South America.
South America.
It had taken some doing, particularly the last eventful 48-hours, to get there.
Two nights ago, for the second time in the last fortnight, the crew was treated to a celestial light show of shooting stars and slashing meteors. With the moon on a brief hiatus at the tail end of its waning cycle, the night was pitch black and the sky was pierced by countless spheres of infinity’s real estate on the last, dying gasp of their own cyclical journey.
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| The color of the water changed from green, to greenish brown, to light brown, to a color that could be called Liquid Fudgicle. |
As it happened, during the pre-dawn watch I was back and forth between the cockpit and the nav station, catching up on email, and I happened to mentioned the “tons and tons of shooting stars” to Harry Stern, back in Seattle, the scientist and sea-ice specialist who joined the team through the Northwest Passage. Once again, Harry had the answer to what we were seeing: the Leonid meteor shower.
“The Leonids are ultra-famous because of amazing meteor storms in the past,” wrote Harry. “The Leonids generally have been some of the most brilliant meteor showers over the years and take their name from the position of their radiant near the constellation Leo the Lion; this is because the meteors seem to materialize from that point in the sky.”
All we can add here on Ocean Watch is that the Leonids did not disappoint. And that was good, because just twenty-four hours later, the night watch proved to be a nightmare.
The wonders of email and our Iridium open-port satellite connection allow us to keep up with lots of folks ashore, and in my case, that includes well-known sailing writers and world cruisers Lin and Larry Pardey, currently back on their island home of Kawau near Auckland, New Zealand. Several years ago, the Pardeys also rounded Cape Horn from east-to-west, our current plan, on their engineless 29-foot woody, Taleisin. So I asked Lin if she’d ever called in French Guiana.
“No way,” she answered. “We completely avoided that coastline.”
I didn’t understand completely why until the night before last.
The currents off the north coast of South America and Brazil are contrary and nasty, at least that’s what we’d been told. Now we know something we didn’t fully understand until that heinous night: The currents off the north coast of South America are contrary and nasty. Whoa, baby, are they ever.
We spent the night getting, as it’s been said in a different context, bent, folded and mutilated. At times we were
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| The anchor windlass wasn’t working and skipper Mark Schrader re-wired the crucial piece of equipment. |
making almost eight knots through the water, but because of that powerful current flow going the exact other way, barely making four knots over the ground. It was a long, rough, Nasty Night, with twin capitols. Worse, because of our progress, or rather, abysmal lack there of, we missed the high tide at 0600, arriving several hours in arrears. So, in taut summation, we may have been miserable, but at least we were late!
We finally arrived off Cayenne at mid-morning and had to wait slightly offshore on the tide until a little after noon to start making our way up the Fleuve Mahury. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as we discovered our anchor windlass wasn’t working, and skipper Mark Schrader made the best of the situation by re-wiring the crucial piece of equipment, an impressive piece of electronic bypass surgery on the fly.
Once underway for the harbor, the scenery looked like something out of Paul Theroux’s sultry novel of good intentions gone awry, The Mosquito Coast. The channel itself was straight and narrow…and shallow, sometimes just eleven-feet deep, which always makes for some puckering moments aboard Ocean Watch with her nine-foot draft. The last place we picked our way into a harbor with an eleven-foot channel was the Inuit village of Tuktoyaktuk in the Canadian Arctic. The difference in temperature was, oh, sixty degrees.
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| Dave Logan skillfully steered Ocean Watch up the sludgy fairway, constantly correcting his course and peering over his shoulder to make sure he stayed on the right course. |
A 2.5-knot current, moving more or less perpendicular to the channel, kept trying to sweep us aside, a nudging, constant hip check. At the wheel – with his MacBook computer, loaded with the very effective Nobeltec charting software, right at this side – Dave Logan skillfully steered us up the sludgy fairway, constantly correcting his course and peering backwards over his shoulder to make sure we stayed right on track. The farther along we went, the more civilized the surroundings: a pair of Navy vessels flying the French tri-color; a small sailing club with a handful of dinghies; a couple of stretches of long, wild beach, complete with beachcombers; even a string of rather grand, stately homes jutting out of the jungle.
“What did you expect?” said Logan. “This is the capital of French Guiana.”
Skipper Mark Schrader, binoculars in hand, kept up a running commentary:
“We’re doing 7.5 knots here. Big current. Something sure is carrying us. It’s just hooting by. Hmmm. I’m not sure that’s good.”
Finally, we rounded the final little bend, and surprises of surprises, there was a marina full of cruising boats, many of them in serious need of care; in fact, several of them looked like they’d been there quite some time, and would be there quite some more before moving on. Nearby, on a makeshift slipway, a wild-looking cast of characters was urging a broken cruising boat out of the water and onto hard ground. The river carried around a bend and up into dense jungle. Unable to raise customs on the radio, we dropped the anchor in the current-swept waters and took a deep breath. The Mosquito Coast, indeed.
For the first time since leaving Seattle, we fired up the grill on the aft deck and had a cookout, then slept with the hatches open and enjoyed a wonderful breeze coursing through the boat. Everyone slept like logs. The little things in life really are the best.
A chorus of parrots awakened us and soon a Belgian sailor on a nearby boat rowed over for a cup of coffee. Paco
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| Paco, a Belgian sailor, had crossed the Atlantic and spent the last three years exploring South America on his 24-foot Jeanneau Fantasea. |
had crossed the Atlantic and spent the previous three years exploring South America on his 24-foot Jeanneau Fantasea, a boat built for daysailing on lakes, not crossing mighty oceans. He had a lot of good local knowledge, and said the Vietnamese restaurants in Cayenne proper – about 8-10 kilometers from our outlying anchorage – were pretty good. In fact, Paco said the city had a distinct Asian flavor. Chinese immigrants, apparently, were the first to arrive, as cheap labor after the abolition of the slave trade. The Vietnamese followed them, particularly those who’d sympathized with the French occupiers during that chapter of their fateful country’s fractured history.
Paco asked where we were headed and when we said, “South,” he visibly winced, as if in true pain. “You know about the current, right?” he said.
Yes, Paco, we now know about the current. First things first, mate. We’re just getting used to the Mosquito Coast. We’ll worry about that another day.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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