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    Sailing With Senta: Eastward Ho!
    Sailing With Senta: Eastward Ho!
    Sailing With Senta: Eastward Ho!
    Ebook142 pages1 hour

    Sailing With Senta: Eastward Ho!

    By Faith Van Rooyen

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    About this ebook

    This is the first book, in a series of seven, about the adventures of the author and her husband on their sailing boat Senta. During their 'shake-down' cruise in the Mocambique channel they visited Madagascar, Zanzibar, Tanzania and Kenya before returning to South Africa.

    There they repaired and provisioned their yacht, Senta, for a more adventurous voyage to the Far East. Half way across the Indian Ocean, they stopped at Salamon Atoll in the Chagos Archipelago, for their first taste of life on uninhabited tropical islands.

    Colour photographs and charts help tell the story.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFaith Van Rooyen
    Release dateDec 7, 2013
    ISBN9781310458316
    Sailing With Senta: Eastward Ho!
    Author

    Faith Van Rooyen

    Born 1938. Educated at Yeoville Convent, Johannesburg High School for Girls and Witwatersrand University, all in South Africa. Worked for more rhan 35 years in the computer software industry, designing and writing and implementing systems for business on mainframes and personal computers. Retired in 1995 to fulfil a life-time dream of cruising with her husband Pierrre on their forty foot Armel sailing boat, Senta.

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      Book preview

      Sailing With Senta - Faith Van Rooyen

      Sailing with Senta - Eastward Ho!

      By Faith Van Rooyen

      Copyright 2013 Faith Van Rooyen

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Table of Contents

      Other books in this series

      Acknowledgements

      Chapter One Before Cruising

      Chapter Two Into the wide blue yonder

      Chapter Three Madagascar

      Chapter Four Mayotte and Zanzibar

      Chapter Five Tanzania and Kenya

      Chapter Six Back to South Africa

      Chapter Seven Madagascar and Seychelles

      Chapter Eight Seychelles to Chagos

      Appendices

      Glossary

      Other Books in the Series

      Sailing With Senta - Eastward Ho!

      Sailing With Senta - Across Coral Seas

      Sailing With Senta - Africa Calls

      Sailing With Senta - Tropical Dream

      Sailing With Senta - Borneo Here We Come

      Sailing With Senta - Playtime in the Philippines

      Sailing With Senta - Small Boat Voyaging

      Acknowledgements

      Many thanks to

      Judith Ryder, long time friend in Wakkerstroom, South Africa, who has spent a decade managing our affairs while we sailed among Indian Ocean islands.

      All the new friends we made along the way who helped us find out how wonderful the cruising life style can be.

      For Pierre, Brett and Ingrid.

      -------------------- ooo --------------------

      Chapter One Before Cruising

      Faith and Pierre Van Rooyen at a beach restaurant in Thailand

      My husband and lifetime sailing partner, Pierre, and I met in December 1956 when we worked during our Christmas vacation as student assistant sales people in the Manchester department of a large department store in Johannesburg.

      A year later my eldest sister, Jo, the games mistress at Redhill school moved from Johannesburg to teach at St Anne’s in Natal and left her small sailing dinghy with us. Ten foot long, a bit of a wreck, with a heavy canvas mainsail, she sailed so badly that we soon named her ‘Enfant terrible’. We knew little about sailing, but she knew less. Many Saturday and Sunday afternoons saw us trudging back along the shores of the local dams towing the dinghy that did not know how to sail to windward. In an attempt to improve Enfant’s sailing performance we bought a second hand parachute and from it made a jib for her.

      Enfant Terrible - our first sailing boat

      A rain and wind squall washed us and our small boat onto the slipway at Transvaal Yacht Club, where we were welcomed by Mac, destined to be a lifetime friend. We soon joined the club and our sailing life started there, where we soon discarded ‘Enfant’ and bought our first Sharpie, Windways.

      Our first Windways – the Honeymoon Boat

      In June 1959 we took time off work to get married. Our honeymoon was a cruise on Windways in the middle of a bitterly cold highveld winter on the Vaal Dam.

      We tried unsuccessfully to make ourselves comfortable in the open boat with home made sleeping bags and a primus stove for cooking up hot food and drinks.

      An afternoon thunderstorm chased us ashore where we beached the boat, deployed a cover over the boom and took shelter from the wind, rain, mud and flying maize cobs. As we lay either side of the centreboard casing and brewed up some tea on the small stove, we seriously thought of cancelling the honeymoon.

      As night fell and the bad weather abated we took the boat cover and sleeping bags higher up the shore to a grassy area where we made a comfortable nest. Sunrise the next morning had us feeling happier until we realised that we had slept the night in a graveyard. We had not noticed the small headstones as we stumbled over the uneven ground in the fast gathering darkness.

      ‘This is the pits’, I said, ‘What I want is a dry bed and a decent meal. The chart shows a town called Oranjeville, a few miles from here. Let’s sail there and check into a hotel’.

      This was easier said than done. Between us and our imagined refuge was a road bridge across the water. Our mast would not fit under it. Not deterred we dropped the mast, paddled under the bridge, and re-stepped the mast.

      With our few damp belongings in our backpacks we set off along a sand road, now turned to mud, to find the town and hotel. But Oranjeville turned out to be the original one-horse town. And even the horse was somewhere else. We saw a post office, a petrol station and a farmers’ co-operative warehouse. All closed. Further down the road we spied a general dealer’s store. ‘Well, maybe we can at least buy a bar of chocolate there’ I hoped aloud. The store was ‘Closed for Lunch – back at 4 pm’.

      Visions of our comfortable, dry, warm flat in Johannesburg gave us a fresh burst of energy. Down with the mast, paddle back under the bridge, up with the mast again, an eight hour sail back to where we had parked our VW Beetle, load Windways onto her trailer and a two hour drive took us back home at midnight. The end of a honeymoon, but the start of a long, exciting life together.

      We sailed and raced Sharpies, first Windways and then later, Bambi, until late 1961. Pierre was transferred to Cape Town, and we moved there two weeks before our son Brett was born.

      Pierre with Brett, aged three months.

      We bought our first keel boat, 20 ft Tornyn. In her we braved the rough seas off the southern tip of Africa, sailing to and from Saldana Bay and riding out a ‘black’ south easter in Granger Bay, north of the breakwater at Cape Town.

      A year later we sold Tornyn, moved back to the City of Gold, taking with us a Flying Dutchman dinghy, Oriole.

      Thereafter for almost thirty years we worked during the week at our careers in advertising and computers, sailed at week ends and brought up our family now increased by a daughter, Ingrid. Both children loved sailing and became expert dinghy, sail board and keel boat skippers.

      We sailed mainly dinghies, Finns and Lasers, but along the way, owned a 26 ft keelboat, Vale of Belvoir, which we bought and had transported from Mocambique, a 30 ft Astove, ’Waylaid’, and a Lavranos-26 ‘Windways’.

      Vale of Belvoir

      Our second Windways

      Waylaid steaming along on Hartebeespoort Dam

      Through all this time we nursed a dream of one day going cruising. In 1991 we decided that, if we were serious about going to sea, we should learn a bit about ocean sailing. We had once helped a friend sail his boat from Durban to Mossel Bay, and had chartered a Jeanneau Sunshine for two weeks in Turkey in 1982. This, and our year in Cape Town was our total experience of blue water sailing.

      In 1991 we attended a sailing course with Monroe Bezuidenhout in Durban. Sailing we knew, but he taught us a lot about navigation, anchoring, safety at sea etc. More important to us was that

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