We’ve officially decided on the route for the remainder of our trip: we’re headed home via South Africa instead of the Suez Canal.  The Somali piracy issue was a bit of a concern, but the bigger reasons are keeping on schedule and staying close to our budget.  Due to the timing of the seasons and passages, the Suez route would have taken us an extra 6-12 months.  We hadn’t originally planned to visit New Zealand, but we really wanted to extend our time in the Pacific after a late start and we really did enjoy our time there.  We’re definitely going to miss the opportunity to see Asia, the Middle East, and the Med, but we are starting to look forward to Madagascar, Africa, and Brazil and we’re still relatively young.  We keep telling ourselves this is only our first time around.  Bali is our last chance to change our minds, but we’ve ordered the charts to get to South Africa and it’s looking pretty final.

Now if only we could get Google Maps to print out directions for us…

The traditional route to South Africa passes from the Cocos Keeling Islands to Mauritius and then south of Madagascar and on to Durban.  The area from the southern tip of Madagascar to Durban is notorious for large, confused seas and the sea near Durban can be even worse.  From Durban to the cape, the incredibly strong Aghulas current can flow south at 7-9 knots and is often opposed by strong southwesterly gales from the open waters of the southern ocean. The result is that incredibly steep 20 meter seas are not uncommon and a great deal of care attention to the weather is necessary and rough weather is sometimes unavoidable. Getting to Durban at the end of a 1200 nm passage without a chance to pick a proper weather window didn’t sound too good to me, so we’re planning to go north of Madagascar.

The route north of Madagascar adds a few miles, but it lets us stay in the tradewinds longer and avoid the large, confused seas off the southern tip of Madagascar.  We’ll run down the west side of Madagascar, cross the Mozambique channel where it’s narrow enough that we can go on a good weather window and then make coastal hops down the coast of Mozambique to South Africa as the weather allows.  We’re hoping the route will be safer and also give us a chance to see some interesting places.  We haven’t decided whether or not to stop in the Chagos on the way, but in either case the route should take us a least 200 miles farther out from Somalia than any previous pirate attack has occurred (to date the pirates have been working up to 800 miles offshore).  Now we just have to manage to sail 2000 nm a month for the next few months…