Cocos Keeling
Monday, August 25, 2014 – Direction Island, Cocos Keeling
Well the weather gods keep smiling upon us, as we had the most amazing sail to Cocos Keeling traveling 600 miles in 4 days. One of my daily chores was to walk around the boat to inspect the rigging and pick up the flying fish off the deck from the previous night. The record ended up being 20 flying fish on deck after our second night out. Kite had a bit of excitement as a large shark ate their tow generator (a torpedo shaped device with a propeller that is towed behind the boat to generate power) and Shango unfortunately had a couple of their batteries go bad. But all in all it was what just what you want in the Indian Ocean…a quick and relatively uneventful trip. The winds this time of year between Indonesia and Cocos Keeling typically blow 25-30knots, but we were fortunate to encounter more moderate tradewinds in the 15-20 knot range. At times we also had up to a 2 knot current going with us and we really had to try to slow the boat down so that we didn’t arrive at Cocos in the dark. Definitely not a place you want to enter at night and even entering in the day time required good light as you have to weave your way through the coral heads to the anchorage area. We are anchored off a small island called Direction Island in 20’ of the most beautiful water we have seen since the Tuamotus. This place is absolutely stunning.
Cocos Keeling is a coral atoll that is made up of 26 different islands. It was discovered in the early 1600’s and settled some 200 years later by a Scotsman who developed several of the islands for copra (coconut) production. He imported labor mostly from Malaysia and the production remained viable until the 1980’s. Today the population is a mix of Malay and Australian and the main economic engine is tourism.
We have spent the past 5 days here swimming, snorkeling, hiking, having happy hours on the beach, and visiting both Home Island and West Island. It’s the kind of place that I could stay for a very long time, but it appears that yet another uncharacteristic weather window is presenting itself for our next leg across the Indian Ocean to the island of Rodrigues. We have been a little nervous about this next leg for a while as it can be pretty challenging and many cruisers have reported that this leg was the worst weather of their entire circumnavigations. Large high pressure systems in the southern Indian Ocean generate very strong south easterly winds while an endless procession of storms moving from west to east near Antarctica add extremely large waves out of the south or southwest into the mix making for extremely uncomfortable sailing conditions. The other challenge is that weather forecasts are only good out to about 5 days and it will take us anywhere from 12 to 14 days to travel the nearly 2000 miles from Cocos to Rodrigues. As such, Kite, Shango and Hokule’a have hired a professional weather service to help us with forecasting and routing and it looks like if we leave tomorrow we could have a week of lighter than normal tradewinds. While I really hate to leave this paradise so soon, the opportunity to start this next leg off with a week of good sailing is too hard to resist. Rodrigues here we come….