4 Schippers, swopping beers in mid atlantic

This was a test of how good we were with our navigation, it was circa 1989 and with both yachts on their was to Salvador, Bahia, Brasil.

We had not left the Island of St Helena together though!

Picture by Roy McBride using a Canon FT film camera, click on the image to enlarge it.

I sent the image to one of my crew on the yacht Ocean Cloud and asked did he remember the incident?

Hi Roy,

How could I forget?

 Not many people in the world would have done anything like that but it was fun and tested our navigation to the limits to find a drifting needle in a wet haystack with only a magnet a VHF and a,satellite to help.

We had (i think) heard the 4 Schippers talking on their VHF radio to someone, we then called them and Dick Schippers asked did we have any cold beers on board as his fridge had packed up.

We did have a six pack for them and made a swop by way of a soft water bucket on a heaving line!

Great moments we will never forget.

They were a Durban, South Africa boat, we had sailed from Cape Town, also in South Africa.

Dick had radar on board which helped us find each other but its amazing just how hard it was to find each other, even with the fine weather we had that day.

The navigation on our yacht was by a Walker 412 Sat Nav, we got a fix position every six hours or so only, so dead reckoning on a paper chart was the order of the day.

This is a Walker 402, an earlier version of the 412, it still works, well it would if they switched the sat's back on!

http://ckdboats.blogspot.co.za/2014/10/navigation-by-sat-nav.html

Roy