SO HOW's our intrepid round-the-world sailor getting on? Just fine. After setting off from Palacios in Texas in his 37-foot yacht Island Time on March 6, Charl de Villiers has completed his first hurdle across the Caribbean Sea to Panama.

Proud father Johan, who lives in Morgan's Bay, is keeping me in touch with Charl's progress. This is no ordinary round-the-world voyage. Charl, who was educated for a while at Komga School, is what is termed "profoundly deaf" and he aims to be the first deaf person to circumnavigate the world on his own.

That in itself is extremely hazardous. He cannot hear anything happening on and around his yacht and has various aids to overcome this handicap.

Five days out into his journey he discovered that some of the devices linked to radar, and designed to warn him of nearby vessels, were too sensitive. Wind and water were triggering the alarms. "No ways I can use it," he wrote to family and friends via satellite communication. "The only thing that works is the alarm clock with bed-shaker and flashing light. I have to set the alarm to wake me every 30 minutes when I check the radar which I leave on standby mode. To leave the radar on at all times consumes too much battery power."

Four days out after starting off, he was sailing in 20 knot winds and sympathised with "poor Willie", his automatic steering gear. Willie was fighting to keep the yacht on course with full sails hoisted. But, like all innovative sailors it was a case of 'n boer maak 'n plan and he was able to make adjustments and release some of the pressure. "Willie is breathing a sigh of relief and sails much straighter now," he wrote.

Then on March 16 and 17 there were even more tribulations. He woke to find his radar reflector (a metal device designed to reflect other vessels' radar signals) had come adrift up the mast and a spreader arm (it prevents excessive mast bend) was also loose.

Ups and downs

"I HOVE to and got my climbing gear out. The wind was 15 knots and the mast was swaying on the swells. The climb up was painfully slow. I had to keep one arm around the mast and with the other hand move the climbing locks one at a time."

He repaired the reflector but on the spreader arm a bolt needed tightening. He didn't have the right tool with him. "Getting down was worse than climbing up." He took a break before tackling it again and thought the folk back home would never believe he'd climbed the mast in a 15 knot wind with two-metre swells, so he donned his leather sky-diving helmet, attached a camcorder, and did it all over again, this time getting it recorded on video.

That wasn't the end of it. Back in the cockpit he decided it was time to tack, but found the yacht would not point up into the wind. Something was drastically wrong. So he hove to again, donned diving goggles, released the swim ladder and with a rope tied round his waist got into the water.

The yacht's centre board was hanging forward at a 30-degree angle. "Back on deck I sat down to think. A yacht's centreboard is very important, like an aeroplane's tail."

So he donned scuba gear and dived down once more. The centreboard was stuck and using ropes tried to pull it back to no avail. Finally after half a dozen more dives, adjustments, kicking, grunting, heaving and pulling it came free and fell into its correct position.

"Set sail again and within five minutes we were heading on 55 degrees better course," Charl wrote. "Boy, I was relieved."

This week he sailed into Cristobal, at the entrance to the Panama Canal and promptly enjoyed an eight-hour uninterrupted sleep. The first short hop of his voyage is complete, but not without incident and there's work to be done. Ahead is a non-stop dash across the Pacific Ocean to Australia, from there through the Indian Ocean to Cape Town and finally across back the Atlantic to his start point.

No doubt there will be more riveting adventures and experiences to share with us.

Thought for today

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another - Rene Descartes, French philosopher (1596-1650).

1000 houses built

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