Written by: Skip Novak

If you are in the yacht charter business, there is not much you won’t do at the moment to earn a crust. It is a time to pull your finger out and adapt before the falling tide of marina fees, crew salaries, insurances, and various expenses to keep things afloat pull you down to meet Davy Jones.

So it was fortuitous when the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), got wind that my charter vessel, the Pelagic Australis, was stuck in Cape Town recently.

Eradicating mice on Gough Island

Last March, the RSPB had to abort their project to eradicate mice on Gough Island, a tiny volcanic outlier in the Tristan da Cunha group in the South Atlantic, when Covid locked things down. The Vanguard had sailed to the island only to be marooned by the news. They had to eventually re-deploy the yacht to sail the stranded team onto Ascension Island as they could not return to Cape Town. The mice, having arrived 150 years ago with the sealers have gone aggressively carnivorous devasting the sea bird population, so they would feast for another year, hopefully, their last.

The Pelagic Australis is now doing the repeat voyages to establish a team 15 on the island with two tonnes of birdseed and other equipment. The team will, over the next two months, sequester two species of fragile endemic land birds and care for them during the bombardment of ‘bait’ (read poison) from helicopters to eradicate said mice. In May, the SA Agulhas, the South African ice breaker, will deliver three choppers with Kiwi pilots who have the necessary expertise. Needless to say, this is logistically an ambitious project in every way, shape, and form.

Sailing into the South Atlantic

Although Gough is a British territory, there has long been a South African meteorological station on the island and in the time of Covid, all visitors are suspect. My crew of four, plus eight RSPB staff, had to quarantine for 14 days before departure from Cape Town.

On February 1st, the 12 of us were bussed down from the hotel in negative pressure, jumped on board (the boat having been theoretically sanitized well before), and after stowage of personal kit and household and safety briefings we were off that afternoon, maskless, in a howling southeaster, wind aft of the beam with a five-meter swell. For the landlubbers this was a bumpy start, heads down in buckets.

After that blow died down, we motor sailed on and off for four days going due west on about 35 degrees south before a nice northwester filled, allowing a close reach down to the island. It was a pleasant trip in mild conditions and when the autopilot failed halfway it was actually a bonus, as people enjoyed taking half-hour stints on the wheel in the generally sunny and warm weather.

Arriving at Gough Island

On arrival, we were lucky with a calm ‘open roads’ anchorage just off the kelp line. Within the hour, the RSPB contingent was offloaded (rats, not mice, leaving a sinking ship came to mind), with their day bags onto a rocky shoreline under the met station. That afternoon we off-loaded their kit bags by crane from the inflatable, a 30m drop along the cliff face.

The next day all the other cargo was uplifted in gravel bags just before increasing swell made the last trips precarious. We moved around the corner for two days to a better shelter to recoup and prepare for the return, and not least of all, to admire this most rugged of volcanic islands and cruise the shore by Zodiac.

Time to head home

Upon leaving the island, we circumnavigated and then went wing and wing, main down to 4th reef trimmed amidship, and kept that rig for the next 36 hours. With only four of us on board and my 18-year-old daughter Lara on her first crew contract, I was reminded how pleasant sailing in these mid-latitudes could be. I was reminded of my early years of yacht deliveries – shorts and T-shirt stuff, fishing line over the side, making sushi, and mid-ocean swimming. A great working holiday!