Our 1025 mile passage took us just under 8 days – Monday, February 25th through Tuesday, March 5th. We knew we chose a “not so windy” weather window but there could of been promise of the wind picking up towards the end of the week (always a 50/50 chance that would of been correct) but generally a downwind passage with wind (what we had) coming from the ENE or NE.
Sri Lanka requires you to hire an agent to facilitate clearance in/out procedures, something we need to get use to here in the Indian Ocean. Yes this is an added cost however, one that is possibly understandable form a country that ceased a civil war around 2009. Specifically port Trincomalee (the Navy base is here), security is high and we were told and read from others cruisers who have stopped here, they do monitor us with AIS, helicopters and planes, and of course the Navy. Pretty much everyone we spoke to used Sandeep from GAC. His contact info will be at the end of the post. He and his GAC team responded to all of our communications in a professional manner.
Prior to leaving Phuket, we applied online for a 30 day visa; cost $35 usd each visa and it was an immediate response. Visit: http://www.eta.gov.lk/slvisa/
We also completed and filled out the below documents after initial contact with Sandeep. After this, we just needed to keep them updated on our ETA.
- Copy of our USCG documentation
- Copy of our ETA number from our online visas obtained for each person
- Copy of our crew list
- Copy of our insurance policy including the valid policy dates
- Appointment letter (see below)
- A signed and completed ISPS form that will be provided to you from GAC (see the one we provided to them below)
Motoring to get away from the “land effect” and see what our true wind would be like…
We emailed Sandeep and the GAC team right before we left Phuket, Thailand to let them know we were coming and an estimated ETA.
Our second day we found ourselves without a wind indicator….Trevor keeps trying to isolate the problem and we have no idea exactly why our wind indicator mostly works but sometimes just goes down. This meant we had to “feel” the wind and try to estimate wind speed and direction. This meant A LOT of sail changes! I can’t remember the last time when we would do 3-4 sail changes a day (this meant reefing or shaking out the reef in the main or jib, pole out for the jib or pole in, spinnaker poled out for downwind sailing, or spinnaker flown as an asymmetrical “jib”). And as a rule, we…or I should say…I…prefer not to sail at night with the spinnaker so at night we would drop the spinnaker and pole out the jib….exhausting!
Up/Down…the sails went…motor on, motor off…just because we could’t stand the noise of “slapping sails”…and would cringe at the wear and tear it causes on the sails and gear.
Additional to the little wind, we experienced strange currents between Phuket and the Nicobar Islands.
Our GPS speed went down to 4.1….. 
20-30 minutes later, we would be back to our “sail motor” cruising speed of 6-7 knots…. 
Here is what the sea looked like when we were going through these strange currents. I tried to do a little research but basically came up with…it’s complicated: Fresh water rivers from up North dumping large amount of water into the Andaman Sea/Bay of Bengal, tectonic plates, change or transitional seasons, Rossby Waves, and equatorial Wyrtki jets all influence the surface currents and the vorticity of these bodies of water….confused? so was I…..
On day 3 we passed the Nicobar Islands and to the north (very far away) was the infamous North Sentinel Island…a “no-go” zone for…anybody?!
It was fun thinking about how remote these islands are….
The rest of the passage went without major incident..thank goodness….!
About 200+ miles away from Sri Lanka, we started to see AIS targets. However these are not BOATS…we believe these are fishing buoys as other AIS targets around these were fishing vessels….see the dimensions are 1m by 1m….pretty cool! 
The swell was almost directly on our starboard beam…this meant we had LOTS of flying fish land aboard Slow Flight. One night, 1 hit our dodger so hard it scared the crap out me. Another night, one “flopped” its way right behind where we sit…for a flying fish, getting all the way into the cockpit was probably not a small task. And we had a SQUID?!
Another night….on my watch of course… a small squall built into a large squall ahead of us on our Radar (Yellow = heavy rain/squall). I didn’t want to wake Trevor up so I slowed down to try to time our arrival to this monster about when he woke up…but the squall was moving faster than I anticipated and I ended up waking Trevor up, just in case. Just as approached and was about 9 miles away, the squall started to “shift”…to say the least, it literally was like it parted ways just for us to go through. We experienced wind…yeah…except for it was on the nose so not much use to us..in fact it hinder us. Oh well….
This series of photos of our radar is zoomed out at 36 miles which means each “ring” is 9 miles wide.
I woke Trevor up around this time… 
OMG… seriously?! Trevor went back to bed at this point, almost laughing at me 
That’s how it goes….sometimes squalls just appear right on top of you..you just never know.
Small repair…after so much “slapping” of our sails in the light wind, our mizzen sail needed to “re-webbed” or reattached to the car on the mast.
Trevor actually does all of the “sewing” and “whipping” (get your minds out of the gutter LOL) to our sails and lines….it actually takes quite a bit of strength to pull/push the needle through multiple layers of webbing or line. He sometimes uses pliers to “sew”…..Pink or Blue job…not sure anymore : )
These were our general sailing conditions….
Flat calm seas…also means no wind….. 
Nights got squally after we passed the Nicobar islands and entered the Bay of Bengal. Every night we would experience a threat of a decent sized squall…we almost wanted to “chase” squalls to get some wind! 
Or just beautiful sunsets…with the motor running : (
We are advised NOT to enter the Trincomalee Bay at night and to time our arrival during daylight hours. We contemplated whether to run the engine for the next 2-3 days straight and get in a day earlier or add more miles and head a few more degrees north to catch a decent beam reach and sail more. We decided to make a route change and sail…slowly…to time our arrival during daylight hours.
When we were about 100-50 miles away from Sri Lanka, we had a local fishing boat check us out….
We had a visual on them in the distance and they came right up to us with great intentions. We heard from SV Starry Horizons that they had a few of these encounters on their passage to Sri Lanka just a week before us…but Captain David would “Hammer down”. We were trying to sail with the little wind we had at the moment (SOG was about 3 knots)…so trying to out run these guys didn’t seem appropriate. After our short exchange in the below video…they lingered about our boat just a bit longer than what I was comfortable with and we couldn’t understand them as they discussed something in their language….for a SECOND…I got nervous…but then they turned around and blazed they way the came….
Our last night, we figured out after we anchored, we caught a fishing net. Here is Trevor’s account of what happened… “why we slowed to 1.5 knots from 5.5 knots at 1am and why there was a small fishing boat following us so I let out more sail and revved up the engine… After about 5 minutes I was able to get back up to speed and the the fishing boat was left in our wake. All was well till we got off the Dock where we had finished our check in papers for Sri Lanka. Our engine didn’t like reverse. After anchoring i dove the prop and found this on it. Our boat slowing and the following fishing boat all made sense to me at the first site of the rope and net on the prop.”
At anchor Trevor checked the prop…of course the alternative was that our transmission was going out or damaged …we were almost relived we found a line and float attached to our prop….considering the alternative! 
Ekks…I can’t believe we motored into the bay with this wrapped around our prop. No damage to our shaft either…. 
Wow..our bottom paint doesn’t looks so great! 
Bummer to the guy/gal who owned this net…it looks brand new?! And here comes Slow Flight to ruin it for them….we almost felt bad!
I should mention here that we emailed our agent and GAC team via our Iridium Go! almost every day with amount of miles we had to go to arrive. They ask you to email a few different email address with each correspondence. I would gladly provide those emails but since they are mostly employees of the GAC, not sure if my list would be current. They will let you know who to email.
I would email them around noon their local time to ensure they could estimate our arrival in case our Iridium Go! failed or stopped working. They were great at responding and followed my instruction that our Iridium email does not allow for photos or images because on their regular email they usually have a small image of their company logo. They would kindly remove this image and sent a confirmation email each day…just incredible….!!!!
In the morning of March 5th, we hailed Port Control on CH 16 when we were about 10 miles offshore or when the Port Control office opened at 6 am. We hailed then again when we were just outside the main Trincomalee bay. The immigration and customs offices don’t open until 8 am, I believe, so it made sense that we arrived just about 9 am. Flag up and we were ready to come into port!…..
NOTE: SV Kokomo came in and anchored off of Elephant Island about 9 pm a week after we came in. He was told by Sandeep and Port Control, this was fine…however it was not FINE with the NAVY!!!! I guess the Navy has the end say in it all. Lesson learned. They were escorted to Dutch Bay where they anchored for the night. Sandeep and I were communicating via WhatsApp and I was able to locate SV Kokomo from their AIS. We continued to update Sandeep until Kokomo was anchored and hailed Kokomo to let them know we were here if they needed anything. The next morning we helped them to the dock at 7 am.
NOT QUITE!!! The Navy stopped us, along with every other boat who enters the bay, just as we were rounding Elephant Island. No problem, we were aware this could happen. However, after about 10 minutes we started to worry that there was a problem. With very little English, they talked on their “special” radio (we couldn’t hear the conversation on CH 16) . Thankfully, we were in contact with Amy and David Alton on SV Starry Horizons via Iridium Go! and who were already anchored in Trincomalee and they were ready on CH 16 when we approached the bay. We hailed them to see if they could contact Sandeep, our agent, for us to help defuse the situation since we didn’t have a local SIM card for internet or phone calls. So Amy and David contacted Sandeep for us. Sandeep heard us on his VHF radio on CH 16 but we later learned that they (GAC) can only “listen to” and not respond on the VHF…curious…but whatever. Finally after another 30 minutes of discussion, the Navy guys asked for my phone, called Sandeep (thankfully I had his number saved), and then we were allowed to enter and proceed to the pier. The captain of the Navy ship shaked our hands and welcomed us into his country. We still to this day don’t know exactly why and even asked Sandeep….he said they were confused. We had heard that the Navy checks for the boat name on your boat and ours is on our transom. However our dinghy on our davits does constrict sight of our name but we thought we made it clear to them where our boat name was. Another thing it could of been is that the “SV or SY” before a boat name can confuse the Navy…..I’ll leave it at that.
Our track where we drifted while the Navy contemplated whether to let us proceed….we later joked that SV Starry Horizons told them not to let us “rascals” as we would “ruin the neighborhood”…LOL 
The Navy boat….nice guys. They didn’t speak English very well nor did they hail us on CH 16. They just came close enough to us with crossed forearms “X” formation indicating we should “stop”.
Thankful we were allowed in..but still confused…we headed to to the pier….the pier is called “Passenger Pier“…though no name like this exists on charts etc.
Passenger Pier has a depth of about 2.5 meters at low tide….the concrete dock does not move and if you arrive at high tide you could only have 2 feet of pier height. You may have to adjust lines to accommodate the tides but the tides are minimal, 1.5 meters swing. I suggest to keep your fenders low, even though they will probably go in between the tires and you will get black marks anyways. There are no cleats, just large bullocks to tie lines to bow and stern. Generally there is a guy from GAC there to help with lines but depending on what time you arrive, they aren’t always there.
We prepared for a starboard tie, bow facing to the north as it shallows near Powder Island .
If there is a boat at Passenger pier already, the alternative is to raft up to them or raft up to the Commander 7 boat on the south side of the pier, bow in to keep your keel in deeper water. SV Alexandra rafted up to Commander-7 and they draw 2.1 meters…though I don’t know what stage the tide was when they were there.
Dinghy side….In this photo, this dinghy is tied up to the GAC boat. Most times there is someone there, Shalika or another, who catches lines. Shalika is AWESOME by the way!!!!!
Slow Flight tied to Passenger pier….we tried to tie the fenders together “long way” to try to fend off the tires…but that didn’t work in the end so we just re-tied them as we settled at the pier. 
Get the Magic Eraser out!!!! It will be hard to avoid the black marks on the hull….
Once at Passenger pier, we had to contact port control to let them know we were at the pier. This is because they charge for the time you are at the pier..it’s only like $1-2 usd an hour….hence you need to hail them when you leave and anchor your boat so they can stop the “clock”. Clearance took about 3 hours at the dock. Sandeep had Trevor sign about 15 different forms and “stamped” each one with our Slow Flight boat stamp (they like that here). Immigration and customs came aboard. No inspection but customs did pause when we told them we had: 70 beers, 12 bottles of wine, 23 bottles of liquor. We explained that we had the opportunity to purchase large quantities in Malaysia, duty free, and we have no intentions of selling or re-distributing…the quantity was to stay on board and keep us “sane” through out our passages in the Indian Ocean. It seemed to us that they had heard a similar story before and just made us “declare exact amounts” on our sheet…..we hope the coffee and tea with cookies helped the situation…or maybe not!
Health inspector never came to the boat as the guy was in Galle or Columbo on another job. We were told to anchor out (remember to call port control so they don’t charge you pier time) and headed into shore for an ATM and a SIM card. All in all, we spent 3 hours at the pier for clearance procedures. We later contacted Sandeep to pay him for our clearance fees and we met at the pier a day later. A pretty painless clearance process, unless you are Slow Flight : )
Sandeep Kavinda Wickramarathne | Jr Executive – Operations|GAC Shipping Ltd |No. 17, Rajavarothayam Street, Trincomalee, SriLanka | Mobile:+9476 467 545 1| Fax:+9426 2222 344 | sandeep.kavinda@gac.com| ops.trinco@gac.com|www.gac.com
Next up…ROAD TRIP….temples, and Buddhas, and elephants…OH MY!!!!