After setting sail from Panama City on 28 February 2018, the Race For Water catamaran just arrive in Callao, which is Peru’s main fishing and commercial port, a town very close to Lima, where she will make for on Friday. Eric Loizeau, our ambassador who has been aboard since the Panama Canal, shared with us his impressions before making landfall.
Eric: “The whole night there was nothing to see! The whole day there’s been nothing to see. We’ve been making headway in a tenacious mist, which has enveloped our boat the whole time. It was as if we were sailing along the Breton coast between Audierne and Camaret on a summer’s day, where the warm air, pushed by the southerly breeze on the cold sea of the English Channel, picks up a thick fog, which restricts the sailor’s eye to the prow of their vessel. Here though, between the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, the meteorology is quite unexpected. We thought we could make out the high peaks, snow-capped perhaps, of the Andes cordillera floating over the desert coastline of Peru, but we were reduced to scrutinising the unfathomable, sounding our foghorn at times to herald our arrival among the invisible fishermen.
Some good news though, we discovered the source of the fishy odour attacking our nostrils for some days already. It was a rather foolhardy flying fish which, following a supersonic flight, managed to get trapped between two solar panels on the upper deck, departing this life and leaving behind its rotting carcass.
Tomorrow, if all goes well, we reach Lima and Callao. Back to my childhood dreams when I devoured the adventures of Tintin, Snowy, Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus, they too making landfall in Callao to resolve the enigma of the Temple of the Sun, hidden in these mountains off Lima.
As such, it’s our last day at sea and it’s tinged with nostalgia. Over are the night watches keeping an eye out for fishermen and cargo ships in the starry night on the deep ocean. Over are the evening aperitifs in the watch cockpit in search of the Green Flash. Over too are the sociable meals in the Marina rocked by the cold offshore breeze and the odd flambéed banana. We have to hook back up with the masses and the noise of the city instead of the silence of the sea, disturbed only by the cries of the passing birds, like those lined up in tight rows along the outside edge of our starboard wing for a large part of the morning.
Nevertheless, I sense that the crew is pleased to have got the boat safely into port despite our trials and tribulations along the way and thus enabled her to fulfil the role she is destined to carry out in this round the world. Today, in order for her to serve as the base for the foundation’s ACT team, which is coming out to meet her, we’re going to spend the day cleaning from the bilges to the upper deck, thus bringing our delivery mission to an end.”