Friday 4th to Wednesday 9^th March 2022

From Uligan it was a 24 mile trip to Dhapparu, motoring as there was only 2-3 knots of wind with, once we were outside the atoll, a gentle swell on the beam that caused Vega to roll. I suspect we’ll be doing a lot of motoring in the Maldives until the seasons change at the beginning of April from the SE to the NW monsoon, when we might get squalls and electric storms in the transition period. 

Captain Robert Moresby spent three years in the 1830s charting the depths in the atolls of the Maldives, using plumb lines and sextants, and his Admiralty charts were used until the 1990s when satellite imagery largely superseded them. Since we left on this trip in 2015 we have almost completely given up using paper charts, just too expensive, too bulky and archaic. Navionics is the app that we mostly use for navigation and passage planning but it is very inaccurate in the Maldives. With Google Earth and the excellent wifi there is here, you are able to see where you are to within a few metres and hopefully avoid running aground on a shallow reef or bommie. It’s also important to keep a good lookout and one of us will usually stand at the bow watching out for shallow patches when we’re entering through a pass or crossing a lagoon. The reefs rise up very suddenly from the depths and often lie just a few feet under the surface of the sea, but you can usually spot them quite easily in good light with the sun behind and not in front of you, as they show as pale blue as opposed to the dark blue-green of the deeper water. So it’s important to arrive at an unfamiliar anchorage by about 4pm at the latest whilst the light is still good. 

The entrance through the reef into Dhapparu was deep and wide. We dropped anchor off the beach and spent a peaceful three nights here, alone apart a few fishing boats and the lights at night from the village in the extreme south of the island.

There was a shallow reef between us and the beach but the snorkelling was disappointing with only a few small fish and rather dull, brown coral. The beach was beautiful, a long stretch of silver sand backed by palm trees and dense vegetation, unfortunately spoiled by the usual litter of plastic bottles and other rubbish washed up there. Going ashore we wanted to find a path through the shrubs to the inland lake in the north, but several times were driven back by clouds of mosquitoes which breed in the stagnant water inland. The rustling in the undergrowth was a bit spooky but we decided it was crabs, their burrows were everywhere. We took the dinghy north to a pebbly beach and found a short path there through to the lake.

There were even more mosquitoes here than in Uligan and somehow they managed to find their way onto the boat even though we were anchored well offshore. They can fly quite long distances and have a very acute sense of smell… we burn mosquito coils onboard, wear repellant ashore and have dug out the mosquito net to sleep under after a night of being kept awake by itching bites. Thankfully there is no malaria in the Maldives after a successful eradication programme in the 1970s (though we could, I suppose, still contract Zika, dengue or chikugunya fever from them!).

From Dhapparu it was 8 miles on to Utheemu where we had hoped to make a short stop for lunch. There don’t seem to be many sights of great historical interest in the Maldives so I was keen to visit the restored wooden palace here, the birthplace of the great Maldivian hero, Sultan Mohamed Thakurufaanu who, with his brothers, fought an eight-year war, driving out the Portuguese invaders in 1573.  We had contacted Assad, our agent, for permission and he’d been in touch with the village council. We would be allowed to visit but as the village had 133 positive Covid cases and 60 households were in quarantine there would be no one to greet us or show us around. The palace was closed too so we could only look at it from the outside. As it was events overtook us, preventing our visit, so here is a picture of the palace courtesy of Google:

Halfway to Utheemu, motoring on a hot, still morning, the engine alarm started screaming. The engine was overheating and when Hugh checked it over the coolant reservoir was empty. Messages went back and forth with Colin and Jon, Hugh checked the impeller and the fan belt etc and topped up the coolant, I dived under the boat to check the seawater inlet wasn’t blocked, but the outcome was we needed the engine looked at by professionals. No engine and no wind so we were not able to sail and were drifting towards a reef… where was the RNLI when you needed them? Only the nearest reef was several miles away and we were only drifting at half a knot, so we weren’t really in any immediate danger. 

The next protected anchorage was a good 8 miles away at Nolhivaranfaru. The solution was to tie the dinghy to the port stern of the yacht and use its little 9.8hp outboard engine to push us along, with one person in the dinghy, the other steering the yacht. It was surprisingly successful and took us about 3 hours at 2.5 to 3.5 knots. 

The entrance to the lagoon through the reef was a bit hairy as the depth rose to 4 metres and we tried to judge what might be a particularly shallow patch to avoid. It was just a bit stressful crossing the bay with its numerous bommies, with Hugh at the bow keeping a lookout and me steering Vega, peering at Google earth on my phone, and it was an enormous relief to drop anchor in an open sandy patch not too far from the beach. 

If it hadn’t been the anxiety of how we were going to fix the engine this would have been pretty much the perfect paradise.  Calm, clear, turquoise water and a small village nearby. 

We had contacted Assad about finding a mechanic or engineer who could get the engine fixed. There was a Yanmar dealership on Kulhudhuffushi, the capital island of the atoll, two islands further south of where we were. He arranged a tow for us in a couple of days time. 

The next day we visited the village and were surprised to find how friendly and welcoming people were. We had quite a few ‘where are you from?’, ‘is he your husband?’, ‘where are your children’ etc., and I chatted to two teenage girls who spoke very good english (with an American accent) about their favourite TV programmes. Half of the school lessons here are in English so most of the younger people speak excellent English and a lot of the films they watch, and music they listen to, is American. There was a girls’ throwball match being played with a large audience watching, the men and women on the whole standing separately.

Girl’s throw ball match

The main street, breadfruit trees and minaret of the Mosque.

Although there are a couple of guest houses on the island it is not very common to get tourists here, many would be put off by alcohol not being allowed on the local islands and there are restrictions as to how you dress and behave, particularly as to which beaches you can wear a bathing costume on. We met an Eastern European family swimming and sunbathing on an isolated stretch of the beach well away from the village, who were having a week here and another week on a resort island.

After two nights our tow arrived at 9am and pulled us the 7 miles to Kulhudhuffushi, the main island in Thiladhunmathi Atoll, where we tied up against the wall in the commercial dock.

• 

• 

Hopefully it wouldn’t take more than a few days to repair the engine then we would be back to sailing through paradise….

Sunday 20th March

11 days later and we are still in Kulhudhuffushi and the engine is still not fixed.