We are in Richards Bay, South Africa and will be coming home to Bristol from December 2nd to 28th… so rather a lot of blog catching-up to do! Here at last is the one from our time in Mayotte….

Friday 7th to Tuesday 25th October 2022

Up until Covid the usual stop for cruisers heading south towards South Africa had been Madagascar, which has a wonderful cruising area around the offshore islands on its northwest coast. It closed its borders during Covid and although it is open now to most overseas visitors it is still closed to private yachts. It’s not clear why and speaking to a sailor who was doing a yacht delivery from Madagascar to Kenya, he didn’t know why either and thought it just due to crazy government bureaucracy. It’s such a shame as Madagascar was going to be one of the highlights of our circumnavigation. As Des said ‘I would strongly recommend you take Madagascar off your wish list until sanity returns to this banana republic’!! They have had dreadful problems over recent years with drought, famine, plague as well as Covid and ongoing problems with poverty exacerbated by high birthrates, deforestation, soil degradation and unsustainable land management practices; it is one of the poorest countries in the world. 

Most yachts now stop instead in Mayotte, a volcanic island roughly half way between Mozambique and the top of Madagascar, which I’d never heard of until we were looking at this alternative route. It is part of a group of four islands, the Comoro islands, but in 1974 all the islands except for Mayotte voted to become independent from France. In 2009, in another referendum, over 90% of the population of Mayotte voted to become a department of France. As with so many former French overseas possessions that we’ve visited, such as Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, remaining part of France confers benefits in terms of financial support and improved infrastructure etc. Although Mayotte is the poorest of all the French departments, with high rates of poverty and unemployment, it is still much better off in financial terms than the other Comoro islands, and has a significant problem with illegal refugees coming over from them.

Mayotte consists of two main populated islands, Grande-Terre and Petite-Terre, plus a number of much smaller islets, all surrounded by a double barrier reef, the enclosed lagoon being the third largest in the world. Entering the lagoon via a pass through the reef in the northeast it took us over three hours to motor across to the anchorage at Petite-Terre.

We anchored near to Endorphin and at a reasonable distance from a large orange vessel that was tied to a massive mooring buoy. On the second night I couldn’t sleep and went up on deck to look at the stars. Instead I found myself staring at a solid orange metal wall which we were lying right up against. With the tides shifting we’d drifted against this vessel and one of its huge anchors was digging into our inflatable dinghy. I woke Hugh…. ‘there’s something I think you need to have a look at’…. He eventually came up on deck, half asleep and completely unclothed, pushed us away from it, gently motored Vega back and let out more anchor chain until we were a distance away from it. We couldn’t move until the morning and until the tides had changed and we had both swung around to face a different direction, as the ship was lying right over our anchor. Poor Hugh had a rather disturbed night waking every hour to check our position whilst I slept soundly after that.

It is a busy anchorage at Mayotte, full of boats; local yachts, ferries, small commercial boats and fishing boats as well as the international cruisers.

Ashore is the Yacht Club which became the focus of our time there. A bar selling cheap beer where we could socialise with other cruisers as well as free wifi, a laundrette and showers.

Checking in to Mayotte was extremely easy… fill in a form obtained at the yacht club, get a taxi to the airport to get it stamped by immigration, email the form to the Maitre de Port, et voila! That was it. No charge either. We’ve found the same lack of bureaucracy at the other French territories that we’ve stopped at on our voyage. It was initially a surprise to us when we realised we were in the EU as my mobile phone pinged into life with a message that I could use my UK SIM card in Mayotte. The currency is, of course, euros.

There is no public transport as such here, instead there are shared bush taxis which you hail from the side of the road and which will take you to your destination for a fixed sum of €2 each for short trips around the islands. If the driver has room you squash in with other passengers going roughly the same way and he drops you off on his way around. Few people wear masks on Mayotte, unlike the Seychelles where face masks were still expected in shops and buses. On their first day here Colin and Izzi from Endorphin shared a packed taxi to the airport to complete their arrival formalities. Three days later Colin had a cough and wasn’t feeling so well and Izzi had flu-like symptoms. A lateral flow test the next day was positive and they self-quarantined on Endorphin for the next two weeks until they tested negative, feeling rather unwell and Izzi becoming quite breathless for a while, but fortunately not becoming seriously ill or developing long Covid. In the meantime we’d shared a taxi with them whilst they were mildly symptomatic and were relieved not to catch it ourselves. 

The car and passenger ferry between the two main islands, from Mamoudzou on Grande-Terre to Dzaoudzi on Petite-Terre, goes regularly and costs a mere 75 cents which you only pay on the trip over to Petite-Terre.

The tourist information building by the ferry terminal on Mamoudzou (with the fruit and vegetable market behind) and the inter-island ferry:

The people here originate from a stock of Arab traders, Persian sultans, African slaves and Portuguese pirates. Mayotte is 90% Moslem but it is a very relaxed form of Islam due to both the French and African influences. The women mostly dress in colourful African garb, bright, vibrant colours and are rarely veiled. Alcohol is on sale in restaurants and supermarkets.

A wedding procession in the streets of Petite-Terre:

People of Mayotte… the women often cover their faces with a paste to protect their complexions :

People are generally rather camera-shy so I’m afraid I took several photos surreptitiously in the street. I do usually ask permission as I did in the fruit and vegetable market but this was refused there, so here is a photo of just the fruit and veg (when I produced my camera the cry went out ’camera!’ and the vendors all dived to hide their faces).

We shared a taxi (rather more than €2 each) with American friends Laura and Dick (from SY Maia) to Plage N’Gouja at the very southwest corner of Grand-Terre, having taken the ferry over to the main island. Since we’d missed seeing the lemurs of Madagascar we were keen to see them here and had heard they dropped by at lunchtime everyday. There are over 110 types of lemur on Madagascar but only one type on Mayotte, the common brown lemur, which was brought over from Madagascar at some point and they are generally considered a nuisance here. We walked down to the beach and to the only restaurant there just in time for lunch and were lucky to get a table. On cue the lemurs appeared swinging across the roof and along the railings, eyes peeled for anything they could seize from the tables. It was a pretty pricy establishment but we had a great meal of fish and curry, then coffee on the beach. We’d bought a couple of bunches of small, sweet bananas in the fruit market by the ferry terminal and once the lemurs spotted these they were all over us, leaping onto our shoulders to be handed a banana. I was initially rather nervous in case they bit or scratched us but they were perfectly well behaved, carefully peeling then scoffing the bananas whilst keeping a sharp eye out for other greedy lemurs, although they messily discarded the uneaten banana skins on the ground.

Lemurs! (spot the baby in the bottom left picture below):

The beach was lined by a row of huge baobab trees, one of which is around 330 years old, although in Africa and Madagascar they can live to up to 3000 years. Unfortunately climate change is threatening these massive trees. 

We were in Mayotte for 18 days. Much of the time was spent doing the usual domestic stuff that is part of ‘Living the Dream’. Clearing and cleaning the boat, laundry, shopping… we soon found a big Carrefour full of French foods, cheeses, sausages, also tins of cassoulet and tartiflette which Hugh decided would be our main meal on passage from now on. We wandered around some of the residential streets in Petite-Terre where many of the houses are behind high walls topped with barbed wire. Some homes, especially on Grand-Terre, are just corrugated-iron shacks, especially in the rundown areas where the immigrants live. Once in a taxi we were stopped and everyone had to show their IDs… presumably the police were looking for illegal immigrants.

The boat required some work as a couple of new problems had arisen on the last passage. Our anemometer, the wind direction and speed indicator at the top of the mast, had completely stopped working on the way over from the Seychelles. It had given intermittent problems before and we’d had a new indicator and instrument panel fitted in the Seychelles. Jon very kindly went up to the top of the mast in the boson’s chair to look at the connector up there, which looked fine. The fault had to be somewhere in the cable that goes down inside the mast and runs between the top of the mast and the instrument panel in the cockpit. This cable had been cut and rejoined when the mast was removed in Thailand. To cut a long story short, having spent an age testing along the length of the wiring we decided the problem must lie in the cable running up inside the mast or at the connector at the top. Since it would be impossible for us to replace the cable in the mast Hugh erected a temporary anemometer on a wooden post on the deck railings, so now we have wind speed and direction readings, just at deck level and not mast-top level.

Jon up the mast & our temporary anemometer:

The other main problem to fix was our loo pump which was not working (a plastic bowl had been a temporary loo whilst at sea). On dismantling it Hugh discovered a huge calcium deposit in the duck valve at the exit pipe ( marine toilets and pipes are liable to get blocked by these due to the interaction between urine and saltwater) and once removed we were operational again in the heads department.

When we left I felt as if we really hadn’t made the most of our time in Mayotte or been as adventurous as usual. Perhaps we are feeling rather jaded now. We are looking ahead to when we get Vega home next year although there are still many fascinating places to visit on the journey back. On Mayotte there are some recommended hikes to the top of the volcanic peaks on Grande-Terre and a walk round an interesting looking inland lake on Petite-Terre, but we had been warned off doing these unless in groups of at least ten people due to safety concerns with the illegal immigrants from Comoros, many of whom are starving and desperate. The lagoon surrounding the main islands of Mayotte is the third largest in the world and some other yachts reported wonderful snorkelling with turtles, reefs to dive and isolated beaches. Although we had managed a snorkel on a nearby islet, motoring across in the dinghy from the anchorage, the coral was bleached, as it is in so many places in the world now, although there were still some spectacular formations of table corals and pretty fish to see. Our days seemed to merge one into another and much of our time was spent socialising in the yacht club with beer at €2 a bottle and the company of other cruisers, old and new friends who had arrived mainly from the Seychelles or Tanzania. Conversations inevitably included strategies for tackling the Mozambique Channel. 

And so we were about ready and a good weather window to tackle at least some of the 1300 mile passage to Richards Bay in South Africa appeared. Des gave us the go ahead: there were ‘no apparent threats…….from pretty relaxed a few days ago suddenly we have mass evacuations from Tanzania, Mayotte and Reunion (20+ yachts) so things will get a bit hectic’. About eight boats set off from Mayotte on the same morning as us and we were soon left behind by most of the other yachts, some hoping to do the trip without stopping, others, like us, expecting to have to stop along the way to allow difficult weather to pass by. This was the long anticipated and much dreaded passage down the Mozambique Channel.