Island-hopping across the vast Indian Ocean

Wildly divergent sailing and cultural experiences challenge and delight Saskia Stainer-Hutchins as she island-hops across the vast Indian Ocean

There’s a saying among sailors that plans are only ever made in the sand at low tide. Sailing the world requires meticulous planning and preparation – but also the ability to go with the flow. In 2024 this was brought into sharp relief when events in the Middle East forced many world cruisers, myself and my husband Ross included, to evaluate our plans for the year ahead.

We ended our 2023 cruising year in the yacht haven of Phuket, Thailand – the premier boat parts and service centre of Asia – with our eyes set on transiting the Suez Canal and entering the Mediterranean. But with the growing conflict in Yemen choking off access to the Red Sea, we made the difficult decision to instead point Acushnet’s bow south, towards the Cape of Good hope via the Maldives and Chagos.

As a result we spent days assessing a new swirl of weather maps, cruising guides and government websites. These countries are an established route for world cruisers, but perhaps not the most common, as many boats attempting to pass South Africa will take advantage of the tradewinds and go via southern Indonesia and Mauritius/Réunion, much further south.

Our new route, a detour of grand proportions, would take more miles and be more upwind than other alternatives. Our Maldives agent estimated that just 60 or so private sailing yachts had checked in through the Maldives during our season, with nearly half of them only touching the northernmost island on their way up to the Red Sea. We don’t know how accurate that number is, but either way we knew we were experiencing something that very few sailors get to see, and for that reason every day felt like a gift.

Threading the needle

As the Maldives and Chagos straddle the Equator, and therefore two opposing tradewinds and monsoon seasons, sailing this route required meticulous planning to thread the weather needle. We left Thailand in March, just before the end of the north-easterly monsoon season, allowing for favourable winds over to the Maldives. Our plan was to then transition south across the equator as the monsoon season switched, and find safe harbour in Chagos while we waited for the south-easterly trades to get established.

To add some extra pressure, Chagos, the best place to wait for the weather switch, only grants fixed date permits of no more than one month to sailors, which in turn must be applied for 6-8 weeks in advance of your arrival date, and usually cannot be changed. So, if we wanted to see Chagos, we’d have to sail to a schedule.

Our start to this journey could not have gone better; the sail from Thailand to the north of the Maldives was perhaps the best passage we have ever made; very few waves and a steady 15 knots on the beam had us flying along at about 7 knots with our Code 0 and full main up. We barely had to change the sail set over six days, making for some very efficient Velocity Made Good miles towards our destination (our best VMG day in our Lagoon 46 was 175 miles!).

Magical experience

After near perfect wind and sea state conditions between Thailand and Sri Lanka we then had absolutely no wind during our last two days of passage.

It was not sailing, per se, but the experience itself was utterly magical. We found ourselves motoring over a sea that was as flat as glass. In those conditions spotting wildlife was easy and we saw it all from the bow, including an incredible number of turtles.

It was suffocatingly hot, so we regularly took the opportunity to kill the diesels and jump off the boat hundreds of miles offshore. I will never forget the feeling of looking down into the abyss, how small and yet how connected to the ocean I felt.

The calm conditions even allowed us to creep into our first Maldives harbour at night (something we usually try to avoid); I stood on the bow with a flashlight looking for hazards while we followed coordinates that some friends who’d arrived a day beforehand had sent us.

Maldives contrasts

We checked in at Uligan, the northernmost port of entry. The Maldives is a very conservative Islamic country and as a result, local islands are wildly different from anything tourists experience within the resorts. Uligan was a wonderful example of this; the call to prayer segmented our days there and governed life on the island.

The tidy sand streets and coral stone houses were so unlike anything we’d expected to see and charmed us instantly. In fact, this island proved to be one of our favourite stops as the anchorage was perfect; 20ft of crystal-clear water with an ideal sandy bottom surrounded by reefs teeming with life. It was cruising heaven.

As we turned south, we didn’t realise how rare a find that would be. There are over 200 resorts in the Maldives and many of these now occupy the best islands with ideal anchorages for sailboats. Most of these resorts either don’t allow cruisers to stop at their islands or charge prohibitive rates.

The remaining anchorages were often very deep or unprotected from wind or swell. Local islands had man-made harbours with concrete walls to tie up to, but these were often full, and sailors needed to apply for express permission from the government to stop in these places. Instead, we frequently had no choice but to drop the anchor in over 30m of water, often in very rolly circumstances. The best we could do at these depths was a 3:1 scope, so we were often on anchor watch as squalls rolled past us.

Sailing conditions as we turned south were also very changeable. I’m not sure I’ve ever worked so hard to sail as frequently varying wind strengths and directions had us switching constantly between our Code 0, parasail and conventional jib and main set up. We were passing through in April, right before the monsoon season was setting in, so squalls were at least a daily occurrence, and became more frequent the further south we went.

One of our most memorable stops was the island of Dholhiyadhoo which housed an abandoned luxury resort, complete with crumbling cabanas over the water. Exploring the ruins of that hotel felt like we’d stepped into a post-apocalyptic future and gave us a real sense of adventure.

We also visited the only marina in the country and tried a taste of the resort life, as there were two on Dholhiyadhoo island. It was deliciously stimulating to bounce between sleepy Islamic villages, lonely atolls with perfect snorkelling, and luxurious resorts all in the space of a few days. This breadth of experiences was why I found the Maldives to be one of the most exciting countries we have ever sailed, as every stop was entirely different.

Article continues below…

Mixed reviews

Sadly, this view of the Maldives was not something echoed by all our fellow cruisers. During our time travelling this country there were several fierce spats on cruisers’ Facebook groups where a few people expressed how much they disliked sailing these waters.

The complaints were often valid: it proved to be expensive; the sailing and anchoring were challenging; fresh provisions were hard to come by, and help and materials for repairs were even harder… the list goes on. To top it all off the government insisted that every boat carry a tracker (which we had to pay for on a per day basis) to allow them to monitor our movements. This didn’t bother us as we’re always broadcasting our position on AIS, but it made many of our travel companions irate with rage.

So cruising the Maldives is not for everyone.

An unexpected aspect of moving through these waters was the fact that the Maldives are building new islands everywhere. In remote waters we’re used to our electronic charts being merely indicative of what might be out there, but we never expected entire new land masses to be uncharted.

One night we pulled into a lonely anchorage marked on a map only to find that there was an entirely new piece of land rising right where we would have dropped the anchor. Satellite maps were needed, as Navionics charts proved to be unreliable, and even then sometimes these maps would show ocean where islands now flourished. We saw several strange sights related to this construction, including a 1,000ft-long dredging ship and a barge packed with fully-grown palm trees.

Once we passed the Maldives’ densely populated capital of Malé, roughly halfway down the country, the breeze started to pick up. Normally, the winds should have blown from the north-east but clocked around to south-west as we neared the equator, which inconveniently was the direction we wished to travel.

The more populated and interesting islands lay to the west, but as we couldn’t sail directly into the wind with 20-30 knots of true wind opposing us, and could not afford the wait for a gap in the weather, we skipped many highlights to instead island hop down the less popular and more remote eastern atolls.

Risky strategy

This strategy proved risky. For example, one evening we decided to try and break for a push south with an overnight stay inside an uninhabited reef atoll as the winds were building to a predicted 30 knots. The anchorages we’d found on the cruising apps did not have a wind break, but they did have a wave break, and we thought this would be a good option for waiting out the predicted weather.

We arrived with several hours of daylight to spare and went looking for our planned spot. The anchorages were deep (18m-plus), but we were lucky enough to have a 3D scanner on board and could see the bottom in detail. As the light slowly leaked from the storm-strewn sky we desperately spent over two hours motoring around, but could not find the promised sand, only a field of bommies. This is not the first time this has happened to us.

In remote anchorages I think sailors sometimes take a chance and drop on less than ideal bottom types, then write them up as sand if they are lucky enough to hold with no issues. The general lack of traffic means that there’s rarely another boat to corroborate or challenge the assumption.

But we could not find a spot we were happy to stop in and so, as the sun set, we turned reluctantly back out to sea. The wind blew a steady 30 knots apparent at a wind angle of about 45° and we spent most of the night beating upwind towards our next destination, heavily reefed.

At about this latitude the equatorial current had started to make itself apparent, flowing at about 3 knots to the east. This meant we needed to head even higher into the wind to reach our destination and also made the ride down extremely uncomfortable. It was a pattern that we’d repeat for the next 400 miles all the way down to Chagos.

We reached the southernmost Maldives island of Gan just in time to make use of the last two weeks of our month-long Chagos permit, assuming we could find a suitable weather window to hop south. We spent our time in Gan diving (there is a wonderful shark dive, and the reef passes were stunning) and provisioning.

Finding fresh food was a challenge and I spent a full day on a hired scooter visiting six different food markets up and down the island. It was a necessary task: we needed enough food for at least four weeks away from civilisation.

Mysterious Chagos

The sail to Chagos took three days and was dominated by the equatorial current once again pushing us off course. We’d hired a weather router who told us it should have died out a day or so from Chagos but in practice we only saw it lessen and never switch entirely. We crossed the doldrums where the wind disappeared and was replaced by small squall cells, lightning, a big southern swell and our old friend the east-setting equatorial current.

It was quite a mélange of conditions and we burned a lot of fuel punching through this zone – nerve wracking as we needed to conserve fuel with the following passage to the Seychelles firmly in our minds. On our final day we thankfully found 10-15 knots of favourable south-easterly which we could harness using our Code 0.

Until it hit the news headlines recently, the archipelago of Chagos was little-known, but there is a complicated history behind this huge, isolated Indian island group. Chagos is made up of seven atolls, covering an area larger than France. The first inhabitants were brought as slaves by the French in the 1700s to farm coconuts.

Over the years control passed to the British who continued to import people to work the farms as employees. As slaves, and then employees, the local people never owned any of the land, and this ownership nuance allowed the UK to expel the local population between 1967 and 1973 after Chagos was sold to the UK for £3m by Mauritius, as a condition to gaining their independence in 1968.

The USA subsequently built a naval base in Chagos, and this is the reason, alongside the closure of the farms that supported them, the local population was forced to leave their homes. Since that time Mauritius has sought sovereignty of Chagos and as of October 2024 this bid was successful: the UK Government has confirmed that the islands will be returned to Mauritius.

Politically charged

It is a deeply politically charged area. Chagos was a beautiful place, but very lonely. The atoll we visited harboured an abandoned town and it was indescribably moving to walk the ruins. The graveyard was especially tough; can you imagine having to leave your loved ones behind? The shipwrecks and ruins spoke of a deep pain. Travelling the world you learn to appreciate the value of ‘home’, and it was clear this was once someone’s home. And still is, even if they’re not there.

Only a tiny number of people are permitted to enter Chagos waters; military personnel, a few scientists and some very lucky sailors. The right to visit as a sailor was heavily restricted and the permit dates were ruthlessly managed. Many of our fellow cruisers were not granted permits and changing or extending permits was mostly denied. While we were in the country two boats’ permits expired right at the time that a revolving tropical storm was forming to the west.

They asked to stay but were told they must leave or face a massive fine. Both made it to the Seychelles safely, but their passage was not an easy one. We learned our lesson and did not push our luck. We only stayed for 10 days and left as soon as a good weather window opened, well before our permit dates expired.

Remote paradise

Putting all the administrative difficulties and geopolitical injustices aside, Chagos was one of the most magical experiences of my life. We were incredibly isolated and spent our days fishing, snorkelling and strolling deserted beaches. We were hundreds of miles from the nearest town and a thousand miles from the nearest mainland country.

Chagos is currently one of the largest wildlife sanctuaries on the planet; 545,000 square miles. The amount of flora and fauna we saw was breathtaking. Birds choked the sky. It was so remote that we found the animals were not afraid of us.

One evening we took the dinghy out to an isolated beach to watch the sunset where the drifting squalls provided a dramatic backdrop. Four months prior we never would have expected to be where we were, but I was extremely grateful to have found myself washed up on that beach. Sailing teaches me many things every day, but the ability to ‘go with the flow’ was a gift this region has blessed me with forever.

If you enjoyed this….

Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.

Build your knowledge with a subscription delivered to your door. See our latest offers and save at least 30% off the cover price.

The post Island-hopping across the vast Indian Ocean appeared first on Yachting World.