Travels on God Spede

Palau - Chapter Two

2011-05-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

The anchorage in Palau

It's hard for me to believe, but we've been in Palau for another entire month since I wrote the last blog update. It's not often that we are in any one place for so long, and I often get tired of being in "town" for long stretches of time, but the set-up here for liveaboards is so nice, and we've met such a great group of people, that I have really enjoyed our stay.

Fred after a day of diving. You can see a few of the many Sam's Tours boats at the dock and masts from the sailboats in the anchorage in the distance.

Fred returned to the boat shortly after I posted the last blog entry and we did another round of awesome scuba diving when he got back. Coincidentally, some friends from Sun valley, Tuck Hall and Dave Stone, arrived at that time also.

Tuck Hall taking an underwater photo

They had planned a dive trip here completely independently of us, and luckily it worked out that we were all here in Palau at the same time. We had a great time hanging out with them. Most days while they were here we dove together, then had some drinks at the Bottom Time Bar and then separated for showers and met up again later for dinner. I dove three days with them and Jeff and Fred did a few more, one of which was diving some of the wrecks in the lagoon and another was a day on the outer reef at Peleliu - home to one of the bloodiest battles in the South Pacific during WWII.


Dave Stone diving on the Jake Plane

This nudibranch is about three inches long

The very first day we dove with them was a really exceptional day of diving. We went to Blue Corner and this may have been our best Blue Corner dive ever. On the flats we saw two lionfish, a very colorful nudibranch, and a large moray eel which was all the way out of it's hole, as well as the usual triggerfish, big napoleon wrasses, reef sharks sleeping in the sand, and a big school of yellowfin barracuda. Next we swam over to the edge of the reef and although there didn't seem to be a lot of current, there were quite a few sharks and some giant trevally, blue trevally and mackerels all swimming around. We got hooked onto the reef and were relaxing and watching the show go by and suddenly there was some sort of frenzy going on below us, and sharks and big napoleon wrasses were all attacking this one particular spot on the reef where apparently an injured fish had hidden himself in a hole. I was surprised to see larger fish attacking the hole among the many sharks.

This Napolean Wrasse is about three feet long - photo by Tuck Hall

Moray eel - photo by Tuck Hall

Also while Tuck and Dave were here, Fred, Jeff and I all did our 100th dive. Again, coincidentally, Fred and Jeff's 100th dive was the same dive. Fred was certified before we started this trip, but Jeff happened to do exactly the number of dives he needed to catch up while Fred was back in the States. Apparently, there is a tradition of diving your 100th dive naked, but both guys decided to pass on that option and went clad in their normal dive attire. This dive was a very nice trip down one of the Blue Holes which are like big vertical chimneys in the reef that you drop down through into an underwater cave. You check out the cave and then exit out of the cave's mouth which puts you on the outside edge of the reef near Blue Corner. Then you drift along this reef until you get to Blue Corner. This particular visit to Blue Corner wasn't as action packed as the day before, and there was absolutely nothing going on at the place where the shark frenzy had occurred the day before, but there was still plenty to see on the flats.

Fred and Jeff on their 100th dive!

I had gotten behind on my record keeping in my dive book and didn't even realize I was doing my 100th dive when I did it, so I was spared the "to dress or not to dress" decision process. I was quite pleased when I realized later that my 100th dive was among my favorite of the dives I did here in Palau. The dive was in Ulong Channel, which we've done multiple times and which I always enjoy because of the truly magnificent coral there, but the trip we did that day was very different from our previous trips there. That day, which was near the full moon, the current was flowing very strongly into the channel and once we entered the channel we were swept along faster and faster as the channel got narrower and shallower. Most of the drift dives we've done previously were either along an outer reef where you have coral on one side only, or through large passes in the reef where you can't even see the other side, and we've always had plenty of water beneath us. Ulong channel is different in that it is much skinnier, especially on the inside end, so you had to steer yourself along as the current swept you through the skinny parts. It was rather exhilarating and is a dive I won't forget any time soon.

Angie - not actually my 100th dive - but it does show my favorite new toy - the underwater camera! Photo by Tuck Hall

After Tuck and Dave left, Fred dove a few more days and since then our days have mostly been either project or shopping days. On project days we do some sort of boat project, the biggest of which has been to repair our large dinghy. This is our third attempt at repairing this dinghy, but this time we've used a different adhesive (the epoxy from Zodiac that we used previously will apparently NOT set up correctly in a humid environment - a fact that the Zodiac people somehow never thought to mention) and we added some reinforcing brackets, so we are hoping for significantly different results this time. Fred decided on this approach after getting advice from many of the other cruisers here, and some very kind Air Force personnel (who we met while diving with Sam's and who are stationed here in Palau doing civic works projects). The folks at Sam's Tours were also nice enough to let us use one of their workshops without which we would never have been able to do the repair since it rains here just about every day, so getting the dinghy dry outdoors would have been impossible. We just got the dinghy back in the water yesterday, and so far the repair looks good. We're hoping for the best since this dinghy is the one we use when we go diving by ourselves, and we think there may be opportunities to do that in the Philippines, which is where we plan to head next.


Our on-shore home in Palau

Most of our days in Palau start with breakfast and coffee on the boat, after which we clean up, and by that time it's usually already ferociously hot. (When I read that the average temp here was 82 I mistakenly thought it meant that the average HIGH temp was 82 - but no - it meant average.) After breakfast we gather our shower bags and the trash and our big water bottle and load it all into the dinghy and head ashore. We tie up at the Sam's Tours dinghy dock where we are able to dump our trash and fill our water bottle with filtered drinking water, all for free. Then we usually head into the air-conditioned computer room for some internet time, which isn't exactly free, but I think we'd be happy to pay just for the air-conditioning, so it seems like a pretty good deal. Next we take a very hot and sweaty 30-40 minute walk into town after which we reward ourselves with lunch in an air-conditioned restaurant. Emaimelei is one of our favorite lunch spots. This is a locals favorite where they serve enormous portions of delicious Filipino and Asian dishes for a very reasonable price. After lunch we do any other town errands we have and then head for the two large grocery stores, which are conveniently located directly across the street from one another. They are both well stocked, but with slightly different items. We usually hit both and then call Johnson, our favorite Palauan taxi driver, for a ride home. Johnson always has a good story for us about Palau goings-on, and his car has great air-conditioning (are you picking up on the theme here?) Back at Sam's we load all our shopping bags into the dinghy and take them out to the boat, which is now sweltering hot, so we put everything away as fast as we can, and then we head back to Sam's for my favorite time of day - the cocktail/shower hour.

Inside Sam's (also known as the Yacht Club and the Bottom Time Bar)

One of the very best things about Sam's is that there is almost always an interesting crowd at the bar in the late afternoon and early evening. It's a great spot on the water, shaded, and with a nice breeze blowing through. All the dive boats are returning then too, and we've become friendly with quite a few of the dive guides, so we get to chat with them, and whichever dive guests we also know, and there's usually a good collection of other cruisers at the bar also. Among the other sailors there's a great mix of people - some of whom have been here for years and some, like us, who are just passing through. So we often spend a very pleasurable hour or two swapping jokes and lies with whoever is around, and wandering off at some point to make use of Sam's lovely (and free!) showers. Having this great social scene right in our backyard has made our long stay here very enjoyable. We're going to miss the Sam's gang for sure!

Cecille and Fey - two of the wonderful ladies at Sam's

Milo, Michelle and Minda always take great care of us!

For dinner, we usually head back to the boat unless it's been a tiring project or diving day, in which case we often eat at Sam's (they have great salads, amazingly fresh fish, and, in my opinion, the island's best cheeseburger) or sometimes we'll get a gang together and head down the road to Kramer's where Renee, Jane and Patrick make great food and where many of the island's expats gather for evening socializing.

Fun highlights during our stay here have included Sam's birthday party, where the musical entertainment was provided by some local bands along with a group of Sam's regulars, including dive guides and sailors, who put on a really good show after practicing only one week. We also very much enjoyed the Cinco de Mayo party hosted by the Royal Belau Yacht Club at Sam's. This yearly event includes lots of tequila drinking (of course!) along with a Mexican food cooking competition. The idea is that the contestants all bring a Mexican dish and everyone who attends gets to try them all and judge them anonymously. Jeff entered, and won first prize, with his awesome pork green chili, which was definitely delicious enough to have won on it's own, but Fred was taking no chances, so he ran an amazing PR campaign, just to seal the deal. If anyone is considering running for office, I sincerely recommend Fred as your campaign manager. Fred's blend of aboveboard charm and willingness to make shady deals under the table can really get the job done! I was way too busy enjoying the scrumptious feast of Mexican food to be any help during the competition, but I earned my keep earlier in the day by being the number one pot scrubber. The first place prize was a gift certificate for $100 to Elilai, a posh restaurant that we haven't tried yet. We're going tonight and very much looking forward to it.

We're also getting the boat ready for our next hop to the Philippines. We may have a bit of a wait for the right weather window, but we're asking lots of questions of the Filipinos we've met here and the sailors who've been there already, and reading our guide and dive books about there, and getting pretty excited to see the place. We think we'll be heading out some time later this week.

Palau

2011-04-12T01:11:00.000-07:00

Palau
March 9 - April 10, 2011

View from a Rock Island Beach

I can't believe we've been in Palau for a month already. Time flies. I know many people say that time seems to go by quicker every year, and I definitely agree, and would also add that the effect is magnified while cruising. I guess it's something about going different places and meeting lots of new people, but I am continually amazed each time I stop to figure out how long we've been in any given port.

We first arrived in Palau on a Saturday afternoon and were pleasantly surprised at how quickly we got cleared into the country. We had heard (correctly!) that it was a quite a bit more expensive to check in here on the weekend, and so I somehow imagined that all the officials were going to have to be called in from home (and hence the extra overtime charges), but they all showed up promptly and we got checked in in plenty of time for us to move the boat around and pick up a free mooring at the Royal Belau Yacht Club. The Yacht Club is part of Sam's Tours, which is one of the most popular scuba diving operations in Palau (which is saying a lot - this place has WAY more tourists than anyplace we've been since Fiji). We'd read about Sam's in advance so we knew to expect the floating docks filled with dive boats, and the free mooring balls and showers they make available to cruisers, but we were pleasantly surprised by the hustle and bustle (we arrived about the time all the dive boats were returning for the day), the very relaxed and breezy outdoor bar and restaurant and the big smiles and welcomes from the staff. Sam's definitely is our kind of yacht club! We quickly ordered a few beers and an appetizer or two and found out where the showers were and enjoyed it all immensely.

Then we asked how to call a cab, because we had our hearts set on going into town to a place called Taj for dinner. All our guide books and Martin (the lovely German we dove with in Pohnpei who has been to Palau many times) had raved about the Indian food at Taj, and since we all love Indian food we were very excited to go there. We were not disappointed! The food was truly delicious. The Tandoori Chicken appetizer was so moist and flavorful, the breads were perfect, and the entrees (we ordered four for only three of us!) were all uniquely wonderful and layered with flavors ranging from subtle to supremely hot - just how we like it. We also met and chatted with Robert, the extremely personable and gracious owner, who has been there each time we've gone and always makes you feel right at home. Then we left and I tried not to moan too loudly in the taxi and managed to roll myself down the dock, into the dinghy and into my bunk for a good night's sleep.

The next day Fred packed and prepared for his trip back to the States to take care of some business, do some skiing, and visit with friends. We had intended to get to Palau earlier, so he could do some diving before he left, but the weather gods had other plans and they delayed our departure from Yap so he ended up flying out right after we got here.

A few days after Fred left, Jeff and I discovered the down side of staying on a free mooring ball, which is that when a Tsunami warning is issued you get asked to leave - and to leave quickly. We were hanging out on the boat one evening at about 5 PM, relaxing and watching a movie on the laptop when we heard a knock on the hull and popped up to find Sam and Gary alongside in a dinghy telling us about the big earthquake in Japan and saying a Tsunami Warning had been issued for Palau for 7:30 PM and that they needed us to get off the mooring we were on right away because it was for one of the big boats that needed to be moved off the floating dock, and these guys had many other boats they needed to move too, so they needed us off quick. Needless to say, this was a bit of a shock. It normally takes us about an hour to get everything in the boat stowed away and transition from life at anchor/mooring to sailing. Luckily for us, not everything had to be done before we got off this mooring ball, since we be inside a nice flat lagoon for at least an hour before getting out of the reef, but we had to quickly figure out which jobs HAD to be done before we left the mooring and which jobs could wait. Then, suddenly the guys were there already, and although I hadn't actually timed it, I would have sworn it was only ten minutes later, not fifteen, but we did a fast last minute check that there were no lines in the water that could wrap around the prop, and away we went. The big boat was coming up behind us already, so as soon as I saw the two dinghys at our bow move to either side I went ahead to get out of it's way as soon as possible. What I couldn't see was that one dinghy was actually being towed by the other, so my trying to go between them didn't work out too well, but I quickly realized my mistake and reversed enough to let the guy (who was rushing us off so he could help the big boat pick up the mooring after we got off) pull both dinghys over to one side of our boat, and off we went.

Let me explain that the moorings for Sam's are in a small area, protected by an inner reef with a skinny pass entrance, all of which is inside the much bigger, much deeper Malakal harbor area which is protected by islands and is inside the still bigger outer lagoon which is protected by the outer reef. We got ourselves through the pass in the internal reef and then slowed down to a crawl and put the autopilot on and finished getting the boat ready for sea as we puttered along inside the big harbor. We'd been told that some of the other sailboats were going to motor around inside this big harbor until they thought the tsunami danger had passed, and then they planned to return to the their moorings. Another sailboat, which also needed to leave it's mooring completely had decided to anchor inside the little bay near Sam's. We discussed both of these options, but decided that we just didn't have enough local knowledge to be cruising around in the big harbor after dark, and we didn't want to be anchored in the little harbor if the tsunami actually hit, so we quickly prepared for an unexpected night at sea and headed out the outer pass to the deep, deep sea - which really is the safest place for a boat if a tsunami is coming. The tsunami effects are only felt where the water shallows up, in the middle of the ocean they say you don't even notice it as it goes by. Luckily for us, all these Pacific atolls are surrounded by very deep water right up to the outer reefs, so it was no problem to get out into really deep water quickly. Unluckily for us, and unbeknownst to us in our protected anchorage, the wind was blowing 20 knots outside the harbor and the seas were big. We hadn't had dinner before we left the anchorage, and we had to rush to get out of the pass before dark, and as soon as we were out we were in some big big waves which combined with an empty stomach made me nauseous immediately and I remained that way for the rest of the night which we spent slowly sailing back and forth keeping an eye on the very large ship which was a few miles away and had also evacuated the anchorage and was circling around in our vicinity.


The Jack Loomis - our neighbor at sea

When the sun came up we headed back in after a chat on the VHF radio with the big ship next to us. I was hoping they could tell us that the Tsunami warning had been lifted, and whether Palau had sustained any damage, but they only said that the warning was only for the previous evening (which I knew, but I was worrying about aftershocks in Japan that might have generated additional warnings). They also said that they didn't think Koror, the main town in Palau, would have been damaged because of it's location. I had assumed that they would have had access to reports of actual conditions ashore, but this didn't seem to be the case. We motored back into the pass and were very relieved to see that everything on shore looked normal. We really didn't know what to expect, and while we were hoping for the best, it was easy to imagine the worst while we were sailing around in the dark all night. We were also pleasantly surprised to see that the boat which had been put onto our mooring the night before was pulling back over to the dock as we came in, so we picked up our old mooring and re-inflated the dinghy and headed into shore as quick as we could to order up a huge gigantic breakfast, after which we had a big nap.

Coincidentally, a few days later we were invited on a tour of the big boat that was our ocean neighbor the night of the tsunami scare. Turns out it was a US Naval vessel called the Jack Loomis. I was interested to see the boat itself, because they'd been our neighbors, but then I found out that the boat's mission is to transport all the equipment needed by Marines to launch an invasion somewhere. This made me even more curious, especially since I had recently finished a book about the WWII action in the Pacific islands, so I had read about one island assault after another. So, on the day of the tour we got on the launch (one of the Sam's Tour boats) and headed out to see the Jack Loomis. We pulled up to the back and had to climb up a big ladder to an outer platform, which was a bit like a big fire escape on an apartment building. We went in and signed the security list while gawking at the three huge tanks that were already in sight.

Tanks

Then we saw the huge engine room (the engine itself is as big as a room!) and the control room and some other cool stuff before being led into the main hold to see the assault equipment. We had been told to be prepared to be amazed, but I was still taken by surprise. There were tanks of every size, and bulldozers and jeeps, and canons on wheels, and armored cars... and there were a LOT of them.


I kinda like this one...

maybe they won't miss it - they've got a lot of them!

I went up to our very nice tour guide, Carey, and said, you were right this is amazing, and he said just wait, you haven't seen anything yet, this is just one level - there are five more! There were fire trucks, and ambulance jeeps, and more tanks in different sizes, and an entire level of jeeps, and huge generators on wheels, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot more stuff. It was really amazing. By the time we got to the last level I wished everyone else would quit taking pictures so we could finish because my legs were tired and that was before we climbed back up the five levels of stairs to see the bridge and the helicopter deck and look out over the bow where the GIGANTIC anchor chain could be seen. Wow. The entire tour was really cool.

Canon

We've also been doing lots of scuba diving while we've been here. We've done it all with Sam's Tours, rather than doing in from our own dinghy, because the best dive sites are quite far away from the main anchorage, and the currents can be quite strong, so it's good to go with folks with local knowledge. The diving in Palau is amazing, and you don't have to take my word for it, take a look at any top ten list of diving places in any of the travel magazines and you'll find Palau listed somewhere near the top. Deservedly so. What I knew about Palau diving before getting here was that I would see lots of sharks and turtles and big pelagic fish like tuna, trevally and snappers along with big schools of smaller fish.

Shark and a big school of fish

What I didn't know about Palau is that there would be groupers the size of small love seats and that the coral here is also fantastic. The coral alone on most Palau dives is as good as or better than the best coral dive in lots of places AND if the currents are right you also see crazy amounts of fish and sharks as well. Most places it's either one or the other, and usually neither is as good as both often are on a dive here in Palau.

The coral is amazing!

Our very first day of diving here we were lucky enough to go to the deservedly famous Blue Corner and we caught it on a very good day indeed. We saw huge schools of medium size fish and we saw reef sharks and gray sharks and really big Napolean Wrasses. We saw the two biggest groupers I've ever seen under an equally huge table coral. We saw a turtle, a lion fish, and a really cute little eagle ray. We saw a big school of medium sized barracuda, some clown trigger fish, lots of titan trigger fish and bumphead parrrotfish and a really lovely bit of cabbage coral with some gorgeous yellow fish schooling above it.

I wonder what this school of fish is studying?

This was all in ONE dive. It really was almost too much. I'd see something cool and try to point it out to Jeff only to discover that he was simultaneously trying to point out something else cool to me. And so was the dive guide and the other people we were diving with. And everybody was pointing at something different! It was crazy. My neck hurt afterwards from trying to look everywhere at once. I was an instant fan.

Eagle Rays at Blue Corner

Another day we went to Ulong channel. We did three dives in this area and I really, really mean it when I say that the coral there was breathtaking. It was like a huge coral garden with an amazing variety of gigantic and very healthy corals. Then we went to Siaes corner and saw amazing shark and fish action along with more beautiful coral. This was definitely one of my favorite days of diving ever! We've done lots of other dives here in Palau also. I think seven days of diving so far, and not all the dives are quite as good as the two I've described, but none of them were bad. Even the worst was better than the best day of diving I've had in many other places, but when the diving is good in Palau, it is off the charts unbelievably good!

Did I mention that the coral is nice?

Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to capture this big picture amazing-ness with an underwater camera. Even when the underwater visibility is great, things more than 10 feet away just don't show up in pictures very well (something about refraction I think), but I'll post as many close ups of cool stuff as I can (based on the internet speed at the time of posting - it varies quite a bit here).

Eel

Oh, I almost forgot to tell about the day we saw the octopus. It was our third dive of the day, and somehow I just wasn't expecting a lot from this particular dive. I don't know if it was the dive briefing or if I am just getting ridiculously spoiled by Palau diving in general (yes, it's probably that), but I just wasn't expecting much. The coral was nice and we saw three of the four different colors of scorpion leaf fish that we had been told we might see (these are pretty cool, very strange looking and very easy to miss) but somehow it all seemed a bit ho-hum. Right up until we saw the octopus. It wasn't like a man eating octopus in a scary movie, it was a little guy about two feet long total, but he just did not seem to be scared of us. The very few other times we've seen octopus they usually hide in a hole very quickly, but not this guy. He seemed to be eating something and there was a fish who was very interested in whatever he had and seemed to be sometimes attacking him. The octopus kept moving about and each time he moved he changed his color and texture to match whatever surface he was on. He could go from light and smooth to spotted and bumpy in a second. Even though I knew right where to look it was hard to see him when he was still. Then he'd move again and change color and texture again. He swam away from the bottom a couple times, which I'd never seen one do before. We got to watch him for about 10 minutes while he snacked away and the fish kept pecking at him. So much for a ho-hum dive.

Octopus

All you fans of Survivor might also be interested to know that we have snorkeled in Jellyfish Lake and we've had lunch on one of the beaches used in the Palau show. It now has picnic tables and lots of rats, but still - I was on another Survivor beach! (We were on one in the Marquesas also.) For those of you who don't watch Survivor, let me explain that Jellyfish lake is a marine lake which was once a part of the ocean, but has now been closed off. The jellyfish who live there don't have many predators so they have lost their stingers and multiplied wildly. When you swim there you can swim right into their midst and be surrounded by hundreds of these pretty jellyfish and not be stung.

Jellyfish Lake

We also recently took the sailboat out and anchored in the Rock Islands for a few days. This trip was delayed a bit because the starter on the boat's diesel engine decided it was a good time to have a melt down right before we wanted to leave. Thank goodness this happened while we were near town though, and not after we got out there! It wasn't too tough a fix after we figured out from the engine diagrams which part it was that was that the smoke was coming from, then turned to our favorite repair expert Nigel Calder (almost every cruising boat I've been on has a copy of his repair book onboard) for tips on how to remove it. Jeff was able to get it out after just a very little bit of knuckle banging and cursing with only a few retrievals by me (with the little hands) of the wrench that fell into the bilge. Sam was nice enough to have one of his mechanics drive us to the shop where they get their cars repaired and those guys were able to rewire it and replace something inside, and then we managed to get it back on without losing any of the nuts and bolts into a space too small for anyone to reach - this is always a hazard during any boat repair (that or important pieces fall overboard if you are working up top).

The Rock Islands are a crazy maze of tall, mushroom shaped islands located a bit south of Koror. There are many different anchorages there. I picked one out based on it being close to some good snorkeling at a place called Cemetery Reef, and relatively easy to get the boat into and out of (many of the other anchorages have 2 meter deep reefs across the entrance at low tide, and our keel is 2.5 meters deep, so we'd need to time the tides to get into and out, which I think just adds unnecessary anxiety - I'm going away from town to relax!)

Our lovely Rock Island anchorage

The anchorage itself turned out to be lovely, but we went past Cemetery Reef on the way to it and I was surprised to see that it was surrounded by buoys, like a swim area in a lake, and that there were a couple tour boats tied onto some of them. In hindsight I realized I shouldn't have been surprised. It's just that since we left Fiji we've been visiting places with very few tourists, but Palau has a LOT of them and I forgot to take that into account. In other countries, as soon as we get away from town the only boats we see are fishermen or very occasionally another cruising sail boat. I forgot that Palau has a lot of visitors and that not all of them scuba dive and those who don't often go on these snorkel tours. So, after thinking all this through, I thought I had made the appropriate adjustments to my expectations of Cemetery Reef, and decided that I still wanted to go see it even though we wouldn't have the place all to ourselves. Turns out I didn't adjust my expectations quite enough.

Jeff driving to the snorkeling

The next day when we dinghyed around the corner to the reef there were a couple tour boats there already, which we had expected, but were hoping we might be pleasantly surprised. We decided to get in anyway and take a look - we'd just try to stay away from the other people. But while we were there boat after boat after boat pulled up. We snorkeled one side of the reef, which is really quite lovely, and decided to head back to the dinghy, where we continued to watch boats pull up. Eventually there were ten tour boats there. They each had at least 15 passengers, some more like 20, all snorkeling in an area about the size of a football field. But the most amazing thing is that almost everyone had on a life jacket. Some even had kick boards. The kick board people tended to form big flotillas and move slowly around the reef together. This seemed very bizarre to me.

Snorkelers with life jackets

When we returned to Sam's and I was telling this tale to another cruiser, he nicely pointed out that at least they were having fun. I guess that's true, and I've got no problem with that, but I wish so many of them hadn't been standing on top of the beautiful coral they were there to see. Unfortunately this problem isn't limited to the snorkelers. Many of the scuba divers here also seem not to be aware or not to care that touching the coral kills it. As I mentioned before there are lots of strong currents here and unfortunately lots of divers just grab onto coral to stop themselves so they can watch the action go by. They recently held a meeting, while we've been here, about maybe closing Blue Corner temporarily to let the coral heal itself some. Divers at this location are meant to use reef hooks to anchor themselves when the current is strong (and some people think this is a problem in itself), but in the very few dives we've done here ourselves we've seen lots of divers hugging coral or standing on coral or grabbing onto it to steady themselves while they take pictures of the coral. It's a shame, and I hope the people here figure out some way to stop the damage this causes. I do know they are trying.

The rest of our Rock Island adventure was every bit as relaxing as we'd hoped it would be. We had tucked ourselves into a beautiful little anchorage and we rarely saw another boat while we there. We listened to the birds and admired the lovely islands and really enjoyed our four night stay.

Fred will return to Palau in a few days and we're waiting on some additional information from our weather guru Susan before deciding where the next leg of the journey will take us.

Yap, Federated States of Micronesia

2011-03-28T02:52:00.000-07:00

I've gotten a bit behind on the blog, so let me first say that as many of you already know, we are currently in Palau (which was not affected in any way by the big earthquake in Japan - hooray!) We have been in Palau for about three weeks now. Fred flew back to Idaho a few days after we got here to take care of some business and do some skiing, so Jeff and I have been enjoying Palau on our own. We really like it here, but we also really liked Yap, so I wanted to put up this blog about our experiences there before I start writing about Palau.

Our time in Yap was pleasant right from the start. We arrived at entrance through the reef fairly late in the day, but the channel was very well marked, so we were able to head into the lagoon and get the anchor down well before dark. We weren't able to raise any authorities on the radio, but we were pretty tired after a seven day sail anyway, so it was kind of nice to not have to inflate the dinghy and go ashore to do the entry paperwork. Instead we got the lines straightened away and put the shade canvas up and toasted Yap from the cockpit. The Yap anchorage is very close to the local basketball court (which was a very nice facility with a roof and some bleachers), so we were able to see and hear some of the game that was in progress. Jeff was saying what torture that would be for Hughsie if he was on the boat - that he would probably try to swim and join the game, but we were all content to relax a bit and enjoy knowing we had a full night's sleep in a calm anchorage ahead of us.

The next morning one of the entry officials called us on the radio and we arranged to meet him ashore at 10 AM. He said he would come to the dock and show us the way to his office. He not only did that, but he also called all the other offcials we needed to see, and they all came to his office to sign us in. This was great, and is definitely not always the case. Sometimes Fred has to spend a couple hours walking all over town trying to find the various buildings for all the officials we need to see, and once he finds the right place he is often told that there is one particular person he needs to talk to who is out right then, so he'll need to come back later. So, having everyone meet us in one spot was great.

After doing the necessary paperwork, Fred needed to take the Quarantine officers out to the boat, but Jeff and I were allowed to wander about onshore while he did so. We noticed right away how clean Yap is, and that there were very nice roadside plantings, and lots of smiling faces. We found a fairly large grocery store near the anchorage and got directions to the ATM which we headed off for after meeting up with Fred who was finished with the officials by then. We were stopped on the corner by a slick looking young fellow who was flashing a map and saying something I didn't quite understand. It turned out that this guy was from the Visitors Bureau Information booth across the street and he was telling us about the free maps and brochures they had there. We got the maps along with a lot of genuinely enthusiastic information from this nice young fellow who we saw many times later and who always checked on us to make sure our visit was going well.

Next, on the way to the ATM we were greeted by another guy on the street who welcomed us to Yap and asked us where we were staying. I began to realize that Yap was small enough that the people who worked in town knew at a glance that we were new arrivals. We had a nice chat with Keyonei, during which he told us he worked at Trader's Ridge Dive Shop, which was across the street, and he invited us to stop by and check out the shop any time. Being strangers in a new place it's really nice to be greeted like this, and we definitely wanted to go diving, so we stopped into that dive shop later in the day and arranged to dive with them the next two days. After that we hit the internet cafe to check our shore emails and let everyone know we'd arrived safely. Fred liked the air conditioning in there so much that he got a hotel room for the night so he could enjoy more of it, and Jeff and I headed back to the boat to with a frozen DiGiorno's pizza. This was a big treat for us, since we find island pizza to be a different than we are used to, so this frozen one was the best we'd had in quite some time.

The next day we went diving. Vince and Keyonei brought the dive boat out to God Spede to pick us up. This is nice for us because otherwise we have to load all our dive gear into the dinghy then unload it again at the dock and then load it again into the dive boat. Yap is known for it's local Manta Ray population and quite a few of Yap's visitors are divers who stop here on there way to or from Palau. We had already done a couple Manta dives in Pohnpei, one where we saw no Mantas and one where we had a great experience with various sets of them swimming formations over our heads. They are quite big, and it is pretty cool when they swim above you becuase it looks a bit like they are flying over you, but the problem with Manta dives is that you often go to "cleaning stations" to see them, and if they aren't there, then your dive can be a bit dull. Cleaning stations are usually a clump of coral in the middle of a sandy channel which have cleaning wrasses living on them. Mantas or sometimes sharks or other big fish come to the stations to get cleaned by the wrasses. It's cool when something is there getting cleaned but there's often not much else to see if nobody is home.

Manta and Reef

Our first Yap dive was to a very shallow cleaning station, but we were lucky in that there were lots of Mantas there that day. We hooked into the reef using reef hooks, so I had both hands free to operate the camera and try to get some good shots. We stayed for about 20 minutes watching the mantas swim about. It was really nice.

Manta overhead

Our second Yap dive was to a site called Vertigo, where we were told there were lots of sharks and big snapper. They weren't joking!

Lots of sharks!

I don't think I'd ever seen so many sharks at once unless the dive guides were feeding them. We found out later that they do feed them at this spot some days, but not the day we were there, although they did tell Fred to take some bread that was leftover from lunch with him to feed the snapper. Apparently snapper love banana bread - go figure!

Fred feeding snapper

The snapper were all around us the minute we got in the water. We started in about thirty feet of water near the edge of the reef and then swam to the drop off where there were a lot of sharks circling around. We just floated there and watched them swim around and around.

Black Tip Reef Shark

Some were small reef sharks, but there were lots of grey sharks as well, which are a bit bigger. I'll admit here that I mostly enjoy seeeing sharks while we are diving, they look so powerful and sleek, but it still raises my hackles a bit when there are a lot around at once. I can't help thinking that if just one bit you that the blood would have the rest of them on you in a flash. Jeff always tells me that the dive companies would be out of business quick if their customers were getting eaten by sharks, and I know it's true, but that doesn't prevent the heebie jeebies from setting in, particularly if I look back and find that one has circled around behind us. I would really prefer if they would all stay front and center where I can keep an eye on them. After watching the sharks for a bit we swam along the outside of the reef and saw some great coral and a turtle. It was a great day of diving.

Grey Shark

Turtle

Our second day of diving in Yap was also nice, but not quite as good as the first. We went outside the reef to the southern point and dove Yap caverns first. There was some really nice coral here and a lot of bumphead parrotfish, but the visibility was not so great so it was hard to appreciate the big picture. Our guide, Barnaby, made up for that by pointing out lots of "macro critters" to us along the way. ("Macro critters" is cool diver slang for the little bitty creatures that it's very easy to overlook.) We saw two leaf fish (the first I've ever seen), some micro crabs, a lionfish and a moray eel. When we got back to the surface a big black cloud was headed our way and Vince decided that we needed to get back inside the lagoon before it arrived, so we went around the west side and headed for another Manta dive spot. We were not so lucky with the Mantas that day, but we did see a couple eagle rays and Vince showed us some underwater stone money and took our picture with it.

Underwater with Stone Money

The stone money, as far as I know, is unique to Yap. It's not in use anywhere else in Micronesia. It really is stone, and it really is money, and it's still in use today. Basically it is big pieces of some kind of rock that is not found on Yap. All the stone money in Yap was brought over from Palau. Most of the stone money we saw looked just like a stone wheel in a caveman cartoon. It's round with a hole in the middle that you can put a big stick through so about eight men can carry the money around. I think there are also some bigger pieces, but we never saw any of those. Traditionally, it wasn't moved very much once it was brought over from Palau. Bigger doesn't necessarily mean it's worth more. What gives a stone it's value is the story of it's history including the tale of the journey over from Palau. Apparently, the rougher the journey, and the more people who died on it, the more the stone is worth. Stones that were gathered later, using tools and bigger ships, are not worth as much as the ones from earlier times that were carved by hand.

Most of the stone money that we saw was near the "Men's houses", which are big, rectangular roofed spaces where the men gather for important meetings or ceremonies. The more important men get the better, higher seats, and then there are lower levels for the less important guys, and a seperate space entirely for the ladies. I assume that the money originally got put in front of the house of the village that owned it, but we were told that it doesn't often get moved, even when it's traded to another village it stays put and everyone knows who owns each piece of money.

I have to admit, that my first thought on seeing this stone money was "Hello - that's not money, that's just a piece of rock!" Then later the same day I was buying some stuff in the grocery store and I looked at the fancy paper I was paying with, and I thought, hmmm, I suppose some alien could say, "Hey lady, that's not money, that's just a piece of paper". Then I remembered that our paper currency is backed up by gold, and I felt better until I realized that "hello - gold is just a piece of yellow metal!" Then I started wondering how "money" really works, and then I decided that that wasn't what I wanted to think about just then, so I decided to forget about it and just stop poo-poohing the stone money. It did also occur to me that security-wise the stone money concept is superior - it's quite difficult to move, and the stone itself isn't worth anything without it's story (although it's not clear to me why a thief couldn't just make one up).

I learned most of what I know about stone money the day we did a land tour with Vince. We drove around most of the island with him and he answered lots of our questions about Yap and it's customs. He also showed us his wife's village (he married a mainland Yapese woman) and the plot of land where one day they hope to rebuild the house her family once had there that was completely destroyed by a typhoon. Only the foundation and the betel nut trees remained. As a bonus on our tour we got to see Vince cut some of the betel nuts by tying his knife onto the end of a long branch using a leaf he cut into strips, and then raising the knife up on the branch and chopping off a clump of betel nuts from the top of the tall skinny palms they grow on. Cool.

The next day we went out fishing and spearfishing with Keyonei and Barnaby. We took our spear gun out too and Fred got some pointers from Keyonei who is an amazing spearfisherman. Apparently spearfishing is easy if you are able to free dive to about 40 feet and stay down there for a good long time. This is apparently not a problem for Keyonei, who comes from one of Yap's outer atolls where fishing and spearfishing are the daily activities for the boys and men. The ladies take care of the farming and cooking. We were told that almost all the dive guides on Yap proper were originally from the outer islands, where free diving is a way of life. Keyonei was able to fill a cooler full of fish pretty easily, and although we didn't have any luck spearfishing, we did catch a mahi mahi while trolling along the outer reef on our way to the spearfishing spot. We were pretty excited since this is the first mahi mahi we have caught on this entire trip, but unfortunately I managed to lose the picture of it and all the other Yap onland pictures we took while we were there. Bummer. We did, however, enjoy a magnificent fish dinner that night!

We also had a bit of excitement after the spearfishing when Keyonei told us that he didn't want to go all the way back to the pass to get back into the lagoon, so instead we would go over a low part in the reef, which would only work if we rode in over the reef on the right size wave. Apparently there is no pass into the lagoon around the island where Keyonei is from, so they take small boats over their reef frequently and it's just a matter of counting the waves correctly - which all sounded nice and reassuring until we got real close to the reef and he put his in shoes on "just in case". Then he told us to look around the boat and make sure everything was secure because there was a small chance we could capsize. Well, I'm not sure what Keyonei's definition of "secure" is, but as far as I could tell nothing in the boat was secure. We had fins and masks and snorkels and spearguns laying everywhere. The fish was all in the cooler, but the cooler itself was in no way secure. In fact, I'm not sure how we could have made anything secure, it was a small, open boat without compartments to put things in. I suppose we could have at least put our snorkel gear back in it's bag (the bag with the broken zipper) but although Keyonei said to make things secure, I couldn't see how, and he and Barnaby didn't seem to be securing anything, so I just grabbed the new camera and put it's strap around my wrist and decided to hope for the best. We made a couple big circles in silence - I was afraid to say anything since I didn't want to interupt Keyonei's concentration. Barnaby was in the bow and I kept my eye on him. He didn't look nervous, but he did look intent. Then, we finally caught a wave and zoomed over the reef with no mishaps and everyone relaxed and started joking again, so I assumed we were safe.

We thought we would be leaving the next day, but the weather simply did not cooperate, so we stayed a few more days and got to go to Yap Days, which is a yearly celebration of traditional Yap culture that includes dancing, and stone money carrying contests among other things. Most people there were in traditional garb which includes colorful skirts for the ladies and loin cloths for the men. Some of the loin cloths were topped with some unique straw looking decorations that are made from hibiscus bark. It was all very interesting to see, although unfortunately they ran out of programs before we got there, so we didn't really understand what any of the songs were about.

One of the my favorite things about Yap, were the very interesting people we met there. For instance, We met Chief Munno one day as we were returning to the boat after Yap Days. He was walking down the street wearing only a blue loincloth and carrying the tradtional men's woven straw bag. He hailed us from across the street, and when we crossed he introduced himself and asked where we were from, and if we had been enjoying our stay in Yap. (It seemed like the majority of people we talked to really wanted to know if were having a nice visit.) I assumed, based on his attire, that he had been to Yap days, but as we chatted we learned he was the chief of one of the outer islands who was on the main island to attend a Chief's conference. The goverment of Yap has four main branches, the same three we have in the US plus a group consisting of the chiefs which includes the chiefs of the outer islands along with those from Yap proper. Anyway, Chief Munno was very interested to learn that we were from Idaho. Seems he had gone to college in Eastern Oregon and had fond memories of a road trip to Boise (to buy some Coors beer!) Chief Munno went on to tell us that he is only a few credits away from a Masters degree, but he missed home to much, so he came back before finishing. He was a fascinating fellow, and we exchanged email addresses with him, but he also requested our postal address because when he is back home on his island he does not have access to "those machines". Given that the Yap government is clearly very vested in the country's infrastructure, I assume this is by design. I assume that they could have internet on the outer islands but that they sometimes choose not to, because I know that one of Yap's stated goals is to try to keep traditional living alive, while also attempting to make themselves economically viable by developing their tourist industry. It seems like a very tough line to walk, but I hope they can do it, because Yap is definitely a very unique place.

Another day, in the laundromat I met two other interesting characters. The first was a very nice 75 year old lady who very kindly offered to share her lunch with me. She has six grown children, and many of them went to college in the US, and a few of them still live there. She's been to visit so many times that she is bored with their hometowns and on her last visit she asked them to take her to Las Vegas where she won either $900 playing the slot machines. The other character was a gentleman who was dressed in a loincloth and carrying a woven straw bag full of betel nuts. He was waiting in the laundromat for a ride back to his village, where he owned a small store. He asked me about the book I was reading, and wheter we read a lot on the sailboat, and told me he had just finished reading the Bill Clinton's autobiography. Somehow this was just not what I expected him to say, but it was great chatting with him.

People here in Palau keep asking us what there is to do in Yap, and my advice is to just wander around town and chat with the very friendly people there. It really is a unique, and very lovely experience.

Truk Lagoon (Chuuk), Federated States of Micronesia

2011-03-01T18:12:00.000-08:00

Truk Lagoon islands and dive boat

Truk Lagoon is the first place we've been to that we were warned repeatedly about before arriving, but we are happy to report that we had no unpleasant incidents during our stay there. We were very careful while we were there, especially since we continued to be warned by locals that everything on deck should be locked up, and we purposely anchored in only one location, which was off of the lovely and welcoming Blue Lagoon Resort, and we limited our overall stay and severely limited our time in the main town, and although it's a shame that we felt that all of this was necessary, I am glad to say that we had nothing but pleasant experiences during our stay in Truk.

We arrived to the main town dock pretty late in the afternoon our first day here after motoring twelve miles inside the reef. The lagoon here is huge. It's quite different from Pohnpei, which was basically one large mountainous island with a nearby fringing reef. In Truk their are many medium to small islands which are all surrounded by a reef which is ten to fifteen miles away from the central islands. The town of Weno is where we had to go to check into the country, and is also where we had been told that fights often break out in the streets between local youths.

We reached the main town dock at about 2:30 PM. This dock is really designed for much bigger ships with huge bollards spaced quite a ways apart. We put our bow line around one, but the next one back was quite a ways away, so Jeff volunteered to stand on the dock and hold the stern line. Unfortunately for him our check in process was delayed while we were waiting for one of the agents to show up, so he wound up holding the sailboat onto the dock for about two hours while many of the local skiffs went flying by creating totally unneccessary wakes to push us around. It was a bit annoying, but eventually we got our paperwork in order and still had enough daylight to head south to what we had been told was a much safer anchorage off of the Blue Lagoon Resort. We got the anchor down and got the dinghy inflated in record time and went ashore to arrange our diving for the next day. Then we headed back to the boat to finish our post-passage necessary chores and make ourselves some dinner and hit our bunks for that first blissful night of uninterrupted sleep.

The next day was the first of four days of fantastic wreck diving. We'd heard that Truk is in a class by itself when it comes to wreck diving and I think we are all now believers. We went ashore a few minutes before what we thought was 9 AM, the time we were meant to meet our guide on the dock. We waited and waited and made a few jokes about island time and waited some more, and Jeff finally walked up to the dive shop to make sure they knew we were there. In the meantime a nice fellow came over and began chatting with Fred and I. He asked if we were going diving and mentioned how early we were. Once again we had crossed into a new time zone during the passage without realizing it and we were an hour early. Sheesh!

A few minutes later, Estos and Mack brought the boat around and we loaded up our gear (after apologizing for rushing them!) and met a father and son from Australia who dove with us for two days, and headed out over some very calm water between some very beautiful islands to our first Truk wreck.

The Fujikawa Maru was a 433 ft Japanese aircraft carrier. We swam along the outside for a bit and admired the amazing hard and soft corals which almost completely cover the outside of the boat. It makes the boat itself like a reef and makes swimming around all the masts and the towers that stick up from the deck really interesting. Just the outside would have been an amazing dive, but Estos led us inside to a room with lots of pipes and some electrical circuits still showing. We swam around this for a bit then went swimming through to the holds. There were six holds on this boat all with something cool to see, but my favorites were the ones with containing the Japenese Zeros. It was unbelievably cool to be swimming around inside a ship under the water and see these planes inside. One of the holds had about six of them and they were scattered around and kind of lying on top of each other. It was amazing how tiny these planes were. I could not imagine getting in something that size and going to shoot at other planes and ships. Incredible. The holds also contained many fuel drums, lots of saki bottles, some gas masks and some shoes.

A few of the MANY saki bottles we saw while diving

Our second wreck the first day was the Heian Maru, a 510 ft submarine tender with more amazing coral outside and a really cool very long horizontal swim through with periscope repair pieces laying in the hallway.

I was completely sold on Truk wreck diving after these two dives. We all agreed that we could easily do mulitple additional dives on these two wrecks before their charms would begin to pale.

The second day we went first to the Shinokoku Maru, a 500 ft naval tanker, whose superstructure was covered with gorgeous coral. Even the bow gun was covered, so much so that it took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. We also swam inside and saw an operating table and a side room with a tiled tub.

Jeff amongst Shinokuku superstructure

This was also the first dive that we took our amazing new underwater camera on. This camera was a Christmas/Birthday/Easter/Valentines/St Patricks Day/Thanksgiving present from Judy and Merv, and we were super excited to try it out! We are also super excited to be able to share our underwater experiences on the blog thanks to the photos from the new camera. Jeff and Fred were a bit amused at the fact that I read every word of the instructions beforehand and at my initial nervousness about damaging the camera, since Jeff graciously allowed me to have the first go with it. It took a bit of getting used to at first (I am definitely NOT a "gear girl" and there is already a lot going on when you're wreck diving) but then I was very pleasantly surprised at how much fun it was to take some outside snaps. We didn't attempt any inside photos at this point, because it's pretty dark inside the wrecks and some of the spaces are pretty small and there are sometimes sharp pieces of metal about, so you need to pay attention to where you are, but we made up for it once we were outside the wrecks back in the better light. We took a gazillion photos and you can be assured that from now on we'll be posting pics of all our dives.

Coral on the Kensho

Our second dive this day was the Yamigiri Maru. It had a big torpedo hole in side which we swam into, and more amazing coral on the outside, and also a human skull which appeared to be fused into the wall of the engine room. This was the only sign of human remains that we saw while diving although many of the wrecks have them. Our dive guide told us before the dive that it was there and gave us the option of seeing it or not. We voted to see it, and to me it seemed a good reminder that we were actually diving on ships that were sunk full of men during a war. It's easy to lose track of that while gawking at the amazing underwater sights.

coral on the Yamagiri

The next day our first dive was on the Nippo Maru, a 351 ft cargo ship which had a one man tank sitting on one of it's decks. Again, I was surprised at how small the tank was - tiny! I can't imagine getting into something like that by yourself and driving around these islands with people shooting at you. Crazy! There were also som artillery guns on wheels deck on the deck. For some reason (maybe because of the wheels?) these looked to me more like something from the Civil War than from WWII. There were also a lot of big, square water tanks in one of the holds and tons of saki bottles.

There were actually tons and tons of saki bottles in every wreck we saw. So many that Jeff now has a theory that Saki consumption may be a major factor in why the Japanese lost the war! It may sound silly reading this at home, but if you come take a look at these wrecks I guarantee you'll think he's on to something!

Our second dive that day was the Kensho Maru, a 381 ft cargo ship. In this ship Estos took us through some really amazing swim throughs. We went up and down some very skinny staircases, and since this boat is sitting right side up it felt like you were walking around in it. We went to the engine room where there were plenty of levers still intact. There was also some really nice coral on the bow gun outside.

Kensho coral encrusted bow gun

Our first dive on our fourth and last day of diving was on the San Francisco Maru. This was our deepest dive in Truk with a max depth of 165 feet. We dropped down near the bow of the boat which is the shallowest part of this wreck, but still deeper than the deepest parts of the other dives we had done. There was very little coral here, compared to the other dives we had done (I think because it is so much deeper, but didn't get that confirmed by Estos), so we got a really good look at the bow gun and the track that it spins on. Next we swam over to see the two one-man tanks that are on the starboard deck. One tank was partly on top of the other - it sort of looked like they had collided and one tank went up over the other, I imagine this happened either when the ship was being bombed or when it hit the bottom. There were some china cups and plates from the wreck displayed near the tanks also. There was another tank that we saw on the port side of the boat. Between these there were some deeper, open holds where we could see the skeletons of trucks including the chassis, steering wheel, and seat frames. All of this was in front of the bridge and when we reached that we turned around and began ascending gradually back towards the bow and the mooring line to the dive boat. This had all taken only about 15 minutes, but we needed to head back up while we still had plenty of air for the decompression stops diving at this depth would require. There wasn't much to look at on the way up, and we had to spend a good bit of time there, which is the problem with deep dives. I'm glad that most of our dives weren't this deep, but I really enjoyed this one all the same. Seeing the tanks sitting there on the decks was really neat, and seeing this one boat with so much less coral growth than the others was interesting also.

Betty Bomber engine

After a fairly long surface interval, which we spent back at the resort itself, we went back out for our final Truk dive at the "Betty Bomber", a Japanese plane which came down just a little short of a runway that had been built by the Japanese on one of the flatter islands. This plane is in fairly shallow water. It's engine of the plane is about a hundred feet away and we swam over to check that out first, then back to the body of the plane itself.

Fred coming out of the Betty Bomber

The nose was sheared off of the the body, so you could look right inside from the front. There were a gazillion little fish inside, and when I swam in they just moved over a bit to let me through. It felt a little like swimming inside an aquarium. I enjoyed it so much I went through a couple times going each way. Scattered about on the ground outside the plane were some radio parts, oxygen bottles, the ever prolific saki bottles, and a gun that looked more like a hunk of rusty metal than anything else.

Fred with the gun from the Betty Bomber

We had originally planned on four days of diving while in Truk, but we were having so much fun that we would have added a few more days, especially since the weather did not allow us to leave right away anyway, but unfortunately Fred and Jeff both had their ear infections recur, and I managed to really smash my foot on a piece of deck hardware, so we sat around a played hospital boat for the next day or two before checking out on Monday. The guys did make one short provisioning run into town, and said that it was every bit as bad as it was reported to be. I can't tell you how many people in Pohnpei described it as "a shithole". Multiple people used that exact phrase, and not all were the sort of people you'd expect that kind of language from. The boys agreed, however we also all agree that the Blue Lagoon Resort is quite nice. They have lots of security and very friendly staff in general, so if you want to dive in Truk, our recommendation is do it, but definitely stay at the Blue Lagoon.

We had to go back to the town dock again to check out of the country, then we headed north and got through the pass out of the reef a few hours later to begin our 800 mile sail to Yap.

Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia

2011-01-29T20:54:00.000-08:00

January 30, 2011

We've been in Pohnpei for about three weeks now, and, as always, there are things we like quite a bit about this place, and things that are not ideal. The biggest bonus of all has been that we've been able to get the refrigerator repaired here. It had been acting up for quite awhile, but finally decided to quit completely just as we pulled into the harbour here. Obviously having anything as important as the box that keeps the wine cold die on you is a big problem, we were grateful that the fridge waited till we got here to die completely. There was definitely no way to fix it in the Solomon Islands and having it die mid-passage would really be depressing. Luckily for us, here in Pohnpei there are both hardware stores that stock the freon we need and a knowledgeable and friendly man with the gauges you need to put the freon in, and US mail delivery here so that we could get the new compressor in a timely manner and without spending an extra fortune to have it shipped here. All of this is made a bad situation much better than it could have been, but a broken fridge is still a bad situation. However, the new fridge has been in for about a week and is working great and seems to be using a lot less power than the old one was, which is no big surprise since it was running full out full time towards the end.

Pohnpei is a fairly large, mountainous island with a surrounding reef. The reef is a few miles out from the shore in some places and is fairly deep, but also has little mini reefs and some small islands sprinkled around inside it. The good part about this is that the harbor is very sheltered and you can motor around inside the reef and be in pretty protected waters. The bad bit is that the big island does not have hardly any beaches, it has lots of mangrove fringed areas. Here the lack of beaches doesn't just mean no good sunbathing it also means not being able to swim from shore in many places, so although there is great snorkeling and diving out on the reefs you need a boat to get there. For us it means that although we can swim off the boat (something we've been really looking forward to since the Solomon Islands!) we can't see the bottom and there is no nearby snorkeling. But the harbor is very protected and quite calm even when the many rain storms through.

Row of wrecks

The harbor is also home to a lot of abandoned, large commercial vessels in various stages of sinking. Most of them appear to be way more recent than the WWII. I don't quite understand why there are so many here, or conversely why there aren't so many other places, but we have taken to joking calling Pohnpei the wreck snorkelers paradise.

An older wreck

Other aspects that affect a cruisers daily life are that the town is not right on the harbor waterfront. To reach the town from the boat we take the dinghy over to an abandoned dock which is in a very advanced state of disrepair. So much so, that despite our best precautions Fred broke through the dock one day and fell right into the water. Luckily he was not hurt, it was a short fall into a shallow water with a mud bottom, but it certainly could have been bad. It was a rotten four by four beam holding up the outer edge of the dock that broke beneath him. Yikes. After we carefully tie up the dinghy to the dock we walk up a very steep, but thankfully short hill to the Ocean View hotel. This hotel is a boon to cruisers since the have a bar and restaurant, very reasonably priced wifi, and Satellite TV with a live ESPN feed, much to the delight of the sports lovers.

Pohnpei anchorage - Ocean View hotel is the big building on the hill

From the Ocean View Hotel it is a fairly short walk to the near part of town, but a fairly long walk to the far side of town. Taxis are very inexpensive here and we used them a lot. Frankie, our favorite taxi driver, had his birthday while we were here, so we gave him a Wise Guy's shirt to remember us by.

Fred and Frankie

Other good things about Pohnpei - did you catch the part where I said there was a hardware store here? Well, actually there are two, an Ace and a True Value AND a Napa Auto parts. The hardware stores are both huge, and it's not an exaggeration to say that I walked the aisles drooling for about five minutes on my first visit there. We've not seen anything like this on the boat since New Zealand.

There are also a couple good supermarkets here, and they are stocked with products from the US. We are seeing BBQ sauce, canned chili and pickles for the first time in a long, long time. It's funny how exciting that is. So much of the food that is available to us is the same thing over and over again that any variation becomes a pretty big deal. Ever since we've left New Zealand all the countries we've been in have been supplied with either New Zealand or Australian products, and although many things are the same, many things are also just not available. Dill pickles are a big deal. In New Zealand they mostly have gherkins and since then we've seen only gherkins, but mostly no pickles at all. That's just not right.

The downside of the food being from the US is that the US is pretty far away, so many of the products are right at or past their expiration dates. Many stores have a shelf rack marked "Animal Feed" which is where they put the far out of date items and sell them for 50% or less. This may partially explain why the pigs here are so big. And, no, we didn't visit a farm to see a pig, Jeff and I saw one pass in town in the trunk of a small car. A really big pig in the trunk of a small four door car. It's legs were tied around a big stick and it's head was kind of sticking out the side because it was too big to fit down in the trunk. Fred also saw one being carried through town by two guys at either end of the stick. Apparently they like a good pig feast here in Pohnpei, and I certainly don't blame them!

Another interesting thing about food here is that every restaurant we've been to has sashimi on the menu. This includes the fancy places and the fast food joints. For example Arnold's, which was recommended to us by many locals, looks like your typical low budget strip mall eatery in the US and has a really good cheese steak sandwich, pizza, hot wings, salads - and sashimi. And the sashimi is delicious. There aren't different choices, it's whatever kind of tuna they got that day served very simply with soy sauce and wasabi on the side, or local style with ginger and lime. It's almost always one of the best things we get at any restaurant which surprises me again and again. It just seems so unusual to be getting sushi at the local burger joint and loving it.

The reason for all the US stuff is that Pohnpei, and all of Micronesia (formerly known as the Caroline Islands), has been closely associated with the US since the end of WWII. Sometime in the 1880s Pohnpei was claimed by Spain who then ceded it to Germany as part of the deals at the end of the Spanish American War. Then Japan took over at the beginning of WWI and was later awarded trustee ship of the islands after the war by the League of Nations with the caveat that they not build military bases or attempt to colonize the islands. However, there was apparently no oversight of this arrangement, and sometime before WWII Japan pulled out of the UN and still nobody thought to revoke their control over these islands, so Japan went right ahead and built a huge military base on Truk (which is west of Pohnpei, and where we are headed next). So, after WWII the US took control when the Japanese surrendered to us and later the US was given the protectorship of the islands. Pohnpei, Truk, Kosrae and Yap have since banded together and formed the Federated States of Micronesia, which still maintains close ties with the US. I mention all this here because it was all news to me when we got here. I knew the US had ties with Guam, but I knew nothing about FSM.

For today's visitor to Pohnpei what all this means is that the ATM gives you US cash, the cars and you meet a lot of Americans here. They are mostly employed as teachers in the college or work for groups who oversee the large sums of money this area receives via various charitable organizations. Most of them arrived here on an airplane, but there are a few folks here taking a break from cruising and living on their boats in the harbor while stopping here to work for awhile. We've also met a crazy irish/english couple Noel and Kathy. Kathy is teaching at the college while Noel is working on the boat. Noel qualifies as the very first person we met here since he was kind enough to call us on the radio when he saw us coming in to share some local knowledge. He also rowed over soon after we got our anchor down and became the first local member of our arrival celebration. Next, Glen, an American here on a sort of outrigger style catamaran that he built himself came over to say hello, then Noel went back to his boat and got Kathy and some homemade beer he had onboard, and we contributed the SolBrews we had brought from the Solomon Islands, and we had a real party on our hands. Very nice to have a warm welcome!

The next day we met John and Jean. They are teachers who have taught at many overseas locations, the last being in Trinidad. When they decided to move here John flew back and sailed their boat from Trinidad to here, so they have first hand knowledge of some of the trials of the cruising sailor like lack of local knowledge and a very limited supply of fresh water. They have been extremely kind to us during our stay here and have taken us diving and hiking and helped us with our mail and pointed us to Peter, a New Zealander who works here also, who has helped us with lots of repairs and driven Fred to the hardware store about a hundred times to get supplies. Big thanks to John, Jean and Peter!

Our first couple dive outings here were with John and some friends of his. They often go out on Saturdays with Anchur, a local business man who enjoys fishing and has the typical local style boat here which is a long open outboard style boat. We went out two Saturdays in a row with these guys and it was fun to meet everyone on the boat and a nice relaxed way to do some diving as well. We dove two different spots each day, usually in one of the passes through the outer reef. So first we'd zoom out about five to ten miles in the boat to the first spot, then try to figure out which way the current was going through the pass, and go to the correct end so we could drift down with it. Unfortunately, we weren't always quite right about which way it was going, so we would sometimes turn around and not go in the planned direction, but Anchur always found us at the end of the dive, so that was OK. It's amazing to see underwater the passes that you are taking the boat through. Very reassuring here because the walls of the passes really go almost straight down. The coral itself is not nearly as impressive here as some other places we have been, but we've really been to some amazing places and may just be getting quite spoiled. We did see a couple small reef sharks on our first dive here and on the second saw some very large schools of fish. After the first dive each day we'd get our gear off and have some lunch while Anchur did some snorkeling, and then zoom over to the next dive spot, dive there and then zoom home again at the end of the day. On the first day the tide was high enough that we got to come back through a mangrove passage between the main island and a smaller one. The mangroves met overhead and it was like being in a tunnel for quite a long way. Very beautiful.

Traveling through the mangroves on the dive boat

We also did a couple days of diving with the only commercial dive shop on Pohnpei which runs out of the village Hotel. We had been told by many people that they were quite expensive, and I suppose that compared with going to Anchur it is expensive, but we thought it was well within the normal range of pricing for a commercial dive shop (the cost does vary quite a bit from place to place). We did one day of diving with them in the Pohnpei lagoon one stop of which was at Manta Rhodes where we were really close to some very large manta rays, some of which were stopped at cleaning stations and some of which were swimming around in a line of four doing "formations". It was amazing.

Our second day of diving with the Village was at Ant Atoll, which is about 10 miles outside the reef to the west of Pohnpei. This atoll has a very skinny but long and winding pass entrance to it and we dove both sides of it the day we were there. We saw a lot of reef sharks here as well along with a really big school of bumphead parrot fish. Getting out to Ant was a nice treat for us because we wanted to take the sailboat out there as well eventually, and this way we got a closeup preview of the pass from someone else's boat, which is a big plus.

Dive boat at Ant Atoll

But I think my favorite part of diving with the Village was meeting Martin Reiser, a delightful guy from Germany who has taken a year off from work and is traveling around diving. Martin was great to chat with in general, and, another bonus for us personally, he has done a LOT of diving in Palau, one of the places that is in our future, and had great things to say about it and gave us lots of tips for our visit there. We had dinner with Martin after our second day of diving with him and he has a picture of us up on his website along with great photographs and video from many of the dives he has done.

View from the Village Hotel dining room

A couple days after going with the dive guys to Ant we took God Spede there and anchored out for three glorious days. Ant atoll is currently uninhabited. It is a ring of coral with a couple long skinny islands on part of the ring and a big, deep lagoon within. We were the only boat anchored there, so we were the only ones there at night, but the Village Hotel's dive boat came out one day and another small boat was there another day, presumably for fishing. We took the dinghy over to the pass each day and did a lot of snorkeling. The visibility really varied at different parts of the pass each day, but there was one little cove where we could always clearly see the 60 foot bottom. There was amazing coral here, definitely the biggest patch of cabbage coral I have ever seen. Also, there was a black tipped reef shark and a white tipped reef shark that were in this little cove each time we went. We saw lots of other sharks also, by far the most sharks I've seen while snorkeling (not diving). I really enjoyed our stay there. It was so beautiful and peaceful. Very very relaxing.

God Spede at Ant Atoll

Entrance pass to Ant Atoll looking out from the dinghy

Now we are back in Pohnpei preparing to leave for Truk and waiting for a good weather window. We are really excited about the wreck diving in Truk which was Japan's equivalent of Pearl Harbor. The allied forces sunk about 60 boats during two days of bombing in WWII, and now it's a wreck divers playground. However, we are a bit apprehensive about security while we are there. We have heard from many different sources that the main town, Weno, where we must go to check in, is not very nice, and that we need to be very careful while we are there. Apparently it's normal to see a couple fights in the street every day and robberies are quite common. Our plan is to get in and out of Weno as fast as we possibly can, and then move south two miles and anchor off the Blue Lagoon Resort which also has a good dive operation. We've read blogs of other boats who've visited there and they've not reported any problems, and Martin, our new diving buddy, arrived there last week. He was kind enough to report back to us and he says there are no boats there now, but the resort's dive guide says that the boat will be safe there while we are out diving with them. We also hear that the resort has onshore showers that will be available to us after diving and good cheeseburgers - woohoo! We still plan to stay even at the resort for only a few days while we dive and then we will beat feet out of there. Of course, all these plans are open to revision after we get a look at the place, but we think that we can enjoy the diving there and get out unscathed.

Fish Photos

2011-01-09T15:10:00.000-08:00

Here are some photos of the barracudas we caught at Sipoko Island in the Solomon Islands. The big one was our Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner. I was surprised how delicious it was. Somehow I expected barracuda to be oily like mackeral, but it wasn't. I'd say it was very much like wahoo, but with a texture slightly more like grouper.

I may have said this before, but the big one required special effort to land. We hooked it while we were trolling from the dinghy, then Jeff fought it as we drove the mile back towards the boat, then Fred jumped from the dinghy back onto the sailboat as we made our first pass by and grabbed the gaff, then as we made another pass by in the dinghy Fred gaffed the fish while standing on the sailboat. It was an amazing effort on the part of both guys!!!

This guy was huge!

We caught this one first and thought he was large - until we caught the next one!

Arrived in Pohnpei Micronesia

2011-01-04T16:25:00.000-08:00

We made it safe to Pohnpei early morning Sunday Jan 2 (which would be Sat early afternoon in the US). We waited outside the pass through the reef until we had good daylight and then motored in. We were able to tie up at the town dock and clear into the country very quickly even though it was a Sunday. That was a nice and unexpected treat. We were also led over to the anchorage by a very nice gentleman from Port Control. We are enjoying Pohnpei so far, but taking a bit slow since we are all recovering from a cold that made its way through the entire crew on the passage up.

Sailing to Micronesia, Day 6

2010-12-29T19:50:00.000-08:00

All is well on board on Day 6 of our longest passage since the New Zealand - Tonga run. We are headed almost due north and we crossed the equator yesterday. We had a small crossing ceremony which included some sacrifices to Neptune which included some Solomon Islands coins, a NY giants winter hat, a Vermont National hat (which had been worn to death already), some swimming apparel and a bit of rum, since it's rumored that Neptune appreciates the fire water, and we most definitely want to keep Neptune happy.

It looks like we'll be sailing for another three days or so. The wind has swung around to the east more, which is what we needed to go to Pohnpei, so that's where we are headed. Unfortunately, the wind has died a bit more than we'd like, and we're close to the equator, so, once again, it's HOT. But it's not as hot as the passage to the Solomon Islands or the time we spent there. We have read that 81 is the average high in Micronesia year round, and we are very excited about this. 95+ is a bit much on a regular basis without any AC.

It's also nice to see the entire Big Dipper again. At night it's low on the horizon in front of us and the Southern Cross is low on the horizon behind us. It's very nice that it's been calm enough the last few days to appreciate these details. The first few days were much rougher than we had anticipated, so it was hang on and try to keep nourished and sleep a bit sometimes. Now it's calmed considerably and we've had some time for bread making and book reading the last few days.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention my dissapointing equator crossing toilet flush experiment - it is definitely NOT swirling in the opposite direction now that we are in the northern hemisphere - what's up with that?

Sailing to Micronesia

2010-12-27T22:06:00.000-08:00

We are on day 4 of our passage from the Solomon Islands to Micronesia. We are hoping to make landfall in Pohnpei, but we are sailing close hauled (as close to the wind as a sailboat can sail) now, and if the wind shifts any the wrong way we will need to bear off and head to Truk instead. It's 850 miles to Pohnpei and a bit longer to Truk. We have about 520 miles to go still to Pohnpei. All is well on board but it's getting hot again as we approach the equator.

We left on Christmas morning, from tiny Sikopo island which is in the passage between Choiseil and Santa Isabella islands. Sikopo is uninhabited and we spent a couple nights there waiting for the right weather for departing. On Christmas eve we went fishing in the dinghy and caught two barracudas, one of which was enormous! We didn't get to measure it, but it was at least 4 feet long. Jeff fought it from the dinghy for about 45 minutes as we motored slowly back to the sailboat. Then Fred tried to jump onto the sailboat from the dingy as we motored past still fighting the fish. Unfortunately I was driving the dinghy at the time and did not quite understand this was the plan, so we didn't quite make it, but he was of out of the water pretty quick and grabbed the gaff and was able to gaff the fish from the sailboat as we made another close pass in the dinghy. It was pretty exciting! We will post some pics of the monstrous creature as soon as we get to the next internet connection.

We were all excited to try eating the barracuda. None of us had ever had any before because you can't eat it anywhere ciguaterra is present because it will give you fish poisoning. However, there is no ciguaterra in the Solomon Islands, and we'd heard it was delicious - and after trying it we agree! Jeff pan fried some iwth a lime beurre blanc for Christmas Eve lunch and then served some battered with tartar sauce on the side for Christmas lunch. Yum yum yum.

Sailing to Micronesia

2010-12-27T21:53:00.000-08:00

We were all excited to try eating the barracuda. None of us had ever had any before because you can't eat it anywhere ciguaterra is present because it will give you fish poisoning. However, there is no ciguaterra in the Solomon Islands, and we'd heard it was delicious, and after trying it we agree! Jeff pan fried some iwth a lime beurre blanc for Christmas Eve lunch and then battered some with tartar sauce for Christmas lunch. Yum yum yum.

Solomon Islands, Gizo

2010-12-19T14:40:00.000-08:00

We've had a nice time here in Gizo and surrounding areas. We spent two days diving with dive Gizo and saw some more fabulous reefs, a sunken Hell Cat plane and a sunken Japanese boat from WW II.

Did a bit of shopping in Gizo the next day then headed out to an outlying island and picked up the mooring ball in front of Fatboys resort. It's another small relaxed resort here in the Solomon Islands. They have a few lovely bungalows, and more important to us, lovely clear, crocodile-free, waters to snorkel in. We've really enjoyed being able to jump off the boat to cool down whenever we want to, and we've taken the dinghy over to the outlying reef a few times for snorkeling and had some luck fishing there yesterday also. We caught two rainbow runners and a small skipjack tuna in about 40 minutes of trolling. Threw the skipjack back and had the rainbow runners for lunch. Jeff pan fried them and we had them rice, cucumber salad and tarter sauce. Yum.

We are back in Gizo today for a bit more shopping, then will probably head back to Noro soon to refuel and then planning to leave sometime between Tues and Thurs to sail up to Micronesia. This wil be a 900 mile trip and unfortunately we are expecting very light winds again. Since we also will be crossing the equator again on this trip we expect it to be another very hot sail, but we are very excited to get up to Micronesia (which is malaria and crocodile free - hurray!) We'll also probably be at sea for Christmas, but it doesn't feel much like Christmas here anyway, so no big deal.

We'll have little or no internet access before we leave, but I'll try to post a few short blogs from the sat phone as we go.

So, Merry Christmas in advance from everyone here on the God Spede!

Solomon Islands, Vona Vona Lagoon

2010-12-14T21:59:00.000-08:00

Ringgi Bay

Our first stop in the Solomon Islands was Ringgi Bay. After a hot hot hot passage from Vanuatu of seven days and six nights, I was very excited to pull in and have a shower, a cocktail, a dinner we could eat off of plates on the table (most meals on passage are eaten out of a bowl you hold in your hand while bracing yourself somewhere in the cockpit) and a full night's sleep. I know some people say they love the passages, but I much prefer the arrival to the journey.

There isn't really a town in Ringgi, and we were not able to clear customs there, but it was a good anchorage that we could reach before dark, so we stopped there and spent our evening resting up. The next day we motored about 15 miles over to Noro where we thought we were going to be able to clear in, even though it was Sunday, but alas, that was not to be. Apparently, just as we reached town, Billy, the customs guy, was leaving for Gizo, where he was going to clear in a large ship, but he said we could clear in first thing Monday morning. The Lonely Planet guide we have said there wasn't much in Noro other than a fish canning operation, and Fred, who had gone ashore to find Billy, agreed with this assessment when he returned. He did, however, say there was an ATM, a few small stores, and a place that sold fuel and a market near the dinghy dock. All of this was good news, since all of our Solomon Islands cruising guides are so old that all their info about onshore facilities is completely out of date, so we weren't sure what we could hope for.

Noro

Later that afternoon a gentleman and a young girl paddled over in a canoe, and we first assumed that they had carvings or fruit for sale, since this is a common practice here, but instead it was the Quarantine official who had heard from Billy that we had arrived and decided to paddle out so we could complete our paperwork with him. Curbside service - nice. The gentleman had Fred fill out a couple forms in duplicate because he didn't have a copy machine and this way both he and Fred could have a copy.

The next day we planned a three pronged attack into Noro which was designed to get our check-in and provisioning done in the morning so we could leave Noro and head for a resort in a lagoon that we had heard good things about. The plan was for Fred and Jeff to go to the ATM, then Fred to go to customs to check us in while Jeff hit the stores and the market while Ashley and I filled some of our jerry cans with diesel and returned to the boat to empty them into the tanks, then returned to shore, refill the cans, collect the guys and be on our way. However, when we got to shore we realized that Fred didn't have his shoes (and hookworm is common here so shoes ashore are advised for visitors even though many locals go without regularly), so I hopped back on the dinghy, got the shoes and came back and was tying up the dinghy wondering where on earth the gas station was, since that was where I was supposed to meet everyone. I'm looking up the hill trying to see some kind of Mobil or BP sign up in the air when I see Fred standing in front of a shack about 20 feet away, that has a big sign saying "Petrol Sold Here". Apparently, it's a fuel shack, not a fuel station, that I should be looking for. The guy here had fuel in 50 gallon drums with a handpump which he used to fill up two stainless steel containers that looked very much like very large measuring cups, which is apparently what they were. He filled these up to a certain line, then poured the fuel into our jerry cans.

For those of you who are interested in the entire fueling processs, I'll say that the following steps are to lug the jerry cans to the dinghy, get them into the dinghy without dropping them in the water, dinghy out to the boat, lift them up onto the boat without dropping them in the water, find the baja filter we use to filter out any water or foreign materiels that may be in the fuel, put this into the fuel fill hole, then lift the jug up high enough so the fuel goes into the top of this foot tall filter and try to pour the fuel into the filter without spilling it all over the deck and make sure you pour it in slowly enough that the filter does not overflow. All this while the boat is bobbing around in the waves, sweat is literally dripping off of you, and some flies are buzzing around. It really makes you appreciate a normal fuel dock when you find one!

Noro is also notable as the place of our first encounter with betel nut chewers. This is a very common practice here. It's apparently a bit of a pick me up, but if you chew lots of it your teeth are stained first red and eventually black. There's also a lot of spitting that goes along with the chewing, and in many places the dirt on the ground is stained red from the spit. The betel nut itself is mixed with mustard stick and lime (not citrus ime, lime from crushed coral) and it apparently tastes awful. I'm not sure I'm adventurous enough to try this one, but apparently lots of people like it because a lot of market stall space is taken up by people selling it.

Diamand Narrows

Our three pronged Noro approach was successful, and later that day we pulled out and headed down Diamand Narrows into Vona Vona Lagoon. Diamond Narrows is aptly named in that it is in fact quite narrow. It's a skinny passage between two islands, but it felt more like going up a river. There were houses near the shore which were built only about a foot above water level, which we saw right in Noro as well, but I don't understand what happens to them in a storm. Now mind you, some people would call some of these buildings shacks, and say no big loss if it got washed away, but others looked like fairly well constructed buildings with big covered porches.

Diamond Narrows houses

After Diamond Narrows we turned into Vona Vona lagoon. The other "lagoons" that we have visited prior to this were areas inside of a coral atoll which usually had only a few small islands inside, but with lots and lots of coral heads scattered all about. Vona Vona lagoon was an area of fairly shallow water with lots and lots of small islands inside. The water inside was three or four amazing colors of blue, depending on the different depths. This lagoon was bounded by two fairly large islands with some reefs across the entrance on the remaining side. As with the other lagoons, the area has not been well surveyed so the charts show no depth measurements and just have words saying "numerous coral heads" in certain areas with no attempt made to actually show the individual hazards. We did have a hand-drawn map that had been sent to us by Joe, the owner/operator of the resort we were headed to. He emailed it to us while we in Vanuatu, and it was VERY helpful since route we needed to take in the sailboat was definitely not anything approaching a straight line, or even a very direct route. we'd heard about this map from the blog of our friends Randy and Hideko, on Swingin On a Star, who passed this way in the fall of 2008. We were then able to find the resort's website and email to ask for the map before we left Vanuatu. That internet thingy really is a handly little invention.

The next two days we spent diving with the guys from Dive Munda. They came by and picked us up off the God Spede each morning and took us to see some amazing reefs. I'm not sure how to say how great the diving is here without just gushing about it. The reefs we saw were all huge and healthy. Our dives ended only when we ran out of air, the reefs appeared to just go on and on and on. One of the dives had some of the most amazing soft coral I've ever seen. One coral had little green flowers coming out of it. They looked exactly like someone had brought some little plastic green flowers down to decorate the place, but if you waved your hand near them they would retract into little buds, so I'm pretty sure they were real. Another dive was along a sloping wall of coral and there were big schools of small fish. One school was swimming down the reef in a skinny but long grouping - they looked very much like a fish waterfall cascading down a coral mountain. Gorgeous.

Lunch with the Dive Munda guys

The dives themselves were all outside the lagoon, but close enough to it that we came back each day to have lunch on one of the lagoon islands. Lunch consisted of bread, crackers, canned chili tuna, peanut butter, slices of pineapple so sweet it tasted like candy. The chili tuna was new to us. It came from the cannery in Noro, and was just like our canned tuna from home except that it had thin slices of spicy red chilis marinated with it. It was served drained, but without mayo. I liked it quite a bit, but not as much as the guy we met later who was headed to Noro to get a case of it to take with him.

Also notable, Ashley walked out onto a nearby sandspit on our lunch break one day and saw 3 or 4 reef sharks swimming around off the beach. There were also a resident gang of 3-4 reef sharks that hung out off the dock of the Zipolo Habu Resort. Luckily, these reef sharks are not very aggressive, so they wouldn't necessarily prevent us from swimming, unluckily, the salt water crocodiles who also like to hang out in the lagoons here do prevent us from swimming off the boat. This is kind of a big bummer here, because it is really hot. This is definitely the hottest place we have been, except for maybe Savu Savu in Fiji, which was only so hot because they were having a spell of exceptionally light winds while we were there. Here, this is the normal hot, and it's hot. Temps in the mid 90s are the norm and we've measured 100+ a couple of days. Our normal response to this kind of heat would be to swim frequently, but I think the fact that the locals term for the cruiser who recently got bit by a croc while swimming to check his anchor was "dim dim" kinda says it all.

After our diving days, we spent a relaxing day enjoying the Zapolo Habu resort. The resort's dining room/bar area is right near the water, and raised up a bit, with open air walls and a thatched roof. It is a very relaxed and relaxing spot. We enjoyed all our meals there immensely and Fred got to watch the Patriots trounce the Jets live via their satellite TV, which lives in it's own thatched roof hut separate from the dining room. Very civilized. We all enjoyed their satellite internet connection and their huge pile of magazines along with their cheerily lit up Christmas Tree. I'm having a hard time believing that Christmas is right around the corner. I hadn't realized until recently that this will be our first Christmas spent on the boat, or in the southern hemisphere, and I'm just having a hard time believing it's going to be here soon. I've never sweat this much in December.

Zapolo Habu Resort dining room and Christmas tree

The next day we did a provisioning run into Munda on one of the power boats from the resort along with another American couple who had arrived on their boat a few days after us. It was great fun zooming along in the lagoon with a driver who knew where all the reefs were. We could just sit there and enjoy the breeze and watch the islands go by. Later in the afternoon Jeff, Ashley and I took the dinghy over to a nearby snorkel spot. Since we'd just learned that a crocodile had been shot on the resort's island earlier that day, I was a bit concerned about one biting us while we were snorkeling. I mean we really weren't that far away. But then again, we were in the resorts snorkel spot - surely if people got eaten there they wouldn't send you, right? Yes, that sounds quite reasonable - right up until you're actually in the water. Then all I can think is that I may be the next one the locals are calling "dim dim', which doesn't make for very relaxing snorkeling.

Munda market

The day after that we took the dinghy over to have a look at Skull Island. Fred initially assumed we were going to an island shaped like a skull, but actually, it's a very small island that has been used to store some people's skulls. Ashley read somewhere that the skulls were from warriors and powerful chiefs. I assumed that we would be required to take a guide with us to visit the island, and that the guide would explain it all to us, but we were told we could go on our own, we just had to pay a Kastom fee, which we could tack onto our bill at the resort. Very convenient. I'm not sure exactly what I expected, but I was surprised that the skulls are just there sitting in some rocks. I suppose it's a reflection on me that I'm surprised that they haven't all been stolen. Certainly if they were left unattended like that in the US somebody would come take 'em.

Skulls on Skull Island

That afternoon we left the resort and went halfway up the lagoon. The water got cloudier and cloudier as we went up into the skinnier part of the water. Ashley was on croc watch (we assume the murkier the water the more likely that there will be crocs), but she did not see any.

Vona Vona Lagoon

The next day we left the lagoon and came over to Gizo, the capitol of the Western Provinces, or the Wild West as the area is referred to affectionately by those who live here. Today was our first day in Gizo and we went into town to arrange some diving for tomorrow and take a look around. There are lots and lots of very small shops, many of which sell the same stuff. There is one main street that follows the waterfront and we walked along it past the huge construction site that will one day be the new hospital out of town to a place that seemed to be public water access spots where people were doing their laundry in the spigots that were provided. WE walked back through town and poked our head into a couple of the shops and then had lunch at PT 109 (which is named after JFK's boat the little island he and some other guys landed on after their boat was torpedoed is right near here) with some other cruisers then headed back to the boat for a swim after being assured by the local dive shop operator that we'd be safe from crocs here. Hooray! We got out the shampoo and the soap and jumped in, then onto the boat to lather up and then back in again, and repeat. Jeff got a big cheer from some locals passing by when he jumped in off the rails as they went by, and Fred and Ashley were both brave enough to do back flips off the rails, which fascinated two very young local boys who were passing in a dugout canoe that kept sinking on them.

We'll probably be in the Giza area for a week or so while we do some diving and some provisioning, then we'll wait for good weather to head up to Micronesia, where we hear the average temps are in the 80s and swimming off the boat should be the norm again - Hurray!!!

Made it to the Solomon Islands

2010-12-03T21:59:00.001-08:00

We made it! We are anchor down as of 4:15 PM today. No night watches tonight, full night's sleep for everyone - hurray!

We can't check in till tomorrow, so we'll spend the evening on the boat, but I think that's all I have energy for anyway. Very happy to be here in a very breezy anchorage.

Arrived in the Solomon Islands

2010-12-03T21:57:00.000-08:00

We made it! We are anchor down as of 4:15 PM today. No night watches tonight, full night's sleep for everyone - hurray!
We can't check in till tomorrow, so we'll spend the evening on the boat, but I think that's all I have energy for anyway. Very happy to be here in a very breezy anchorage.

Sailing to the Solomon Islands Day 6

2010-12-02T17:19:00.000-08:00

All is well onboard on day 6 of this very very very hot passage. We left Vanuatu expecting a few days of very light winds with better winds following that. Instead we have had very light or no wind for most of every day. This means that instead of sailing we are slowly motorsailing along under cloudless skies near the equator, which in turn means that it is ridiculously hot. Only in the evening do we stop sweating, and even then only if you are in front of a fan sitting still. We put the motor into neutral yesterday and took turns taking a swim to try and cool off, but the water is so warm that it wasn't super refreshing, but at least we all smell a little better today. We hope to reach an anchorage tomorrow night, but we need at least a little wind to appear to make it.

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Headed for the Solomon Islands

2010-11-28T05:41:00.000-08:00

We left Luganville, Vanuatu this morning. Headed for Noro in the Solomon Islands. It's a 750 mile passage, which would normally mean about 5 days, but there are particularly light winds forcast for a good portion of our journey, so it may be more like 6 or 7. We've had a very pleasant first day at sea.

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Vanuatu, Luganville

2010-11-24T21:38:00.000-08:00

Our wonderful dive guides

On our sail from Port Vila to Luganville on Espiritu Santo we anchored off a little island off of the south east corner of Malekula island for an afternoon to take a break and a swim after an overnight sail up. It was a beautiful spot, but our enjoyment of it was a bit spoiled by a local guy who yelled from shore that we could pick up a mooring ball that was there, rather than anchoring, and then came out in his homemade outrigger canoe to collect some money for it (no problem there, we're happy to pay for the use of a mooring ball that someone else maintains). The problem was that after he collected the money for the mooring Tom then wanted to sell us everything from vegetables to guided snorkel tours. Normally these are things we'd be interested in, but we'd just stocked up at the market in Port Vila and were more interested in a nap than a snorkel right at the moment. Then Tom proceeded to tell us that some cruisers give him donations to help pay his kid's school fees (school is not cheap here in Vanuatu) and he wouldn't tell us how much to give, since it was a donation, but he made it pretty clear that he did expect one. We felt a bit strong armed, but gave him some more dough to get rid of him. Unfortunately, we understand from reading cruising guides and other boat's blogs, that this will be more and more the norm in certain places as we go. Some places in the Solomon Islands it's the norm to have about ten canoes surround you as you are anchoring to try to sell you things. I understand that these folks don't have many customers and that on our very not-homemade looking craft we must seem like very wealthy people, but the thought of having to deal the full effect hustle even as you are still trying to get the boat anchored wears me out already. It's also tough because I do like to meet the local people, and I don't like to be rude, but sometimes you just want to be left alone and it can be difficult to tell someone to go away. But apparenlty it's something we'll have to get better at as we go.

We did have a nice nap and a very refreshing swim off the side of the boat. That was a nice treat after a week in Port Vila where swimming off the boat was not an appealing option. Swimming is basically our air-conditioning on the boat, and we definitely miss it when we can't. We left in the late afternoon for another overnight sail to Luganville, and as soon as we left the channel we were met by a pod of dolphins. We all went up to the bow to watch play in our bow wake. It is amazing how powerful they are and how close they can swim to the front of the boat. There were a couple very small ones which we assumed were babies. After they left the bow of the boat Jeff spotted one doing a flip far off the stern quarter of the boat. Then we saw another flip and and another and another. Amazing! What a nice way to start a sail.

Luganville, mostly referred to as Santo, was a main base for American soldiers during World War II. More than half a million military personnel were stationed here over a three year period and there were often as many as 100 ships moored in the protected channel off town. During that time, the USS President Coolidge, a luxury liner that had been converted to carry troops during the war sank trying to come into the channel. The story we heard was that they were supposed to meet a pilot boat to lead them through the mines in the channel, but when they arrived they knew an enemy sub was behind them and the pilot boat wasn't there yet, so the captain decided to take his chances with the mines rather than the sub. The captain did hit one of the mines and ran the boat up on a reef to prevent it from sinking. The troops were instructed to get only themselves off with the plan being to return the next day for their gear. Unfortunately, the boat rolled off the reef in the night and taking all the gear, including the entire supply of quinine for the South Pacific. Oops.

The good news is that today the Coolidge is one of the most accessible wrecks for scuba diving in the world. It is also one of the best preserved in that there are still rifles, gas masks, boots, and even some artwork still there to be seen, if you are willing to go deep to do it. And I do mean deep. The wreck lies in 20 - 60 meters of water, with the stern being the deepest. I was surprised that we didn't need Advanced Open Water certification to dive it, but our guide told us Vanuatu is the only country in the world where your Open Water certification allows you to dive to 60 meters and I'm sure it's specifically for this very famous wreck that the rules are written this way. Any time you mention Vanuatu this wreck is mentioned as a must do, so we've really been looking forward to it and we were not disappointed. It is really amazing.

We did four dives on the Coolidge, starting with shallower ones and getting deeper each day (this is not optional, the dive guides want to assess your abilities and your air consumption as you go along). The first day we went to about 30 meters and saw the ships big turret mounted gun and then swam back to the bow along the top of the boat seeing rifles and helmets laying on the top and looking down in holes to the inside of the boat. The ship is now laying on it's side, so when I say "top" I mean what is now the top which is what used to be the starboard side of the boat. The second day we did our first decompression dive ever and went inside the boat to see "The Lady" which is an original piece of artwork that has been restored and replaced by the local diveshops, and some chandeliers, and a row of toilets. It was funny to see the toilets hanging off what seems like the ceiling. The next day we swam into the engine room and saw the gauges and telegraphs and the big turbines, then through a corridor with bed frames and rifles. Jeff saw a pair of boots that he said appeared to be in almost perfect condition. Most things have a good film of coral on them now, but even so can pick up the rifles and easily identify the helmets, but Jeff said coral must not like leather because the boots were quite clean. Our fourth and last day we dove down to 60 meters and saw the boats enrmous rudder (about the size of a barn door), the name Coolidge on the stern and the swimming pool and then did our first safety stop swimming about 5 meters above the boat along almost it's entire length. I really enjoyed that part since you got a real feel for just how big the ship actually is. And there is some really lovely coral growing on it and beautiful fish to see as well. On this deep dive we had 15 minutes of bottom time and then it took us 45 minutes of safety stops to come back up. It was fun, but it's going to have to be something equally spectacular to get me interested in going that deep again.

The Coolidge dives were are first dive every day. Our second dive most days were on reefs. Tutuba point was my favorite. It was really really large patch of really really lovely healthy coral. One day our second dive was Million Dollar Point. This is where the US forces dumped a huge amount of surplas equipment after the war. Apparently US manufacturers gave the government good prices on equipment during the war with the caveat that none of it be brought home afterwards. Apparently we offered to sell the equipment to the goverment here at the time (Vanuatu was then under joint control by the French and the British) for pennies on the dollar, but they did not respond. Some people say they were holding out for a better price, knowing that we couldn't take the equipment home. Others say that the military personnel were just as happy to dump it as sell it since then they didn't have to take an inventory. In any case, everything from giant bulldozers to jeeps to cases of coca-cola were dumped into the sea. I'd been told the story, but was still amazed to see how big the pile is. We swam along it slowly for 20 minutes on our dive, and it is a very tall pile. Astounding. It was hard to tell what most of it was, but there were lots of axles and tires, and just the size of the pile itself made it worth seeing.

Matthew enjoys our Ryobi radio with ipod (we like it too!)

We had increasing long surface intervals between dives as our first dives got deeper. We went with Santo Island Dive and Fishing and each day they served us wonderful lunches and we had lots of time to chat with the our dive guides who were all from Vanuatu. They were a really nice and friendly group of guys and getting to know them some was a great treat. We met them for kava a couple times after diving and that was great too. Their favorite kava bar is called Nemo's and is right on the water so you have a nice view with a breeze coming in. It was a very relaxing spot at the end of the day and seemed to be frequented by mostly recreational kava drinkers, none of which, I am happy to report, were throwing up. The gentleman who owns the dive shop and the manager of the Beachfront, the resort we are anchored off of, go there for kava almost every day as well, so we got to chat more with them also and got a lot of information about the wreck and the local history from them.

We really enjoyed our stay here and if you are a diver and thinking of coming to Vanuatu, I whole heartedly recommend you do so. I also whole heartedly recommend Santo Island Dive and Fishing. Their guys are "numba wan" in my book!

walking on the sandspit

After we finished diving we learned that the weather was not going to co-operate with our original departure date, so we decided to rent a jeep and take a tour up the east coast of the island. It was beautiful and we waded out a sand spit onto a deserted island (deserted except for the cows who apparently wade out too - it always surprises me to see cows wading in the ocean) and checked out one of Vanuatu's blue holes. I was excited to finally see one, because the guide books we have tell you they are cool and say you mustn't miss em, but they never explained what they were. Annoying. Turns out they are big pools of fresh water that has been filtered through lava rock. The water if very clear and very blue, and the one we were in was quite cool, which felt really nice after driving in the car all day. There were a couple rope swings and Fred and I went off them. I somehow ended up on the high one, and I really thought twice about going at all once I saw the sharp lava I would have to swing over, but I figured I might never get another chance to rope swing into a blue hole, so I went for it. I scraped my feet a bit on some lava at the low point of my swing, but made it in relatively unscathed. Ashley was very sad she didn't catch the moment of our flip camera (which we have courtesy from Tom Burke - thanks Tom!), but truthfully I am just as glad that the moment is not captured on film, but it was fun!

blue hole - the water really was a strange blue

Vanuatu, Port Vila

2010-11-24T21:21:00.000-08:00

We spent a relaxing and fairly uneventful week in Port Vila. For me the highlight of the week was running into our very good friend Roy Dickson who sails on a boat called Peggy West. We originally met Roy in 2008 in the Marquesas and it has been our pleasure to run into him again many times. The only small problem this time was that Irene, who is another of our favorites wasn't currently on the boat with Roy since she was on her way home to Ireland to visit her family. We had a couple nice nights with Roy this time. One was out for Friday night happy hour and one night he had us all over for a lovely dinner aboard his boat. He also helped Fred and Jeff repair our dinghy. Thanks Roy!

On the way back from Friday night happy hour we were walking along the waterfront and I was drawn to the sounds of some serious hip-hop music coming from a big bandstand set up in the park. There was some sort of break dance competition going on and one of the Ni-Vans was busting some old John Hughes moves up on the stage. We only saw a couple performers before some sort of break occurred but I was pretty impressed. In the daytime in this same park there are stalls set up selling woven bags of varied construction. Apparently each island has their own style (I got an orange and white strappy number). The contrast with those and the break dancing is the kind of thing I love about the towns in the South Pacific islands.

Port Vila was also the site of our first visit to a kava bar. Kava is a drink found in many South Pacific countries, which is embraced very enthusiastically here in Vanuatu. We've been told by many people that the kava in Vanuatu is quite a bit stronger here than anywhere else, and here there are actually bars set up where you can buy the kava prepared already. The other countries we've been in you could buy kava root in the markets and make it yourself, but we were a bit confused as to how exactly you were supposed to make it. The traditional preparation calls for the root to be chewed by young boys and then their spit is collected in a bowl and that concoction is drunk later. We neglected to bring any young boys with us on the God Spede, so that method was out for us, and although we'd been told there was an alternate method that involved straining stuff through a sock, the instructions for this method were always vague, and we know where our socks have been, so we never tried this method either.

In Vanuatu, however, there are bars where it is sold ready to consume, so we decided to give it a try. We went with Rueben and James, two nice guys we had met earlier that evening when they drove us to dinner. We hailed them down thinking they were driving a taxi. We we asked if they were a taxi, and they said yes, but something about the way they looked at each other first, then looked around a bit and shrugged, made me suspect that they were just two guys out driving around. We later learned that all taxis in Port Vila have a T or a B on their license plate, but at this point we had just arrived in town and were still learning the ropes. Anyway, Rueben and James were very friendly and chatted with us on the way to dinner, and gave us their phone number, so we called them after dinner and asked them to take us to their favorite kava bar. They took us to Ronnie's, which we had read in a book was the place all the ex-pats and government officials liked to drink their kava. I was a little surprised that it was an open air place with plastic garden style tables and chairs on a dirt floor under some big trees with parts under a roof. I guess the word "bar" had led me to expect something else, but open air really is the coolest way to go in these parts, so it makes sense.

We all walked up to the bar and got our first bowl of kava. It was served in little plastic bowls, something like you'd use to serve cereal to a five year old back home, and looked exactly like muddy water. It got scooped into the bowls out of a big plastic bucket. It tasted pretty much like muddy water with pepper added. Truly vile, but we had read enough to expect that and knew to just slug it down and not sip and savor. Even having been forwarned, I was surprised at just how bad it tasted. It's giving me shivers writing this thinking about it. Ugh. Anyway, I thought the effects were quite nice. The first bowl made my mouth a bit numb and gave me a very mellow feeling. The second bowl gave me a nice little happy glow, much like a second glass of wine. I decided to stop there because we'd just had a big dinner (we found out later that you're supposed to eat after having kava) and one of the bad effects of the kava is that it will upset your stomach if you drink too much. As we sat there having a nice conversation with Rueben and James, I became of all the spitting going on around me. It does leave a nasty taste in your mouth, so apparenlty spitting on the ground next to your chair is considered perfectly acceptable. Then I noticed some people getting their kava and taking it to a trough that seemed to be built for that very purpose. They'd drink their kava, take a sip of some beverage, and spit it out into the trough, then repeat the rinse and spit then rinse their bowl and return it to the bar. This was all well and good, but I'm glad that I was completely oblivious to the fact that there was a gentleman a few tables over who was occasionally leaning to one side of his chair and throwing up. Yes, I'm really glad I missed that part!

After a bit Rueben and James drove us back to the dinghy dock and we all went home and slept like babies. Kava was traditionally used for ceremonies and rituals, and women were not allowed in the same room as the kava bowl. Now, it is touted by many people in the US as a cure for anxiety, insomnia and back pain. After talking to lots of people here in Vanuatu, I'd say it's just considered the normal thing to drink after work with your friends. It's kava time, so you go have a few "shells" before dinner.

We also did a day of diving at Port Vila. We dove a wreck in the harbour called the Star of Russia. This was an old sailing ship designed by the same people who built the Titanic. This was my first time inside a wreck and I just wasn't super impressed. The visibility in the water was not great and another group of divers went into the wreck before us and I think they stirred up a bunch of silt, so it just seemed like swimming amongst a bunch of sharp things without seeing much. We have a lot of supposedly good wreck diving coming up so I was sad to be so nonplussed by this first experience, but decided to wait and see, and since then we've done some truly awesome wreck diving, but I'll get to that later. The next dive was on some very nice coral just outside the harbor.

Sorry, for some unknown reason we took no pics in Port Vila.

Vanuatu, Tanna

2010-11-12T23:13:00.000-08:00

We did it. We stood on the rim of an active volcano in Vanuatu. We heard it rumble and saw sparks and some pretty big chunks of lava fly up out of it into the air. It was pretty impressive, and a little bit scary, but not terrifying as I had read it can be, and as I'm sure it is when the volcano is more active. I was a bit concerned when our guide pulled us aside when we first got to the rim and said, very calmly, "When the volcano goes off don't be in a big hurry to run. Stop and look to see where the lava is going and only run if some is coming towards you". Don't be in a big hurry to run? RUN? I might need to run from lava? On this skinny volcanic lip that has little lava rocks sticking up everywhere? Seriously?

Volcano rim with lava rocks

Well, I guess sometimes people do have to run because those lava rocks on the rim weren't placed there by some landscape designer, they got there when the volcano blew them out. However, the day we visited the wind was pretty stong at our backs and the lava chunks that reached our height stayed comfortably far away horizontally, which was fine with me. I was also happy that we weren't seeing a big lake of smoldering lava when we looked down into the volcano, which was what I had imagined. Actually, I had hoped to see just that before we got there, but once I saw how skinny the rim we were walking on was and how steep down both sides went, I was pleased to see that if I fell off into the volcano there was a big rim about 50 feet down to catch me. Now, I'm sure it's warm on that rim, but not as warm as molten lava, and I was grateful for it.

Lava fireworks

But I'm getting ahead of myself here, let me go back some and tell you about our stay from the beginning. We had a nice calm four day passage from Fiji to Vanuatu with unusually large seas being the only real problem. These waves had been kicked up by some bad weather farther south of us. We motorsailed most of the way trying to get in before some thunderstorms which were on the way reached us. As we were approaching the harbour, Fred saw a bunch of birds working the water near us and Jeff threw in the fishing line and caught a little skipjack tuna almost immediately. We find that skipjack tuna is delicious when eaten the first day, but gets bit strong tasting the next day, so catching a little one is perfect, and we had just enough for dinner for four. Jeff made a great stirfry with this one, which we all enjoyed, while also enjoying our first dinner in four days where we could put our plates down on the table without having them fly off into our laps. On passages most our meals are eaten out of bowls while we brace ourselves in the cockpit.

We got into Port Resolution on Tanna at about 4 PM. We enjoyed some arrival cocktails while we got the sails covered and the lines coiled and the shade awnings put up and caught our breath. We also enjoyed knowing that nobody would have to get up in the middle of the night for watch duty. No matter how good a passage goes, I'm always happy for it to be over and can just feel myself relax.

The next day we went ashore to see if we would be able to check into the country on Saturday. Some places you can, but you usually have to pay an extra fee. We pulled the dinghy up on the beach and Fred went up to the yacht club to make enquiries, but the place was deserted. In the meantime a very nice gentleman named Phillip came down to the beach to say hello. I was surprised out how excellent his English was. We had read that there are more than 100 local languages in Vanuatu, and that the common language, Bislama, was a form of pidgen english that includes some French and spanish words thrown in for good measure. We read that the correct way to refer to the Pope in Bislama is "numba wan Jesus man". So, given that and that Tanna is a fairly remote island in Vanuatu, I was afraid we would have a very hard time understanding anyone, but Phillip's English was outsanding. Possibly better than mine. He explained that he was not from Port Resolution, but had come over from a nearby village for church services. He was a member of the Seventh Day Adventist church and their services were held on Saturday. He told us that we would not be able to check into the country until Monday, but that it was OK for us to walk around the local village and the nearby areas before then. This was good news, since sitting the on the boat for two whole days was not super appealing. Phillip was nice enough to walk up us the trail a bit and point us towards the village, which really was a village. This is one of the few places I've been which really seemed like a village. Most of the houses were made of local materials. The walls were woven from leaves with a very nice diamond pattern on them. A few of the homes had some corrugated tin for some of the walls, and some had concrete foundations, but most of them looked probably as they looked 100 years ago.

We saw a gal walk across a field with some buckets and fill them up with water from a well, and saw another lady doing her laundry in some similar buckets under a tree. Everyone we saw was very friendly and gave us a big smile and some came up and introduced themselves to us and welcomed us to their village, which I thought was very nice.

We walked across the peninsula and came to a lovely beach with fringing reefs which formed a safe, shark free place for swimming, and there was a big group of kids down a ways having a grand time playing in the water. There were some homemade benches under some shade trees here and we sat down there to admire the view. Johnson came up then and introduced himself to us. He said he was the one in the village in charge of people on yachts and he would arrange us a car on Monday to take us across to Lenakel, on the opposite side of the island, so we could check in. He also said we were welcome to enjoy the village until then. Ashley and Fred took a quick dip and then we headed back to the boat to rest up a bit more. Sunday was mostly spent relaxing also.

Swiming hole

On Monday we went ashore and climbed into the back of a Toyota pickup that had very skinny benches built all around the outside edges and a big metal cage overhead with a rain covering over it. We were told it was two hour ride to Lenakel. we went about half a mile and then stopped to pick up a lady with a live chicken and a few kids. We went another half a mile and stopped to pick up some more people. Another half a mile and we stopped for a few more people. We began to suspect that the trip to Lenakel wasn't very far distance wise, but it would take two hours because we were going to make a million stops. Eventually, when there were 16 of us plus the chicken in the back, the driver must have decided he had a full load and we were off to Lenakel. I passed out some bubble gum and everyone had a good time trying to blow the biggest bubble. My pathetic efforts were greeted with gracious smiles. After we asked a few questions about what we were passing everyone began calling things out as we went along. Schools, Churchs, and markets abounded. We also went through ash plains generated by the volcano. They looked like big grey sand dunes. Then the road got pretty steep and there were a few times that the truck was slipping and sliding and I thought we might have to get out and push, but our driver, David, got us through it each time without any assistance from us.

Bubble blowing contest

We were pretty happy to get out of the truck and stretch our legs when we reached Lenakel. We hit the bank, then Fred went and checked us into the country officially, then James, our guide for the day, took us to the market where they had all the taro and kava you would ever want for sale, but not a whole lot else. We did buy some sweet bread pastries that were for sale, but passed on the rest. Next we stuck our heads in the some of the small stores next to the market. For some reason, Lenakel has at least 20 stores, most of which are tiny. There were lots of big bags of rice, and local sugar, and then a very random selection of other non-perishable items. We saw some Pringles in one store, and were excited until we got a look at the flavors. I kid you not when I say that the three flavors were Soft Shell Crab, Shrimp and Blueberry with Hazelnut. Has anyone else ever seen these? I certainly hadn't. We decided to pass on them and got back in the car for the long bumpy ride home.

Lenakel outdoor market

Later that day the same truck came to get us and we went to the volcano. This time we were accompanied by only our guide, a few young boys, and two rather serious looking fellows with machetes. I offered the bubble gum around again and was surprised that the machete weilding chaps were vert excited to get some. They did not look nearly so menacing once they were chewing gum. They got off fairly soon, but the kids came with us to the volcano and had a great time. They were running around rolling rocks down the side of the volcano. Jeff called it lava bowling. Then as we were walking down from the high point of the rim we looked up to see them doing a truly crazy dance and laughing their heads off above us on the rim. It was great.

Dancing boys

We arrived at the volcano in the late afternoon, while it was still light, then walked around a bit and picked our spot for later. James gave us our briefing and showed us some photos on his digital camera that he had taken the night before, so we would have some idea what to expect. Once it got dark the real show started. They call it fireworks and I can see why. It really did look like someone was lighting an enormous roman candle down there. Then a big boom would come and everyone would gasp and that's when the larger chunks of lava would come flying out. The closes one came to us was to land on the big lower rim below us, but it was a pretty amazing show.

On the jolting truck ride home in the dark I started thinking how ironic it was that James had a cell phone and a digital camera but the cooking in the village was done over open fires and the laundry is done in buckets. I had seen one bank of solar panels in the village about the size of a big door, and a wind generator, and I expect there were some mechanical generators as well, so I guess it makes sense that you could have small electronic devices when you don't have running water or propane tanks, but given that we'd read that in Vanuatuan society the women are expected to do almost all the work, while the men make almost all the decisions, I suspected that the housekeeping conveniences simply aren't given a very high priority. If we had had more time to spend in Port Resolution I may have come away with a different impression, but then again, maybe I would have found that the huts had big screen TVs inside and been even more convinced of my half-baked theory. In any case I would have been happy to spend more time in Port Resolution getting to know the friendly folks there and finding answers to some of my questions, but our time in Vanuatu is going to be limited because we need to leave here and head north out of the cyclone area before the cyclone season begins in December, so on Tuesday we pulled up the anchor and headed off to Port Vila.

We had downloaded weather information and were expecting 10-20 knot winds for this 130 mile sail, but instead we got more like 20-30 knots and quite a bumpy ride. Fortunately it was only an overnight sail, as it was a bit unpleasant. The harbour in Port Vila is very protected and we felt like somebody had turned the wind off as we came in. We were able to pick up a moooring ball in the harbour and have been enjoying the town very much, but I'll write more about that in my next entry. Our current plans are to stay here till Tuesday to do some minor repairs and take advantage of the excellent stores here, then head north to Santo where there is some very good wreck diving.

As always, we hope all is well with all of you!

Arived in Vanuatu

2010-11-04T22:24:00.000-07:00

We made it safe to Vanuatu. Anchored in Port Resolution on Tanna at about 4 PM. Have not left the boat yet, but looking forward to checking out the local scene tomorrow. Also looking forward to an full night's sleep - no getting up in the middle of the night for watch tonight!

Sailing to Vanuatu

2010-11-03T14:11:00.000-07:00

As of Friday morning Fiji time, which is Thursday afternoon US time, we are about 200 miles away from Vanuatu. Hopefully we'll be able to reach the anchorage Friday before dark. The trip has been pretty uneventful so far - which is just how I like a passage to be! Fairly light winds and big waves, but we are motorsailing right along making good time. We plan to check in on the island of Tanna so we can visit it's active volcano. I just hope it's not too active while we are there!

Vanuatu Bound

2010-10-31T23:18:00.000-07:00

As of today everything looks good for a Vanuatu departure tomorrow. We will do a final weather check in the morning, then if all is well we'll do last minute provisioning in Lautoka and then clear out with customs and immigration. Should be a 4-5 day sail to Tanna, the island we plan to make our landfall in Vanuatu. Hoping for a boring passage - that's my favourite kind!

Rest In Peace Tom Kollmer

2010-10-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

Most of you who read this blog probably already know that the recent interruption in blog posts was due to the very sudden and very shocking death of Tom Kollmer. Tom has featured prominently in the last couple boat blog entries because he came sailing with us in Tonga and Fiji. On August 2, shortly after Tom returned to the US, he died suddenly while hiking in Vermont. We were devastated, but very, very glad we got to spend two extremely fun months with him when we did. He still seems very present on the boat because of all the fond memories we have of him from that time. We miss him very much.

Tom Kollmer

Jeff and I learned about Tom's death while we were on the boat in Musket Cove. We are very grateful to the staff there for all the assistance they provided. With their help we were able to leave that very afternoon. Patrick and Sophie on the marina staff were particularly helpful with arrangements for the boat and many other staff members were extremely sympathetic and also very helpful with travel arrangements during this stressful time, and we are very grateful.

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On October 10 Fred, Ashley and I flew back to Fiji while Jeff remained in the US to finish some business. Ashley, Fred's girlfriend, is the newest member of the crew and appears to be unfazed by the fate of our last fourth crew member.

Ashley

Our first few days in Fiji were spent unpacking the 300 pounds of gear and supplies we had brought back with us from the land of plenty, and putting the boat back into cruising shape. We also enjoyed a few of Musket Cove's many amenities including drinks at the tiki bar, beach lounging, windsurfing, paddle boarding and the Thursday night pig roast followed by a demonstration of the local dancing skills. When the dancers came in to begin the program they passed close by my chair. As he went past, one of the warrior dancers lunged at me and let out a war yell right in my face. I let out a very girlly scream in response, much to the warrior's and Fred's delight. This may have been Fred's favorite part of the evening, winning out over even the delicious cracklin they serve as part of the feast.

These guys are scary!

Next we went to Vuda Point for some repairs. Ashley got certified for scuba diving while we were there also. Unfortunately, Vuda Point was every bit as hot as I remembered it being. The only relatively cool working hours are from 6 AM to 8 AM. Any time after that the place is like a giant open steam room. Fred, who always sweats a lot, was literally drenched with sweat the entire day, and I was not much drier. Thankfully most of the work got done quickly and we were able to rent a car and escape the heat for a few days.

Angie windsurfing at Musket Cove

We drove over to Pacific Harbour and tried to do the infamous Beqa shark dive, but found those dives were booked already for the days we were able to be there, we did soft coral dives instead and saw an underwater wreck, and some really cute, little, blue and yellow ribbon eels.

After that we went into the big town of Suva for a mad provisioning spree. Much to our amazement we found a Costco-like store and got so much stuff there that the car was scraping a bit each time we hit a dip on the way home. Suva itself seemed like most big cities in that there were some great parks and other seeming nice attractions (we didn't actually see any, only the inside of grocery stores), but also some areas you wanted to avoid entirely.

Musket Cove Beach

After that we drove back to Vuda point and sailed the next day back to Musket Cove for a joyful reunion with our friends Lisa and Lester on Obsession. It is always a joy to see these two! We were also happy to note that most of the repairs made in Vuda seemed to have taken, with the unfortunate exception of the refrigerator, which just wasn't working quite right.

Next day we sailed back to Port Denerau on the mainland for another joyful reunion with our last arriving crew member Jeff who flew in Tuesday morning. Hooray, Jeff is here!!!

Fred was also able to arrange that a part for our fridge got flown up from New Zealand with an incoming crew memeber for Obsession, which was quite fortuitous as the part is not available here and we know from previous experiences that having something mailed to an island in the Pacific is an extremely slow and frustrating process.

Our plans for the near future are to finish the repairs on the fridge (Ali is working on it as I write this), then head for Vanuatu as soon as the next weather window presents itself. We are all very excited about Vanuatu despite the fact that shark attacks occur there more frequently than anywhere else in the Pacific. Great. We are told, however, that the problems occur mostly in specific areas and if we follow local advice about where not to swim we should be ok. The "mostly" and "should" are a bit worrying, but we are still excited to go and see for ourselves.

Fiji, June 24 - July 15, 2010

2010-07-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

We had an uneventful three day passage from Tonga to Fiji. It was a bit uncomfortable at first because we had some big waves coming from right behind us which makes the boat rock quite a bit side to side. Nobody got much sleep the first night, but we recovered the next day just before one of our fan belts shredded itself to bits. This belt was for the intake water pump which cools the engine, so the engine immediately overheated, and we had to shut it off and wait for the engine to cool down before Fred and Jeff could begin attempting to fix it. We had the replacement belt, but it put up a fight going on, but eventually Fred and Jeff convinced it to cooperate it, which was good news because we were just a few miles away from a pass through the reefs that we did not want to negotiate under sail power alone. But all ended well, and we made it through the pass and arrived in Savusavu on Vanua Levu, the next day. We were very impressed with the efficiency and friendliness of the officials here. They all came out to the boat and we were cleared through in about a half hour, which is pretty amazing, especially considering that we arrived late in the afternoon.

We really enjoyed our time in Savusavu despite the fact that it was unbelievably hot while we were there. The anchorage in Savusavu is a little ways up a wide river,
backed by fairly steep hills, so the anchorage area is very protected. This is a nice feature when the wind is blowing, but makes it very hot when it's not. The river was also not very inviting for swimming, which is our usual method of cooling off. Fortunately, we were on a mooring at the Copra Shed Marina which is a very nice place with very friendly staff and free showers onshore. Onshore showers are a pretty big luxury since fresh water is always in short supply on the boat. We took many long, cooling showers ashore while we were in Savusavu.

Savusavu has one main road that follows the river with about six blocks of businesses along it. Both the town and the people who live there seemed much

livelier than Tonga. We found the people in Tonga to be very nice, but also very reserved. Not so in Fiji. You hear "Bula", the local greeting here, everywhere you go, even from strangers passing you on the street, and it's usually delivered with a big smile. One day, when I was walking by myself just to look around a bit, an Indian lady got out of her car and crossed the street just to ask if I needed a ride anywhere. Then after we chatted for a bit she invited us all out to see the sugar cane plantation she and her husband manage. I told her we would come if we rented a car one day (which we did not get around to doing) and she then assured me that if we had any car problems in Fiji we should just walk to the closest house and knock on the door. She told me that anyone would give us any assistance we needed from use of their phone, to food and drinks, and a place to stay for the night if we couldn't be rescued before then. Nice.

We also liked the food in Savusavu. There are a lot of people of Indian descent in Fiji. They are called Indo-Fijians, and luckily for us, some of them run restaurants. We became quite fond of Indian style curries while in New Zealand, and we've been looking forward to more since we left. Fred and Jeff particularly enjoy very spicy curry dishes, and it's rare that anyone not of Indian descent makes them hot enough. The Indians, however, seem to have no qualms. You tell them you want hot and head sweating hot is what you get. I have no idea how anyone can eat more than one bite of many of the meals they get, but those two seem to love it. We also had some very good Chinese food in Savusavu. They even had potstickers (fried dumplings) which are another God Spede favorite. And did I mention that the food is quite reasonably priced in Fiji? So much so that we rarely ate a meal on the boat while we were there. It just didn't seem practical. Woohoo, no dishes to do!

We went diving with KoroSun Divers while we were in Savusavu. They are not actually located in Savusavu, they operate out of the Koro Sun resort which is on the other side of the peninsula, but they came to the marina and picked us up, and then apologized for having to detour one of their homes along the way, but since it was at the top of a ridge with fantastic ocean views, we just figured we were getting a little extra bang for our buck - a driving tour in addition to the diving. We did two dives with them, one with lots of swim throughs and one near a pair of gigantic coral mouintains. The coral here was really amazing and we enjoyed ourselves very much. Colin, the owner and head dive guy, was also nice enough to tell us about a marine reserve that was too far away for him to take us to, but that we could dive ourselves if we went there on God Spede. He told us many of customers said this reserve was their favorite dive spot in all of Fiji, and he gave us GPS co-ordinates for a couple dives there, so we decided to make that our next stop.

This marine reserve is in the lagoon surrounding Namena island (sometimes called Namenalala) and located about 25 miles southwest of Savusavu. The island is surrounded by a huge stretch of reef that juts out from the mainland and encompasses Namena island. The island is private, with a small resort on it, and boaters are not welcome ashore, but the resort maintains a mooring ball that you can stay on for free, and it is off of a lovely beach with great snorkeling, so we didn't mind not going ashore too much. While snorkeling in the anchorage we saw a five foot long moray eel swimming out of it's hole, which was pretty cool.

We planned on staying there two nights with one full day of diving in between, but our first dive there was so spectacular, and we got some more co-ordinates to other dive spots in the reserve, so we decided to stay for three more days and dive as many of the spots as we could find. I'm really glad we did. This was some truly world class diving and our fee for diving it all was $25 per person which you pay to dive in the marine reserve. The only other people diving this huge area while we were there was one guy from National Geographic who was staying at the resort on the island, and some people on a big charter live-aboard dive boat. The dive boats guys were very nice about helping us find more dive spots and invited us to come aboard one evening, but they anchored very far away from us at night, so we never took them up on that offer. Every single dive we did near Namena was amazing. Some were big coral pinnacles and some were drift dives. The first pinnacle we dove was 65 feet deep at the bottom and the top was at about 15 feet, and it was about 30 feet across. We went down deep and then spiraled slowly back up. It was beautiful, and amazing how many different types of coral there were, how healthy it all was, and how much things changed with depth. We came spiraling up about 5 feet shallower each go round and some something different each time. The top of the pinnacle was like an underwater aquarium. The drift dives were also very cool and we saw white tip and black tip reef sharks as well as a turtle on one of them.

The only bad part of our time at Namena was that I managed to burn my leg on the dive compressor while we were trying to quickly fill our tanks so we could dive again the first day. The compressor shuts off after one tank is filled and then you have to disconnect and reconnect the hoses to the next tank you want to fill and then restart the compressor with the pull cord. When I pulled the cord I did it at a funny angle and the compressor tipped over onto my leg. I didn't think it was a big deal at first, but it turns out I cooked my leg a little. Not need to go the hospital cooked, but I did lose a bit of skin. It's healing up nicely now, and I'm well past the possible infection stage, but am still wearing a bandage for sun protection until it heals completely. The bandage also makes me look more piratey, which I like.

After Namena Island we made our way down to Lautoka on the big island of Viti Levu. This trip wasn't very far as the crow flies, but it took a few days since we had to wind our way around some of Fiji's many reefs. Looking at this place on a regular map is very deceptive. It looks like big stretches of open water between the islands, but in fact there are these huge reefs everywhere and you have to go miles out of your way to get to a pass through them. We did NOT want to travel at night
in these conditions, so it took us two and a half days to get to Lautoka. We caught another Blue Trevally along the way. Those fish are delicious!

At Lautoka we stopped just long enough to do some food shopping and some official paperwork before heading off for Musket Cove Resort which is west of Nadi on a small island called Malololailai. We had to thread our way through more reefs near the resort and as we rounded the corner we were amazed to see all the pleasure water craft that were buzzing around. There were kayaks and hobie cats, and windsurfers and jet skis and day sail boats and boats that had taken people out to an offshore sandbar for picnics and snorkeling. Since then we've also seen helicopter tours and parasailing. I know these are all normal activities at resorts in the US and the Caribbean, but it's NOT been the case in any other place we've been in the South Pacific. It's been ages since we've seen anything like this and it makes a great change! Things got even better when we found out that for a very small fee we could join the Musket Cove Yacht Club (you must have arrived on a boat from another country to be eligible) and then we were welcome to use all the resort amenities. Not necessarily for free, but we are welcome to use them. Oh, and also their are free onshore showers and a spa. Did I mention the spa? And a pool. And the special beach bar which is on a peninsula near the dinghy dock where they serve cheap drinks and have wood fired barbecues that the boaters are welcome to use for free. And they give you plates and wash them for you afterwards - heaven! Now, to be honest, I must admit that I think they built this bar special in the hopes that the rowdier boaters would stay out there and the resort guests wouldn't necessarily have to deal with them, but hey, whatever makes it so that I can have free reign of the place works for me!

After a few days of soaking up the resort ambiance, and a day of diving for the boys, we sadly left Musket Cove and headed back to the mainland to prepare for Tom
and Fred to fly back to the US. The marina at Vuda Point is where we went, and it's a bit strange, but I'll explain about it later, since Jeff and I will be back there next week also. On this first visit, Fred managed to co-ordinate some different people to do some repairs and engine maintenance starting next week.

On Fred and Tom's last night in Fiji we treated ourselves to a very nice dinner in Nadi and then went out to Ed's bar, which we were told was THE place to drink in Nadi. I can't speak to that, since we haven't tried anywhere else yet, but drink at Ed's we did. And then we drank some more. And then we had some shots. Great idea. I don't know what time Ed's closes, but I finally threw in the towel and convinced the boys to take me home at 3:30. Ed's was still going strong. When we got back we turned on the boat stereo, forgetting to fade out the outside speakers, and managed to wake up our neighbors who called security. Great. I woke up the next morning with the worst hangover I've had in a long, long time. Will I ever learn? The boys felt better than me to varying degrees, which is good, especially since two of them had big, big travel days ahead of them. Tom flew out in the early afternoon, then Fred left later that night, and now Jeff and I are on our own for a bit.

We did some mainland provisioning the next day and then brought the boat back out to Musket Cove Resort, where we have gone into serious relaxing mode. We'll stay here for a week, then we go back to Vuda Point Marina while the boat is being worked on which will probably take about a week. After that, maybe we'll come back out here, or maybe we'll rent a car and tour the main island some. A lot will depend on how long the boat work actually takes and whether or not Jeff will be returning to the US also, and if so, when. Maybe, if we tour with a car, we'll save money on hotels by showing up at people's houses late in the evening and telling them our car is broken down... we'll keep you posted.

Vavau, Tonga, June 7 - 15 2010

2010-06-16T16:08:00.000-07:00

After arriving in Vavau, the northern island group in Tonga, we spent 4 days in the main port town of Neiafu. While there we enjoyed many of the comforts of civilization such as internet cafes, non-internet cafes, stores and restaurants.

We also celebrated Fred's birthday with a very nice dinner ashore, what a treat! After dinner, we went for a few beers at one of the bars on the water, and then, after we returned to the boat, Tom, aka the birthday devil, tried to convince us all that we must have Jim Beam in order to celebrate properly. Fred is not a bourbon fan, so I helpfully suggested Jaagermeister instead, and away we went, thereby insuring that everyone felt at least one year older the next day. I may have forgotten to mention before that Tom also nearly killed our freind Sean on his birthday, which occured while he was with us in southern Tonga, by encouraging him to drink way more Jim Beam than is good for anyone. We notice that Tom has timed the extension of his stay so that he will be with us for Jeff's birthday but then gone before his own birthday arrives 10 days later. We think this is cheating and would like to lodge a formal protest with someone.

We spent about four days in town, more than we might have otherwise because, of course, we had some gear to repair. Unfortunately for us there was almost no wind while we were there, and the port is very protected with high hills on all sides, so it was very very hot, and some enormous jellyfish were visiting the port also, so we were hesitant to use our normal cooling method of diving off the boat and paddling around.

Because of the heat we were very happy when we finished our town errands on Thursday and headed out to the outer anchorages. When we pulled into Port Morelle, the spot we had intended to anchor at the first night, we changed our minds quickly when we saw that it was also protected by very high hills. Instead, we went another mile and anchored at Nuku where we could sit downwind of a sandbar between two islands so that our breeze was not blocked at all. Heaven!

We did a quick scan for jellyfish, and seeing none, we all jumped into the water. The guys got out the mini plastic football and commenced their game of jumping off the bow pulpit and trying to catch the ball on their way into the water. It seems to be a bit tricky to throw the ball accurately enough while you are treading water, so completed passes are rare enough to warrant wild celebrations.

Just as I was about to get out of the water anyway, I felt a sharp sting on the inside of my forarm. I looked around, but didn't see anything in the water, but got out quickly anyway. That evening a string of itchy bumps appeared on my forarm, but nobody else had been stung, and we didn't think too much about it, these things do happen from time to time. Next day Fred went for a long training swim during which he felt a bit like he was being stung also, but he didn't have any marks on him afterwards so he decided it was all in his head.

Later that day we moved to a different anchorage off Ovalau island. We detoured past Mariners Cave along the way and Fred volunteered to be the boat man while Jeff, Tom and I swam in. There is an underwater tunnel into the cave that you can snorkel through and then you come up inside the cave itself. The top of the tunnel is about 6 feet underwater and about 12 feet long. The trick is not to come up too early so you don't hit your head on the edge of the tunnel. We had gone in before in 2008 with our dive guides, but this time we were on our own, so it seemed a bit spookier. We got directions to the cave from the skipper of a very lovely 76 foot Swan that was circling around outside while some of it's crew swam in the cave. Fred offered to trade his 39 foot Swan for that fellow's larger boat, but oddly enough his offer was not accepted. Fred then brought us in close to the cliff and

the rest of us jumped off the boat and swam over to the opening. The swimmers from the other boat all came out of the cave as were approaching, so we had the cave to ourselves after we got in, which we managed to do with no mishaps. Once inside the cave we saw the fog effect that is created as swells come into the cave and compress the air inside. Tom Kollmer was not impressed by the fact that someone had left candles on ledges inside the cave, or he was annoyed that we didn't have matches to light them with, or perhaps both. I tried to swim down inside the cave to see the lower entrance to the cave, which is 65 feet deep, but although our free diving skills are increasing, I couldn't get anywhere near the top of this second tunnel. We do know people who have swam through it, and supposedly one of them went all the way to the bottom and d lost.

After we swam back to the boat, we headed over to Ovalau island. This was described in the book as a day anchorage with excellent snorkeling, and we thought we could use the settled conditions to our advantage and stay there overnight, since the winds were again expected to be very light. Jeff and I went for a snorkel and Tom swam ashore with his book while Fred filled the dive tanks and did not get in the water. Jeff and I could see that the reef here used to be quite impressive, but most of it was dead now, with a few patches of new growth which were home to some lovely but very small fish. Our Tonga guide book is a few years old, and we've been told that the reefs have been damaged by several large storms since it was written.

The next morning poor Fred looked like he had the measles. He had stings all over his arms, legs and most of his chest. He said that he had barely slept the night before because they were so itchy. We knew he had gotten the bites during his morning swim because he didn't go in again after that. I also had gotten quite a few more bites, during my snorkel swim, but we were puzzled because Jeff and Tom, who had been in the same water at the same time, had nothing. We got on the radio and got some information from other cruisers. Apparently we were being bitten by either microscopic jelly fish or sea lice. Sea lice? Great. We were told that the effect of the stings could be lessened considerably by applying vinegar to them as soon as possible, which would be great if we were feeling the bites immediately, but we weren't and we didn't have enough vinegar on board for all of us to drench our entire bodies after each swim. We also learned that these things had never been in Tonga before. Apparently this was their first visit. Lucky us that we were here for it.

The next day Fred and I decided to go diving anyway. We have full wetsuits so we thought we'd be safe. Jeff and Tom stayed on the boat and circled around while we were down since there was no place to anchor near our dive site. We dove the south west corner of the reef around Euakafa island. It was a good, but not great, dive, and I saw two new fish that I hadn'tseen before, but they don't seem to be in my fish book. (Note to self - look for new fish book in Fiji). I got a few new stings on my hands and feet on this dive, but again didn't feel them till later so the vinegar was not effective. We are all now afraid to go in the water because these pesky bites are very itchy and they last about four days.

After the dive, we motored around to anchor off of Tapana Island, home to a spanish restaurant called La Paella. We'd heard wonderful things about this place when we were here in 2008 and were disappointed not to get there then, so we were determined to go this time. We were not disappointed. They serve a four course set menu that varies a bit based on availability of ingredients. Our dinner started with two courses of tasty tapas, followed by a very nice paella (which our spanish friend Irene says tastes just as it should) with some delicious ice cream to finish it all off. Entertainment is also included in the evening. The spanish couple who run the place sing and play guitar after cooking dinner. We understand that the duration of the singing varies quite a bit, based in part on audience participation and in part on how late the previous evenings performance went on. We only got a few songs We were basically there for the food anyway, and in this we were not disappointed and would highly recommend it to others. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that we did see a first for us there that evening. There was a dog in the restaurant throughout the evening, which is something we've become accustomed to, but after dinner was over a goat wandered in also! It is pretty common here to see goats and pigs in people's yards even right in town, but this was definitely the first time we'd seen one in a restaurant!

Because of the small stingy things, and the huge jellyfish, and the fact that the reefs here are just not that impressive for snorkeling or diving, we have decided to leave for Fiji sooner than we originally planned. We have managed to successfully shanghai Tom Kollmer into staying longer and making the passage to Fiji with us. We expect it to be a three to four day sail and hope to leave at the end of this week weather permitting.

Haapai Tonga, May 27 - June 5, 2010

2010-06-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

We had a great time in Ha'apai, the middle island group in Tonga. This group consists of mostly small, low lying, picture postcard looking islands set amongst numerous coral reefs. Think sandy beaches and palm trees and you've got the basic idea. A few of the bigger islands have small villages that run off generators, while the largest has a very small airport, a few stores a very small, very laid back resort, a dive shop and electricity.

We spent about two weeks in Ha'apai. Because there was no internet access, I've got a lot to report here, so I'll start with just a brief summary, for those who just want to know that we are still alive and have some idea of where we are. Basically, we were island hopping around Ha'apai and spending lots of time snorkeling, diving, spearfishing and fishing.

Most of the scuba diving has been on our own, as opposed to with a guide. Before we did much of this I was worried mostly about our safety during the dives themselves. This turns out not to be much of a problem - we just don't go super deep and we never push the time limits (mostly because we run out of air first anyway). The real challenges are figuring out where to go, and timing the currents right if there is current in the area, and not forgetting little details like taking your weights with you and having plenty of gas for the dinghy. But we're working out the kinks and having lots of fun while doing it.

We've also been enjoying Tom Kollmer's visit quite a bit, and Fred wants me to give a little poke to those of you have said you'll come visit, but never actually show up. I don't want to name any names, but Tim Farley, John Dagelman and Robin in Canada all come to mind. Seriously people, get your act together and get out here.

That's the quick summation. The detailed version follows.

We spent our first two nights at Nomuka'iki (iki means little in Tonga, so to find Nomuka'iki on the chart you first find Nomuka, then look for a little island near it). This is where we made our first attempt at diving on our own this trip, but we had to abort after our regular outboard engine decided to stall on us inexplicably just as we got to the dive site, which was about a mile away from our anchorage, next to our island but downwind, with no protection and no other land between us and Fiji. Luckily, We got our small backup dinghy engine started after a few anxious moments (during which I realized that we had never actually started our new "backup engine" before this and - we did, however, have the hand held VHF along also). Once we got the backup started, we decided to forget about the dive and get ourselves back to the safety of the anchorage. It was a slow trip since it's a small engine and there were four of us and all our dive gear aboard, but Fred assured us that if necessary he would swim us in while holding the dinghy rope in his teeth. Happily, that wasn't necessary, and after unloading all our gear and determining that the regular dinghy engine just needed a bit of help getting back into neutral, after which it was fine, we consoled ourselves with a marvelous snorkel near the boat.

Next we headed to the island of O'ua which we probably would have skipped normally, but some north winds were coming and there are relatively few places in Ha'apai with protection in that weather, and it seemed like the best of the ones near us that did. We weren't particularly impressed with O'ua itself, but we had a very fun potluck supper on Catina one night which was attended by us and Paul from Scott Free and the crew from Sol Maria and a good time was had by all. The next day we tried the diving thing again with Fred volunteering to be the boat guy, since there was nowhere to anchor the dinghy near this reef. Jeff, Tom and I went down and although the visibility and coral were not great, it was still fun to get a dive in with Tom and to have some success getting ourselves into and out of the water on our own.

Also while at O'ua, Tom befriended some of the local boys who would paddle out on an ancient and definitely unseaworthy craft to visit us each day. Tom asked the guys if he could take a picture with them and we were all surprised when the kids flashed some gang signs during the picture. Gang signs? In Tonga? We spent much time speculating as to where they could possibly have learned about gang signs, but had to leave it at speculation as neither their English or our Tongan language skills (of which we have none) were up to a real explanation. Tom did, however, delight the kid thoroughly when he gave him the bandanna off his head after the guy said he liked it. Presumably because it is his gang's colors.

While at O'ua we read about some spectacular diving to be had at Wickham reef, just south of us, that was only accessible in very settled weather, which was what we were expecting after the north winds went away, so we stopped there and it truly was spectacular. This was the biggest and healthiest reef we had seen since Rangiroa, and, in my opinion, by far the best dive we've done in Tonga. There was a huge area of beautiful coral with valleys to swim in and wonderfully colorful reef fish everywhere. It was really, really lovely.

Next we headed to Uonukuhihifo island and had the good luck to arrive the same day a mess of fish had been caught by the other boats that were there. They had planned a beach party potluck to share the wealth - woohoo. Tom was fascinated by the cows roaming this uninhabited island after he got over being startled by them while walking down the beach in the dark.

The next day we went out to both dive and fish from the dinghy. Unfortunately we had trouble locating a dive spot that wasn't too rough or didn't have too much current. While looking we realized that we had forgotten our dive weights, but as we fished our way back to the boat to get them, we caught a blue finned trevally. Our fish book listed it as "excellent" food quality and we agreed. It was delicious. Fish really is better the same day you catch it!

The next day Jeff, Tom and did a circumnavigation walk around the island and did a little snorkeling from shore. Tom then continued on to circumnavigate the neighboring island and attempt to get a picture of the cows, but they managed to hide from him.

After that we headed up to Uoleva, where we had been before in 2008. I was keen to visit there again because the snorkeling was fantastic, and the guys were keen to go because a Tongan feast was being organized which was going to include pig. We are all about the pig on the God Spede! The feast was in fact a feast and was unusually good food, and the guys had a nice chat with the folks from Mariner's Cafe who organized it.

The next day we did a drift dive in the pass with Lisa and Lester from Obsession and afterward Gavin from Sol Maria put on a spearfishing display. Gavin has competed in free diving competitions in the past and it shows. He can go quite deep and stop and wait for the fish to come to him. Fred got in with his spear gun also, but Gavin had already picked off the easy ones so Fred was left with only the smart ones to shoot at and they all survived to be shot at another day.

The next day we snorkeled in the anchorage and it was even better than I had remembered. I took a turn with the spear gun, but couldn't get anywhere deep enough to hit anything. Those fish were just laughing at me. But I did watch Lisa and Lester bag a crayfish (she spotted it and he grabbed it), so I learned something about catching dinner, even if I didn't actual do it.

Next we headed to Lifuka island with Ha'api's capital city of Pangai. We went on a shopping spree hoping to find some fresh produce, but the stores here have mostly canned goods. Well, to be more specific they have mostly canned corned beef. I swear to you that in every store at least one tenth of the aisle space is taken up by canned corned beef in an amazing variety of can sizes. Particularly amazing since there is not a variety of anything else. No other item comes in multiple sizes or brands, but there is always a huge row devoted to the canned corned beef. And let me be clear, I do not mean corned beef hash, it's just plain corned beef. Oh, and sometimes there are cans labeled simply "Corned Meat". I'm just not brave enough to read the label to find out what's in there.

In the end, after going to every store in town (which was easy to do since there are only six and they are all within a two block radius) we came away with potatoes, onions, frozen frying chickens and some good old American bacon, which we were very excited about.

Next we headed to Foa, where we went diving with a dive guide again. It was nice to have someone else fill your tanks and find the dive spot and lead you around to all the good stuff, although we do enjoy going on our own quite a bit too.

After that we spent one night in Ha'ano which had more really tremendous snorkeling and Tom tried his luck with the spear gun, unfortunately, again to no avail. The next day we motored to Mo'unga'one where I played boat person while Jeff, Fred and Tom did some diving right off the sail boat and I motored around in circles since there was no anchor spot nearby. They said it was a great dive with swim-throughs and a huge Napoleon Wrasse. After the dive we anchored off Ofolanga for dinner then left at 10 PM for an overnight sail to Vava'u, where we are excited to find cafes and banks and internet service. Ah, the comforts of civilization.

Southern Tonga, May 14, 2010

2010-05-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

We made it to Tonga and have been here relaxing and enjoying Tom Kollmer's company for about a week now. However, I would be lying if I said it was a fun passage here. In my opinion it was our least pleasant passage to date.

Things started out OK, but a few days into the sail, instead of the 20-25 knot winds we were expecting we had 30-35 sustained winds and were having to sail upwind in it. This alone would be enough to make things unpleasant (sailing downwind is ALWAYS nicer and normally what we do), but we also had some technical difficulties on the way, just to make things worse. The new anchor locker hatches leaked so much that we burned out a bilge pump on the way up and had to replace it during the very roughest portion of our passage, and since we were so far heeled over from sailing upwind, we also had to hand pump water into the central portion of the bilge so that the electric pump could get it overboard for us. It was a lot of work in very unpleasant conditions, but our friend Sean, who sailed with us from New Zealand is an avid boater and his help was invaluable. He pumped and repaired like a maniac. Thanks Sean!!!

Luckily we were able to stop at Minerva Reef for a much needed rest on day 7. Minerva is a spectacular landless atoll, which means it's just a big ring of coral reef with no land on it in the middle of the ocean. Inside is about 2 miles across and the water is quite calm except at high tide when some of the waves sneak over the reef.

We were able to effect some more repairs here and when we left we basically glued the anchor locker hatches shut, thereby temporarily solving that problem. Then we had a two day trip from Minerva to Tonga with basically no wind at all, so we motored up in very calm seas and dropped the anchor off Big Mama's resort (which I've mentioned previously in this blog) and have been enjoying her fine hospitality since then.

We hope to leave in a day or two for the Ha'api group (middle Tonga) and will have no internet access there. We'll be there for a week or two, then up to Vavau in northern Tonga and will send another update and post some photos from there. These are short sails with lots of places to duck in if the weather gets bad, so we expect no trouble along the way.

Auckland to Opua, NZ, April 23, 2010

2010-04-25T14:48:00.000-07:00

I am very happy to report that God Spede is on the move again. We just completed a meandering, relaxing twelve day sail from Auckland to Opua New Zealand. It is great to be on board and on the mobile again!

God Spede is looking better than ever. Fred lavished her with a big dose of TLC and she now has gorgeous new teak decks and a spacious anchor locker. The new deck was quite a project. It required every single deck fitting to be removed while the old deck was torn off and the new deck was laid down. Then every deck fitting had to be replaced and every screw hole checked for leaks and every leaky part removed again and remounted. It was a big, big job, but now the boat looks fabulous and is leak free - a big big plus when you live aboard.

Fred, Jeff and I have been back in New Zealand since January. We've spent some time overseeing and helping with the boat projects, and some time traveling around enjoying the scenery. And they've got some good scenery down here. We've also spent some time touring around with my Mom and Merv. Those crazy kids came down for 5 weeks and rented a camper van and toured the South Island. We had a really nice visit with them at the end of their stay.

We left Auckland on Sunday, April 11, after having a farewell dinner the night before with my Mom and Merv who had been touring New Zealand in a camper van for about five weeks.

We did a short sail out to Waiheke Island the first night and stayed in a bay we'd been to twice before on short shake-down sails. The next day we hooked up with our New Zealand friends Sean and Trace who were on holiday and were cruising in their boat, Heramana, with their niece Amber. We did a very relaxing day sail up to Kawau Island and spent the next two nights in a very lovely bay there.

Kawau Island is an interesting place. In the 1800s Governor Gray lived there and he was very interested in bringing different plants and animals to New Zealand in an effort to find new industries for his country to engage in. Apparently he had quite a few different animals brought in from Australia, but the only ones to survive the winters were the wallabies - those little guys who look like kangaroos. They not only survived, but prospered, and are all over the place still. I went for a walk there and saw six of the buggers in a few hours. They were really cute when they were sitting up on their big back feet with their little front paws hanging by their chests, but when they went to scamper away they leaned over and then they looked a lot like a big rat with their long skinny tails trailing along behind them. I'm really not sure if I'd want them in my back yard, but I did enjoy seeing them up close and free.

We spent a lot of our time in Kawau doing small projects, trying out some new gear, reorganizing cupboards and generally sorting things out. We also had Sean, Trace and Amanda over for dinner one night. Jeff and his increasingly talented sous chef, Fred, made penne with broccoli and garlic, ala Bon Apetit, with meatballs in red sauce on the side, and Trace brought home made bread and cookies. It was quite a feast! Six people is a squeeze for salon dining on the God Spede but Sean and Trace are the kinda people we're always happy to make room for.

After a few days on Kawau we parted company with Sean's gang, and we set sail for Great Barrier Island, about 25 miles away. We'd heard quite a bit about Great Barrier, since it is a big sailing destination in the summer here. We can certainly see why. The main harbor is huge and has lots of small bays within it, so you can always be very protected regardless of the wind direction. We tested that theory as we sat out a couple days of bad weather there. We were lucky enough to get the use of Ray Beale's mooring there. Ray had surveyed God Spede just before we left Auckland for insurance purposes, and when he heard we were going to Great Barrier he offered us the use of his mooring, which let us sleep well while the wind blew strong during our last night's stay there.

Ray's mooring was located one bay over from Smokehouse Bay which is a delightful little area created by boaters for other boaters. There was a big fresh water tank which fills up bath tubs, one inside for privacy and one outside if you choose to enjoy the fabulous view while you soak. There is a wood-fired hot water heater for the tubs and there was a big pile of driftwood that had been collected already behind the tub house. There is also a smokehouse to smoke your fish and grills to cook em up on, and a big fire pit, and picnic tables, and fish cleaning tables, and so on. I bet the place is a madhouse in the summer!

We discovered Smokehouse Bay on our last day on Great Barrier, so we didn't use the facilities, but we did take a short hike from that bay which went inland and over a ridge then down to the next bay which had pretty red rock cliffs.

The next morning we got up early and headed for Tutukaka. This is a very little town on the mainland which exists, as far as we can tell, as a base for fishermen and divers who want to dive the Poor Knight's Islands. These islands are 12 km offshore and are a protected marine reserve. We were quite excited to go scuba diving there because Jacques Cousteau had been there and given them two thumbs up, and because we wanted to try out our new dive gear while in the company of dive professionals before we go off into the deep blue yonder on our own. This turned out to be a very wise move since both our new gear and some of our older stuff needed a bit of professional tweaking before it would function correctly. Luckily, Craig at Dive Tutukaka was able to get us all sorted and off we went.

This was the first time Jeff and I had been diving in cold water, and I was not really excited about the cold, but I found that all the people who told me that the thicker wetsuits would keep your warm were right, but I also found that they had neglected to tell me how amazingly difficult it is to get those stupid thick wetsuits on! Not to mention that then you are still meant to be able to get the rest of your stuff on over it! Jeff said I looked like the snowsuit kid from A Christmas Story, and I certainly felt like him! Thankfully Fred and Jeff quickly realized I was struggling and were great about helping me get suited up and off the boat each time we went.

We did four dives in two days and I felt pretty spastic on the first dive each day, and then really enjoyed the second dive. We saw lots of short tailed sting rays and eels and there were cool caves and arches that we got to swim through. In between the dives each day the boat cruised around the islands for sightseeing and they are pretty spectacular looking, so that was fun too.

After Tutukaka we made the trip to Opua in two short day sails and arrived on Fri., April 23. The weather was so nice for this trip that we were able to sail through the skinny gap between Cape Brett and Motukokako Island (known locally as "Hole in the Rock"). Quite a difference from our last trip near here in 2008 when the waves were so big it felt like we were riding a bronco!

We'll be in Opua for at least a week while we finish provisioning and try to finish all our last minute repairs and check our spares list one last time. It's a bit daunting because once we leave New Zealand everything will be more expensive, and a lot of stuff simply won't be available, but at least this time we have a little bit of a clue as to what we might be able to find on the little islands and we know that you can often trade another cruiser for something if you really can't find it, which is all knowledge we did not have when leaving the US originally

We currently plan to head for Tonga sometime near May 1. Sean is going to sail with us up to Tonga if he can get his passport renewed in time, and Jeff's brother, Tom, is going to meet us there also, which we are very excited about. After Tonga we'll head for Fiji, Vanuatu, Palau and then maybe working our way towards Thailand while staying in the safe zone near the equator during cyclone season. I say this with the disclaimer that all plans are subject to change at any time!

Pangaimotu, Tongatapu, Southern Tonga, Nov 7 - 18, 2008

2009-01-11T18:59:00.000-08:00

We did another overnight sail from Ha'apai down to Tongatapu. It is necessary to leave and arrive in all these places with the sun high in the sky, so unless a sail can easily be completed in 6 hours, you have to do it overnight and often wind up having to slow yourself down so as not to arrive at your destination before the sun is up high enough the next day. This time we left Ha'apai at about 3PM and arrived at the northern entrance of the big bay into Nuku'alofa at about sun up.

Nuku'alofa is the capitol of Tonga and by far it's biggest city. We had heard through the radio net that the marina in Nuku'alofa was not nice to stay in, but that there was a fun place called Big Momma's Yacht Club on Pangaimotu, a little island in the big bay near Nuku'alofa, and that there was a ferry you could take back and forth a couple times a day, so Pangaimotu is where we were headed. We knew, again from the radio net, that there were a lot of boats at Pangaimotu already, despite the fact that everyone had only bad things to say about Nuku'alofa. It happens to be a natural jumping off spot from Tonga to New Zealand, being both the most southern spot in Tonga, and it's biggest city (with therefore the best provisioning opportunities). It used to be a must-do stop because you had to get your New Zealand Visa before arriving there and this was the only place in Tonga to do so, but now the rules have changed so this is no longer necessary. We thought it was interesting that many people who encouraged us to skip Nuku'alofa because it wasn't necessary and wasn't nice wound up showing up here despite their insistence that we should skip it.

We intended to go there from the get go, and we're glad we did. Anchoring off Big Momma's Yacht Club on Pangaimotu was another big social scene, since many boats were grouped here waiting for a good weather window before taking the big jump across to New Zealand. We had a great time at happy hour there each time we went, and, of course, the boys befriended Big Momma herself, and I think she was geniunely sad to see us go when we eventually left. The pictures here are of the yacht club, and of Big Momma herself.

Although there is nothing particularly charming about Nuku'alofa itself we definitely enjoyed it's many cafe's, some offering food items we hadn't seen in quite awhile (including the best samosas I've ever had!), and we really appreciated all the provisions there were to be had in Nuku'alofa's small but numerous grocery stores and at the huge farmer's market. We spent a lot of time at Friend's Cafe using their internet connection and enjoying their delicious coffes. But we really enjoyed the food at the Reef Cafe, which was on the wharf where the Pangaimotu ferry dropped us off and picked us up. Since this ferry ran on what can only be called a very informal schedule, it was a great bonus for us that there was good food to be had at the waiting spot.

Once we had gotten the boat and ourselves ready for the crossing we began waiting for good weather. The crossing from Tonga to New Zealand is a big one and there is a good chance of encountering bad weather since storms can go from start-up to fierce pretty quickly in these waters. We were glad (once again!) to have Susan, our weather-router to help us with the timing of this crossing.

Ha'apai, Tonga, Oct 27 - Nov 6, 2008

2009-01-11T18:29:00.001-08:00

We did an overnight sail from northern Tonga to the Ha'apai group, which is the middle group and the least visited. These islands are all very low-lying with lots of reefs, so they were quite tricky for sailors before GPS technology made things easier. They are still tricky, because you can't completely trust the GPS since it works off of old charts (which are the only ones available for this area at the moment), but it definitely helps. We had to pick our way quite slowly at times, with Jeff doing lookout duty on the bow again, but this time we navigated through all the coral heads without mishap.

Our first stop in Ha'apai was in Pangai village. Jeff and Fred went ashore to check us in and to check out the stores. We were a little low on supplies because the supply boat to Northern Tonga was weeks late due to some technical malfunction, so there wasn't much fresh food in the stores there when we left. Things did not improve much at the stores in Pangai, although we did get some frozen chicken, but both Jeff and Fred said this town was the most depressing place we'd ever stopped at, and they wanted to get out of their ASAP. We had to stay the night to get good light for getting out of there, but we left as soon as the sun was high enough the next day.

Our next stop was at Uoleva island. This island was beautiful. We were anchored off a long sandy beach and could dingy over to some fabulous snorkeling. The coral here was the most spectacular we'd seen on the whole trip. It was very tall and there were lots of different varieties, some of which we hadn't seen anywhere else.

We spent three nights here. The first two were by design, the second was because it got very cloudy the next day and we didn't want to go anywhere in this coral infested water without very good visibility. During our stay we went to a beach bash for Tom's birthday. Tom is crewing on Anzac, and Les from Anzac really MacGyver'ed up some tables on the beach for the event. There were about 10 boats in the anchorage and everyone came and brought a side dish, and Leslie from Anzac cooked up a bunch of chicken and we all had a nice feast.

We made another stop in Ha'apai at an island whose name I just can't remember (I'm writing this from Idaho without benefit of the boat's log book which would tell me this information). This stop was also for provisioning and also not very successful, although Jeff and Fred did get an interesting tour of all the island shopping spots by one of the residents. When they told him they were looking for the store he showed them the way, and when it proved to have no vegetables and they asked him if any were available, he took them to a bunch of different fields where they were able to pick their own pineapples, mangos, hot peppers and limes. He seemed a bit surprised when they asked him how much they owed him, and they were a bit surprised that he was surprised, but although this gentleman was quite nice, the guys thought they had seen most of the island already and there was no real need to stay any longer, so we decided to head down to Southern Tonga the next day.

Vava'u, Tonga, Oct 24 - 27, 2008

2009-01-11T18:10:00.000-08:00

After the haulout in Neiafu we definitely needed a bit of a break. We headed out the next morning for a little rest and relaxation in the Vava'u. This is the northern Tonga group and it is quite beautiful. The group consists of numerous islands, one large, several medium, and many small to tiny. There are lots of winding waterways to visit and many great anchorages. In fact, there are so many great anchorages, and their names are so foreign to visitors, that the local chartering company has given them all numbers and issues a chart showing those numbers. So all the cruisers talk about anchorage 7, 18, etc. It's a fairly unique system. Anyway, we headed out for a couple nights in these anchorages and had a very relaxing time. The headline event of this trip was that Jeff and Fred went on their first scuba trip on their own. It was a big success! I snorkeled above them just in case, but this proved to be a purely precautionary measure as they completed their dive successfully with no help from me.
On Sunday the 26th we headed back to Neiafu and spent the following day reprovisioning for our trip down to southern Tonga.

Current locations

2009-01-11T18:05:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the big delay in the blog. We got back to civilization just before the holidays and things got crazy. We are all in the US at the moment. Jeff and I are in Sun Valley, Idaho. Fred is bouncing between Cape Cod, West Roxbury, and Sun Valley. I'm going to try to finish the description of the rest of the trip, but wanted to let everyone know where we are now.

Haul Out, Neiafu, Vava'u, Tonga, Oct 20 - 23, 2008

2008-11-28T20:03:00.000-08:00

On Monday morning we checked again to see if the cutlass bearing had arrived in Neiafu, and we were told by someone from DHL in southern Tonga that it was in her hands at the moment and would be on the plane to Neiafu the next day. We were also waiting for space at the haulout place. In Neiafu they have a rail haul out system, where train rails go from shore into the water and boats get placed on a cradle that rides on these tracks and then the cradle is pulled up the tracks until the boat is out of the water. The boats remain in the cradle while being worked on, so only one boat can be hauled out at a time here.

When we first got to Neiafu we were told that there were two boats in line for haulout ahead of us. As of Monday, one boat had completed it's work, but the other was not out yet, so we made plans to watch Monday Night Football live on Tuesday afternoon at Mala island (this dateline stuff is a bit confusing). On Tuesday we got up and were having coffee when we got a call on the VHF from another boat saying the haul out guys were trying to find us. Apparently they couldn't find the other boat that was supposed to be in line before us, or maybe there hadn't ever been another boat, they weren't really sure, but they'd let us haul out today if we wanted to. We did. Fred hustled ashore to check for the part again and to talk to the haul out guys while Jeff and I got the boat ready to go. The part hadn't arrived on the morning plane, but we were told it would be there in the afternoon, so Fred came back and we took God Spede over to the dock near the haul out rails, which are very conveniently located next door to the Mermaid Cafe, which is also the yacht club.

The cradle was lowered down the rails and people stood on the docks on either side of these rails and used lines from the boat to position it approximately over the cradle while two guys swam in the water and positioned some struts that stick up vertically and form the sides of the cradle. Since the bottom of the keel is skinny and the boat is wide, it's important to get the boat positioned correctly so it doesn't fall over as it's pulled up the rails out of the water.

Fred and Jeff were on the boat while all this was going, broiling in the hot noon day sun. I was on the deck manning one of the lines and being a bit concerned because all the other line handlers were talking to each other in Tongan and nobody was telling me whether I should be pulling on my line, or letting it go slack, or what. I assumed somebody would tell me if I was really messing it up, but I sure wished I could speak Tongan so I'd know for sure. After about 10 minutes of this the guys in the water gave the go-ahead and they began pulling the boat up the rails, but the lookout guy (who was positioned onshore dead ahead of the boat) quickly shouted for them to stop because he could see the boat leaning to one side. So, the boat went back down, more adjustments were made, and 10 minutes later they tried again. This time the boat completed it's jerky journey up the rails, out of the water. A few more supports were added and a ladder was tied to the side of the boat and all the yard guys went off to have their lunch. We headed over the Aquarium to check on the cutlass bearing and were told it hadn't arrived yet, but we'd have it later that afternoon for sure, so we decided to go ahead with our football plans and called a taxi to take us to Mala Island.

The taxi guy took us for a nice drive and then stopped in the middle of the road at the edge of a nice beach. I thought he was showing us the great view, so I began admiring it, but then I realized he meant for us to get out. "Where is the place that shows the football?", we asked. "Over there", he said, pointing to an island off the beach. "How do we get there?" "Boat?" he mumbled, in a way that made me think he was guessing. Then he started chatting with some guys who were lounging on the beach, and told us they would take us over. I never did find out for sure if they were the offcial Mala island ferry or if they were just some nice guys with a boat who gave us a ride, but in any case we made it to the island in time to watch the Patriots give somebody (is it a sign of early alzheimers that I don't remember who?) a serious whipping. This was the first game we'd seen all season and we really enjoyed it.

After the game we boated back with the owners of the Aquarium. It was a very scenic and enjoyable ride. Tonga really is beautiful.

When we got back to town, we found that the cutlass bearing had not come in, but it would be on the morning plane for sure. We got some dinner and headed over to our temporary boat haul out digs. We stayed at a place called Harbour View that was about 10 minutes out of town via taxi. Harbour View consists of multiple guest cabins. We were put in "the old managers quarters". I don't know what the other cabins their were like, but ours was interesting. It had a lovely stone patio out front, but the inside was quite rustic. That's the kindest word I can think of. The walls were a mix of various building materials, and the light switches were all in odd places, and all the beds had mosquito nets which made me a bit nervous about the number of mosquitos we would be encountering, but there were two bedrooms, and a kitchen, and a bathroom with our very own shower - woohoo! Unfortunately, as the very nice current manager was showing us around, a big cockroach ran across the top of the fridge. She apologized laughingly and said there's just not much to be done about them. Hmmm. Despite all these warning signs, our first night there passed uneventfully and I thoroughly enjoyed my access to unlimited hot water, even though I did have to choose between either very hot or cold because the on-demand water heater (with flames inside a box in the shower with you) did not provide any middle ground.

The next day we had a quick bite at The Aquarium for breakfast then headed down to the boat to begin the project. First we had to take the prop off. Fred had asked a very knowledge cruiser named Dave to come by and take a look at things. He did and he had some very helpful information. Unfortunately, the haul-out place is right on a major walkway in Neiafu, so everybody else came by throughout the day with advice also. Some of it was also helpful, but much was of the "sky is falling" variety, which is extremely NOT helpful when you are in the middle of doing something. Anyway, we managed to get the prop off and were also able to verify that the existing cutlass bearing was still functional, and the screws that were supposed to hold it in were in fact still there, which was good news because we weren't sure we were going to be able to find new ones if they weren't. It seems that the existing cutlass bearing was maybe not dimpled enough originally for the screws to hold it in place. This was also good news because the new cutlass bearing still had not arrived on the island. We wanted to use the new one if it arrived, and we were told it would be here in the afternoon for sure, but by now we were beginning to think that maybe "for sure" meant something different in Tonga than what we were used to.

We spent the early afternoon cleaning the prop and reading the directions on how to put it back on. Turns out there are a lot of little bitty markings on some parts that had to be lined up with other little bitty letters on other parts. I was really wondering what on earth those people who told us that all of this could be done underwater had been thinking! It was difficult enough doing it at this haul out spot! Fred and Jeff had taken turns dismantling things while either standing on a shaky box with the shaft at their shoulder level, or while standing on the ground with the shaft above their heads. Then, when the tide camea in, they had water about a foot deep right where they were working. This made the rickety box the best option for standing on, since the top of it was above the water, and it also made it very tricky to find anything you dropped, since it was then underwater. What fun! My job was to go up and down the ladder to fetch more tools or put the boat into or out of gear as needed.

Fred spent the late afternoon riding around in a taxi trying to get the part, only to find out three stops later that it wasn't here yet, but would be in the morning "for sure". At this point we decided to break for the day and if the new bearing came in on the morning plane we'd take the old one off then, and if not we'd re-use the old one after scoring it's screw notches more. Either way, we were going back in the water the next day at high tide, which would be mid-afternoon.

So, after dinner we headed back to the Harbour View. All was well until an earthquake woke us up at 2 AM. An earthquake! Jeff and I both woke up thinking about the boat. Was it OK? Did it fall over? Why, oh why, did there have to be an earthquake tonight?! And why did it have to have that nasty extra sharp shake right at the end? Should we go look at the boat? What could we possibly do if it had fallen over?

With all these thoughts swirling around our brains, we got up to check on Fred. He was in the living room looking a bit dazed. Was that an earthquake, he asked? Apparently he had woken up just before the earthquake and was getting out of bed when he saw a huge cockroach that was halfway up the side of his bed. Then the earthquake hit and he wasn't sure if it was really an earthquake or if he had shaken the bed trying to get off it as fast as possible. He kept saying that he didn't think he'd be able to sleep again, and this was definitely the last night we were staying at this place, and so on. Jeff and I finally went back to bed and Jeff was wondering if Fred had even thought of the possibility that the boat had fallen over. I said that of course he had, that's why he wouldn't be able to go back to sleep, he just didn't want to talk about it. Jeff thought he hadn't thought, but didn't see any point in bringing it up. Why make Fred sick to his stomach about it too? There really wasn't anything we could do at that point one way or the other.

The next morning we took a taxi into town, and it dropped us off at a point where we could see that the mast was still pointed straight up. Jeff said, Thank God, with much feeling, and Fred asked him what he was talking about. Turns out, Fred really hadn't thought of the possibility of the boat falling over during the earthquake - the cockroach had had his full attention!

Now, of course, the part has still not arrived. We finish breakfast and there's still no news, so we head off the to boat to get to work. After we get ourselves all set up to drill the old cutlass bearing, the Chatham Air guy finally calls on the VHF and says that the package is at customs and Fred can come get it right now. So, we put everything on hold again and Fred heads off to customs for about the fourth time, but this time the package really is there and we do in fact have the new cutlass bearing. Hooray! We got the new one installed and the prop put back on in no time at all.

We told the guys at the yard we had finished and they said the tide was at a good height and they could put us back in water soon. Fred and I got on the boat for the trip back into the water - and what a trip it was! The way it is supposed to work is that the cradle the boat is sitting on gets lowered down the train rails into the water by gravity when they slacken the cable they use to pull it up. Well, in our case that didn't happen. Apparently something was stuck somewhere. So the yard guys get prybars and sticks and they're trying to pry the cradle to get it moving. Meanwhile Fred and I are on the boat and we can't see what's happening - all we feel is the boat rocking beneath us - which is NOT a very nice feeling when you know there is no water below it!

Next thing we see is a whale watching boat pull up in the water. Fred immediately gets that they are now going to try using this boat to pull the cradle into the water, despite the fact that nobody has told him anything about what's going on. We are only getting vague reports from Jeff who is down below watching. In the meantime, our supposed friend James from Kaama has arrived onshore and is watching the spectacle. He shouts up to Fred asking if Fred is OK with the fact that they've tied the line from the whale watching boat onto God Spede's rudder - and that's when Fred's face turned purple! He calmed down a little once James made it clear that he was kidding, but he didn't calm down much because still nobody from the yard had said one word to him about what was going on. He started yelling for them to stop everything and send the boss over to talk to him. One of the diver guys tried to tell him to relax, it's all OK, which didn't help at all. They finally explained that the cradle was stuck and they were trying to pull it down the ramp with the whale watching boat, which we had kinda figured out already. So, they begin again, and now the boat is really rocking as they cradle moves a tiny bit and stops again. Thankfully, on about the third try the cradle was freed and we started down the rails toward the water. That trip was the least fun roller coaster ride I have ever been on, but boy was it a relief when the boat hit the water. Fred had us out of the there as soon as we could get the lines untied and we headed back out to a mooring again.

Jeff was following us in the dinghy and while he was starting it the pull cord recoiled back onto his wrist and in the minute it took him to catch up with us his wrist had swollen up to the size of a golf ball. At first he thought that it might be broken, but after we got the boat on the mooring and got Jeff onto the boat he realised it was only swollen and bruised. Whew. We had been thinking about staying in Neiafu one more night to race God Spede in the Friday night races, but at this point we all thought we'd had enough excitement for awile and decided we would head out to the outer anchorages the next day in search of a little relaxation.

PS - We're currently in Opua, New Zealand. We'll all be back in the states Dec 10 till Feb ? I added some pics of us diving to the last post and will put in some haul out pics when we get them off the camera. Sorry blog is so far behind again!

Neiafu, Vava'u Group, Northern Tonga Oct 13 - 20, 2008

2008-11-11T14:23:00.000-08:00

Our sail from Nuie to Neiafu was fairly uneventful. We crossed the international dateline, but we never saw it. We had very little wind for the first 24 hours (much less than had been predicted) which we had to just wait out since we didn't want to put the engine in gear except for emergencies with our temporary cutlass bearing fix in place. But once the wind arrived we moved right along. As we approached Neiafu we were in radio contact with Honahlee, another boat that left Niue the same time we did and were nice enough to slow themselves down and wait for us at the entrance to Neiafu in case we needed help getting into the harbor. We really appreciated this, it's always nice to know somebody's got your back, but, despite the fact that this was NOT an easy harbor to sail into, we did manage to make it without any help. Of course we had to tack upwind into the harbor entrance, dodging various islands along the way. It was a lot like dinghy racing, but with a much higher penalty for hitting a mark. Fred steered, Jeff winched, and I manned the slack headsail sheet and would run up and walk the headsail around the cutter stay if it didn't go around on it's own. Jeff got a good work out and instructed us to remind him of all this winching later in the day if he began thinking he was having a heart attack from the chest pain he expected would come his way. Once we got ourselves inside the first bay, we needed to go down a skinny, winding channel into Neiafu harbor itself. This wasn't anything we wanted to attempt under sail alone, so we got ourselves to a fairly protected part of the bay and slowed the boat way down and I steered while Fred and Jeff assembled our inflatable dinghy, got it in the water and got the outboard engine onto it while we were still underway. We tied the dinghy to the side of the boat in the back and I got in and became part of the new auxilary engine. Luckily the outboard Fred has provides enough power to manuever the boat pretty well in calm sea conditions.

After all this drama getting into harbor we were all looking forward to dinner ashore to celebrate, but as we approached the customs dock we were waived off by our friends on Honahlee who then came on the radio and told us that normal check in hours end at 4:30, and since it was now later than that the customs guy said we would have to pay an extra $150 Tonga if we wanted to check in that night, otherwise we could check in in the morning, but we would need to remain on the boat until then. The current time was 4:37 - serious bummer. Fred got on the radio and we were directed to an available mooring ball, which was a big plus since trying to anchor under dinghy power was not that appealing. Then a few minutes later we found out from Honahlee that this was the last available mooring ball in the whole harbor. There wasn't one left for them (they had been at the customs dock finishing their paperwork while we moored, since they made it in right before the 4:30 deadline). The other big bonus was that the Honahlee crew came over for a few drinks and brought us a big piece of the Mahi Mahi they had caught on their way over, so at least Jeff had fresh fish which he made into a delicious dinner, despite the fact that he had really been looking forward to cooks night off.

The next morning, Tuesday, we had to push the boat back over to the customs dock to get ourselves checked into Tonga officially. Then we went back to the mooring ball, got the boat settled again and headed into shore. Our first stop was the Aquarium Cafe, which was to become our onshore home in Neiafu. The Aquarium has a nice dinghy dock, a great atmosphere, fast, cheap internet access, good food and coffee and very nice owners. What more could a sailor ask for?

I think all of us spent about 3 hours online that day. This was the first fast and cheap internet access we had had in quite some time. In most of the places we've had to pay about $7 - $10 USD per hour for an extremely slow connection. We mostly get on, painstakingly check our email and get off again as quickly as possible. Here it was 75 cents per hour and it was fast. We could actually surf around a bit and get caught up on news and sports - woohoo! The downside in Neiafu was that the phones are crazy expensive and the stores were very bare. We apparently timed our visit badly with respect to visits from the supply boat, but hey, you can't have everything.

One of the first things we checked on was the new cutlass bearing that was supposed to be arriving by mail from New Zealand. Turns out it hadn't been sent out yet but would be soon and we should have it sometime later in the week. Then we heard the bad news from the Aquarium Cafe owners that the parcel service to northern Tonga was a bit iffy. Apparently packages get to southern Tonga fine, but it's a crap shoot as to whether the delivery process goes smoothly from that point on. Great. We crossed our fingers and hoped that we had earned some karmic mail credits during our ordeal in the Marquesas where we had already been through one seriously delayed package experience.

Our first week in Neiafu is a bit of a blur. It's quite a social whirlwind in Neiafu in general, but at the Aquarium in particular. They have outdoor tables on a breezy upstairs veranda, and everyone wanders in and out on their way to and from their dinghys. You find lots of groups with one person on the internet and the rest hanging out enjoying a cool drink, or some ice cream, and chatting with all the other folks who are doing the same. Neiafu is a big gathering point at this time of year for cruisers who are headed to New Zealand for the cyclone season, so there are lots of reunions amongst boats that had been together before and now have caught up with one another again. We were particularly happy to see the crew from Seabright again. They had left the Marquesas before we did and we hadn't seen them since, so we promptly invited them over for dinner one night. We also got to meet a lot of boats that we had heard previoiusly on the Anzac net, but hadn't ever been in the same harbor with. It really was amazing how many boats were actually there. Everyone kept saying the harbor looked more like someplace in the Caribbean than the South Pacific.

We also went for a dive with the local dive shop during our fist week in Neiafu, and we really enjoyed the two they took us to. The coral here is excellent. We saw a few kinds we'd never seen before. One of which looks very much like fiddle head ferns, and another soft one that changes colors when you touch it. The dive guides were all Tongan, which was nice also. Everywhere else we've been the guides have all been European, and although we've really enjoyed the company of most of them, it was nice to see the locals getting involved and nice to chat with them on the boat also. The Honahlee gang came also, and they took the underwater photos shown here (well they will be shown here later - internet connection today is not allowing me to upload them). We went on two scuba dives and then the guides brought us around to Mariner's Cave which we snorkeled into. To get in you have to dive down about 6 feet and then swim about 12 feet horizontally through the cave opening to surface inside the cave itself. We all made it in, but I had to keep reminding myself that I could NOT breathe underwater, since we had just been scuba diving where I could. Swimming in was a bit scary because you swim from the bright sunlight outdoors into the darker cave, but once you're in and your eyes adjust there is a nice glow from below, sort of like being in a swimming pool with the light on at night, and on the way out is lit up beautifully.

After the dive, which was on Friday, we found that the part still hadn't arrived. I headed out to the boat for a nap, but Jeff and Fred decided to cheer themselves up by getting on another boat for the Friday night races. This is a weekly event put on by the local yacht club with a course laid out and prizes and everything. They guys went with Manix and Hannah on Ino and they had a great time despite the fact that they finished DFL - Dead F'ing Last. Apparently, Ino's anchor was stuck, and Ino does not have an electric winch, so Jeff and Fred were on the bow manhandling it up while all the other boats were crossing the starting line. They did eventually get underway and did go around the course, but didn't manage to catch anyone along the way, but apparently a good time was still had by all. An even better time seems to have been had later, at the yacht club, during, and after the award celebrations. Jeff and Fred closed the bar down along with the crew from Skylax, Ramproset and Peggy West, who they very much enjoyed hanging out with. I had a very nice, very quiet night on the boat (which I needed after all the socializing we'd already done all week), and then also enjoyed a very quiet morning on the boat the next day while the boys recuperated.

Niue, Oct. 4 - 10, 2008

2008-10-27T14:19:00.000-07:00

First let me say that we LOVED Niue. It is ridiculously beautiful with magnificent caves above ground and below the sea, and the folks who live there are very nice to travelers. And they speak English! Niue is it's own one island nation, but has some ties to New Zealand.

We spent our first few days there trying to figure out what needed to be done to repair the cutlass bearing. We got a lot of help over the radio from Lou on Skylax who was in Tonga and went in and investigated the haul out situation there. We also got a lot of advice from various boaters who had heard about our problem over the radio. Fred put his scuba gear on, so he was able to take a longer look at the problem and get the measurements of the existing cutlass bearing, so we could begin our search for a new one. Some people told us that if our existing bearing was still good we should be able to slide it back into position and then retap the holes for the screws under water and be back in business. However, nobody could tell us how we on earth we could tell if the bearing was good while it was underwater on the shaft. So, after mulling over all the advice and info, we decided our best bet was to slide our existing cutlass bearing back into position and temporarily hold it there with hose clamps on the shaft outside the strut, and sail like this to northern Tonga where we could haul out and really get a look at it. This fix would allow us to run the engine in neutral to charge the batteries during the passage to Tonga and we could also put the engine in gear in the case of an emergency. So, Fred ordered a new cutlass bearing from a firm in New Zealand and asked them to ship it to Northern Tonga to a place that recieves mail for cruisers.

We were also invited to go diving with Randy and Hideko on Swingin on a Star. These two are a really nice couple who have a lot of extra dive gear on board for their guests to use, and who also have a compressor to refill air tanks. We had been acquiring dive gear as we went along, so Fred now has everything he needs, and we have three dive tanks, but Jeff and I are still missing some equipment, so it was great news for us that we could borrow what we needed. Unfortunately, when we arrived for the dive there was a bit of a mix up and we were short one piece of equipment. Jeff very generously offered to bow out, so Fred and I and some other folks went diving with Randy and Hideko, on what was my first dive without a paid-for instructor. It wasn't completely without an instructor, since Randy is a certified PADI instructor, but it was still the first time I'd gone diving without paying someone to take me, so I was pretty excited. We saw some sea snakes, which Niue is known for, and some cool coral arches, but we went the wrong way from the dive mooring, so we did not see the super cool cave we were trying to find. Such is the life of the independent diver, but the good news is that later in the trip we did hire a guide and he took all of us to that same cave, but more on that later. A few days later we borrowed gear from Randy again so that Jeff and Fred were able to execute the cutlass bearing fix themselves, so Jeff also went on a dive I missed, but I feel I definitely got the better of that deal. It was great news though to know that the boat was ready for the next passage, so now we could relax and enjoy the many cool sights of Niue.

We had dinner at the Niue Yacht Club one of our first nights in town also. That place is great. It's basically an ice cream shop and coffee shop that serves a limited but delicious menu also. It has picnic tables outside on a porch and maintains the mooring balls in Niue. There is not a single member who lives on Niue and has a boat, but they have a huge membership from cruisers who have come through and joined. They actually have more members than there are current residents in Niue. They say their talk about planning a coup one day is talk only, but I am not totally convinced.

One of the reasons we had been looking forward to visiting Niue is that the diving was supposed to be spectacular due to the strange geology of the island. It is a raised coral atoll, which means the entire island is an old coral reef that got raised up and now has a thin layer of dirt on the top in some places. When it rains the water filters down through this coral and enters the sea with almost no silt, so the water clarity near the island is incredible. Our mooring was in 100 feet of water and when the sun was out we could see the bottom, which is by far the best visibility I've ever seen. So, we booked two days of two dives each for Tuesday and Thursday. On Tuesday we went first to the cave dive we'd tried to find before which is called the Chimney, because it's a big vertical cave you swim through that is shaped a lot like a chimney. We entered at the top and swam down, down, down through this chasm until we reached the bottom where there was a little alcove with a bunch of enormous lobsters sitting on the shelves. They were almost scary they were so big! The cave had light coming in from both the top and the bottom, but we took dive lights so we could see all the fish that are in there hanging out in crevices. At the bottom there was a Land Rover which had washed in from the 30 foot high cliffs above us during a cyclone in 2004. It was a bit smashed, but the steering wheel still turned and when I kicked the tires they still had a bit of give even though they had seaweed growing on them. Our second dive that day was into another cave where you entered from the bottom and swam into an opening where you could surface inside a big dome that was inside the island. There was a very small opening at the top so there was fresh air inside to breathe and also a huge coconut crab - which was quite a surprise. Definitely an enjoyable day of diving.

On Wednesday we rented a car and drove around the island. We went to an amazing place called Tongo Chasm which you get to by heading towards the sea from the road on a path through the jungle with roots showing everywhere. Then the path opened up to views of the sea as we walked through an area of strange looking coral spires. After a bit of this, near the sea, we looked to the right and saw a small sandy oasis sunken down in the midst of a deep canyon in these spires. It looked from above like a perfect little tropical beach scene with coconut palms and boulders right in the middle of this canyon. Very odd and beautiful. There was a steep tall ladder that we climbed down to reach this little spot and we scrambled over the boulders and found a stagnant yucky patch of water, so we scrambled quickly back to get away from the mosquitos who love that kind of place. After we climbed back up the ladder we took a little spur path to an ocean overlook where we could see the waves pounding into this huge pool in the rocks.

We took a couple other sea walks down to interesting ocean views and then we went to Matapa chasm which had ocean water entering a narrow canyon area with tall walls on either side. This place was also quite stunning, but when we got in the water with our snorkels we found that is was quite cold and there weren't many fish and you couldn't get out to the sea, so back onshore we went and on to the next snorkel spot because by now we were quite hot and therefor only interested in places where you could swim. Lima pools was our next stop and it was quite beautiful. After Jeff jumped off a cliff into the water we discovered there was not much to see while snorkeling here either, but the water was warm, so we paddled about and enjoyed ourselves and admired the scenery for awhile.

Later we went to dinner at Gill's Indian Restaurant. Gill's has no printed menus, there's no need, they only have a few choices: Lamb, Chicken or Beef curry, mild or spicy. Well, there is something to be said for keeping it simple because the curries and the samosas we got there were delicious. After dinner we chatted with Gill (who waited on us himself) a bit and found out that he was born in India and moved to Niue from there. Lucky, lucky us.

On Thursday we went diving again, this time with our friends from Honahlee who showed up with dive hoods that were hysterical. One had a shark fin on top and the other had devil horns. They were hilarious but also practical in that it was very easy to tell who was who from afar under water, which can be a bit of a challenge when everyone has on black wetsuits. Our first dive was to a really interesting place where there were two caves next to one another with tunnels connecting them that you could swim through. This is very different diving from anything we'd done at other islands and we really enjoyed it. One of the swim throughs was pretty small though and Jeff said that as he was going through it he was afraid that he might need to be Pooh-beared out of it. Luckily that didn't happen. Our second dive was to a place called Bubble Cave where we came up inside a dome inside the island again. This cave was quite dramatic with stalagmites and stalagtites and a few sea snakes lounging around on shelves inside.

Thursday afternoon we went for another sightseeing drive and visited a few more caves. One of these had huge stalagmite/stalactite columns that were a creamy milky color. Jeff and Fred did a photo shoot here featuring John Hughes's Providence jersey. This is a jersey that Jeff stole from John in retribution for John having stole a favorite pair of shorts from Jeff after Jeff had loaned them to him when he was in need. for more details on the nature of the need please see John. Jeff takes this jersey on travels with him and photographs it on anyone he can talk into wearing it. One day we hope to create a coffee table book for John with all the photos.

PS - We are currently in Northern Tonga - Vavau group. We hauled the boat here and replaced the cutlass bearing - an adventure I'll write more about later. We plan to leave tomorrow for the middle Tonga group where we understand it's pretty remote (ie probably no internet). We'll continue from there to southern Tonga and then to New Zealand where we will leave the boat for cyclone season, December - March.

Palmerston to Niue Passage, Oct 1 - 4

2008-10-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

We left Palmerston in the morning with no wind to speak of, but we knew some was on the way and had decided to motor towards Niue (pronounced Noo-way) until it arrived. We motored along for a day and a half until suddenly a strange grinding, rattling noise began. When we put the engine in neutral the noise disappeared. Put it back in gear and we had the noise again. Oh dear. We opened up everything below to take a look at the shaft and the shaft coupling inside the boat and all looked well in there. There was still very little wind so the sea was quite calm, so Fred decided to jump in the water and investigate the shaft and propeller. He found that the cutlass bearing had come loose. On the God Spede the propeller shaft is supported by an external strut between the hull and the propeller. The cutlass bearing allows the shaft to spin inside this strut. Fred found that the bearing had slid up the shaft towards the hull so the noise we heard was the shaft rattling around inside this strut when we put the engine in gear. So, no more putting the engine in gear until we could get that fixed. Fred came back on board and we pulled out Nigel Calder's book (which is our bible for boat repairs) and began reading what he had to say on the subject. It seemed that the prop would have to come off to replace the cutlass bearing, which meant that we would need to have the boat hauled out of the water somewhere to make the repair. Now, at home that would not be such a big deal, but here in the South Pacific places to haul out a boat are few and far between. We had no idea whether there was such a place in Niue or in northern Tonga, where we had planned to visit after Niue. We did know there is a Moorings fleet of charter boats in northern Tonga, so we hoped we could haul out there, but we weren't sure and began discussing how to figure all this out while we were in the middle of the ocean.

We knew one source of information would be the Anzac net. This is an SSB radio contact group we got introduced to in the Marquesas by other boaters who participated. Basically, everyone turns to a particular radio frequency once a day and boats on passage can check in and report their position and the weather there (it's very helpful to get these reports, particularly from the boats that are ahead of you). Also, if a boat was in some sort of trouble they can come on and request assistance from others who may be near them. We knew many people on the net were currently in Tonga and Niue and hoped they could tell us for sure about the availablity of services in those areas. Fred also sent an email to Tom asking him to look things up on the internet as well.

In the meantime we are bobbing around with no wind, but we knew from Susan, our weather router, and from the reports given by nearby boats that we would soon have 25 - 30 knots of wind, which is a bit more than we really like - 15 is my personal favorite number. So, since it would be dark soon, we went ahead and put two reefs in the main sail, which is the harder sail to reduce. We left the genoa (the headsail) at it's full size since it's on a roller furler system and is therefore easy to reef from the cockpit.

About midnight the wind picked up to 15- 20 knots and we were finally moving again. I came on watch at 3 AM and Jeff went down and wrote up his watch report then layed down and had just gone to sleep when the big wind arrived. It came so strong and so suddenly that I didn't want to turn the autopilot on to reef, so I called down to Jeff, and both he and Fred came up and tried to reef the genoa, but alas, for the first time ever, we had trouble with the roller furler so were unable to get the genoa all the way in. We could roll it up a lot of the way, past the second reefing mark, but that plus the double reefed mainsail left us with more sail up than we wanted for the wind which had come up to 30 knots with gusts to 38. We ran downwind with it for a bit hoping for it to calm down a bit, it finally did about a half hour later and Fred went up to the bow, which is quite an adventure in these conditions. He found the problem with the genoa reefing, but it seemed we'd need to unroll the sail completely to fix it and we did not want to do that, so we dropped the mainsail instead and sailed along with the small genoa only. This was close to the right amount of sail, but we were now moving right along in pretty big seas and felt that it was too much for the autopilot to steer through, so we were back to hand steering. And so began Mr. Toad's Wild Ride to Niue. Unfortunately, the wind continued quite strong for the next day and a half until we got into Niue. We had decided to stop there even though the news we recieved on the Anzac net didn't seem promising for hauling out there. We thought we could at least get a rest and see if there was anything at all we could do from underwater to improve the boat's situation and we were also loathe to skip Niue, which sounded quite intriguing in our guide books. We are glad we did stop because Niue turned out to be one or our favorite spots, but more on that later.

Luckily the approach to Niue looked to be easy enough for us to handle under sail power alone. Niue is a raised coral atoll, which means it's looks like a normal island from above (ie NOT a ring of little islands with a lagoon in the middle). It also does not have a reef around it, so there were no passes we had to go through. Niue's bay has a nice wide opening and no tricky parts, and because it is quite deep quite close to shore, they also have mooring balls installed, which would make our life much easier as we came in under sail. The only worry was that it was so rough we were still unwilling to try going to the bow to repair the roller furling, which we had hoped to do before we got there, so that we could sail in under the main alone. Since sailing in as we were would be a bit tricky, and since assembling the dinghy from it's ocean passage storage would be also be tricky with the big seas we still had even in the lee of the island, we decided to get on the radio and see if any of our friends in Niue could come out in their dinghys to give us a push onto the mooring. We talked to one guy and he apparently talked to some other folks as we sailed in, so when we arrived four guys in three different dinghys came out to help. We were quite grateful, but not all that surprised because we've seen that cruisers really come to the aid of one another down here because there just is nobody else to call. We tied the dinghy with the biggest motor onto the side of our boat and using his power and a push on the bow from another dinghy we were able to come up into the wind, which was quite strong still even though we were in the harbor, and unfurl the genoa completely and drop it onto the deck. Then we got pushed up to the last empty mooring ball and the third dinghy handed the line from it right up to us. Hurray - we made it in without a struggle - with a little help from our friends. Big thanks to Randy from Swingin on a Star, Jeremy from Thulane, Steve from Independent Freedom, and Manix from Ino (who we hadn't even met yet)!

Palmerston, Sep 29 - Oct 1, 2008

2008-10-27T14:02:00.001-07:00

Palmerston, Sep 29 - Oct 1, 2008

We had a fairly uneventful sail to Palmerston which is an atoll in the middle of nowhere. It is part of the Cook Islands politically, but geographically it's out there by itself because the other Cook islands are in two groups, both about 200 miles away. Unlike the other atolls we had been to, there is no pass through the outer reef big enough for sailing boats to go through. The outside edge of the atoll drops off into deep water very quickly, but some mooring balls have been placed on a thin shelf outside the atoll on the west side of the island. This means that boats on these moorings are protected from rough seas from the east, but are exposed to any weather from the west. Mostly the trade winds here are from the south east, but when fronts come through the wind can shift to the west, so boats who stop here must keep an eye on the weather and be prepared to leave if a front approaches. Also, the mooring balls are sometimes full when you arrive, in which case you need to keep going because there are coral canyons on the sea floor here that can make retrieving your anchor impossible. So stopping here is a bit iffy since the moorings may be full if the weather is good, or you may not be able to stop at all if the weather is bad.

A front came through the area while we were on our way from Bora Bora to Palmerston, and we heard on the radio that many of the boats that were ahead of us that had planned to stop at Palmerston were going to continue on instead. The front was predicted to have passed the area by the time we got there, so we thought it might work out well for us, since the weather should be OK when we got there, and the moorings would not be full. On our last day in to Palmerston the wind died completely so we began motoring and hoping that we could reach the atoll with some daylight left, but towards the end of the day it became obvious that that was not going to happen. It can be quite dangerous to approach these atolls at night because there are errors in the charting for some of them, so you can't rely totally on your electronic navigation equipment, and the water is so incredibly deep until so very close to the shore of these atolls that your depth finder doesn't help that much either.

Once we realized it would definitely be dark before we got settled on a mooring ball, we decided that we would only stop if there was another boat moored there that we could raise on the radio and ask to turn lights on for us to steer towards. In this case we could have swung around the island wide to the west and come in with no hazards between us and the other boat. We began calling for any boats moored there when we were around the corner still, so we couldn't see that the moorings were all empty - there were no boats there. However, a gentlemen who lives on the island, Bob, answered our radio call and said he could guide us onto the mooring balls by radio. Apparently the people who live on Palmerston use the VHF as their local phone system, which makes a lot of sense - there certainly isn't any other maritime traffic they would be interfering with!

So Bob was talking to Fred on the radio telling Fred when to turn and when to start slowing down, etc. He told Fred that the moorings were about 50 meters away from the reef, but this message didn't get passed along to Jeff who was standing at the front of the boat peering into the darkness trying to spot a mooring ball, so Jeff almost had a heart attack when he saw breakers much much closer than he thought they should be. As Jeff was shouting for Fred to turn around NOW, Bob came back on the radio and said we were in the right spot, and luckily, while we were turning, we spotted a mooring ball and we all breathed a big sigh of relief.

After we got the boat tidied up, Jeff made dinner and we sat down and watched an episode of The Wire (we watch DVDs on the laptop) and then, because the wind still hadn't shifted all the way to the east, which it was supposed to have done earlier in the day, Fred volunteered to stay up and watch another movie and keep on eye on things until it did shift. This is called an anchor watch, and was necessary because the mooring was sooooooo close to the reef that if anything on the mooring system or our line to the mooring had broken, then we would be blown onto the reef in a very short amount of time. The wind finally did shift during Fred's late night movie and he wound up going to bed around 2 AM. Therefore, he was not all that thrilled when our new friend Bob came out to visit us at 6 AM the next morning, despite the fact that Bob was a nice guy who spoke English. English! We had finally left French Polynesia and reached some islands where the official language is English. Hurray! Bob invited us to his house for lunch, which we understand from other cruisers is the normal thing here. There are about 50 people who live on Palmerston Island, and about 30 of those are children, so I guess the grownups get pretty excited to talk to someone other than themselves. We declined on lunch, wanting to just rest up and get a few things done on the boat. We were glad about this decision later, after we talked to other cruisers who did go ashore for lunch. Some said they really enjoyed the island visit, but others said they felt like they had been kidnapped because the locals take you in through the reef to the island on their boats, since getting even a dinghy through the passage in this reef is tricky, and lunch apparently turned into an all day affair, so they didn't get back to their boats until 4 PM, which was not at all what they had expected.

Instead we had a nice day doing some projects and giving the boat a good clean and then we went for a fabulous snorkel outside the reef. The coral there was really nice and there were interesting canyon formations underwater. These canyons are a big part of the problem with anchoring here, but they also seemed to be home to some big beautiful fish. We also saw the biggest turtle of the trip here. Then, we got back to the boat and Jeff went below to make some lunch and while Fred and I were adjusting some things on deck they heard a funny sighing sound and looked up and saw a huge whale about 50 feet away from the boat. It was already diving down by the time they looked up, so they saw the back and the tail only, but I thought I saw it swimming right under the boat. Fred belatedly had the good idea to put his mask back on and jump back in the water, but the whale was already gone by the time he got in. He wasn't sure whether to be sad or relieved, since he was the only one that had gotten in, and therefor would be the whales only target if it did not care for swimming buddies. The whale surfaced quite a ways away, so we didn't get another good look at it, and even though I stayed on whale watch in cockpit for the remainder of the afternoon we didn't see it again. Other folks who were there a few days later told us they got to watch a whale feeding it's baby (calf?) for quite awhile, so of course we were jealous, but they also had a small cruise ship stop while they were there, which they didn't enjoy at all, so in cruising also you win some and you lose some.

We did have a nice chat with Bob and his wife, whose name I just can't remember, when they came out again later that afternoon. We had invited them over to say thanks for helping us get in the night before, but when they arrived they told us that they were not allowed to come aboard since we had decided not to check in with customs and immigration while we were there. We hadn't done that since this was the only Cook Island we were stopping at and we were just there for a quick rest and did not intend to go ashore. We still had a nice, although short, chat with them while they sat in their boat and we sat on the side of God Spede looking down on them. They brought us some coconuts and we gave them some soda. They told us that they eat mostly fish and lobster, which they said were ridiculously easy to catch there, and which they are sick of - what they really like is canned corned beef - did we have any extra? They also told us that the island was out of tobacco because the supply ship only stops by on an irregular basis and it had been awhile. We wondered later if they were able to buy any smokes off the cruise ship when it came by a few days later.

As we were leaving Palmerston the next morning, Bob called on the radio again to say he was out on the reef fishing and if we could wait a few minutes he would bring some fish over. He brought four parrot fish and filleted them for us in about two seconds flat. Eating parrot fish is new to us, it doesn't seem to be done in the Caribbean, and we're not sure if that's a cultural bias or to avoid fish poisoning which there is none of on Palmerston. Jeff cooked it up for lunch in a delicious lemon butter sauce and we thought it was much like snapper in both taste and texture.

Bora Bora, Sep 16 - 24

2008-10-18T17:34:00.000-07:00

We were very excited to arrive in Bora Bora. First of all, it's one of the few islands we had heard of before this trip, and, well, it's Bora Bora - paradise - right? Well, it certainly was beautiful, and we had some good times, but we had some bad also.

The first night we were there we picked up another mooring ball operated by a restaurant called Bloody Mary's. The moorings are free to patrons of the restaurant so we thought we'd go in for dinner, but we didn't know quite what we were in for. This place looked more like I'd expect a Polynesia themed restaurant in Hollywood to look, than like any other restaurant we'd seen in French Polynesia before this. It had a sand floor, and a big wooden bar with stools that looked like beautifully varnished tree trunks. It had a palm frond roof that came down so low you almost didn't notice that there were no walls on either end, and there were amazing rock pile sinks in the bathrooms. The gentlemen's sink had a very unusual wooden device that you had to pull to turn the sink on, but I can't go into more details because we are trying to keep this blog down to an 'R' rating.

We were starving when we got there and were surprised to hear that they were fully booked for dinner, but they told us we could partake of the appetizer menu at the bar. So, we plunked ourselves down on some tree trunks and proceeded to order a couple appetizers and some drinks. Fred continued with his island Maitai taste test. He's become something of an expert on them here in French Polynesia. It's not clear whether his favorite part is the drink itself, or the colored sugar they sometimes put around the rim, or the pineapple and crazy straw it's sometime garnished with, but it is clear that Fred likes them. We had planned to eat multiple rounds of appetizers, but we were shocked at how small the portions were for the price. The priciest was the chicken wings. There were four small wings on the plate which cost 1500 Polynesian Francs, which is about $19 USD. Yikes! We decided quickly that we couldn't afford to eat any more apps, however we did not seem to be detered by the prices of the drinks, and we continued to hang out and enjoy them. There was a continually changing set of people seated at the bar next to us because the hostess sent everyone over to the bar to get a drink before seating them. We chatted for a bit with a couple different groups of people who were staying at hotels, including a nice couple from New Jersey. Later, a young sailing couple from Canada whom we had met briefly before showed up at the bar also and we got to trade sailing stories with them for a bit. Eventually, we all decided to head back to the boat and chat more there. When we got the bill we were a bit shocked to see how many Maitais were on it. We actually wondered if there could be a mistake. We had definitely been there for awhile but Fred didn't look like a fella who'd had THAT many drinks. Well, he didn't until we began the walk down the dock to the dinghy. As we reached the landing where the dinghys were, one of our new sailing friends said something funny and next thing we knew Fred was laying on the dock laughing. Yep, just laying there on his back laughing with his feet in the air. Then, after he recovered from his laughing bout, he climbed into the dinghy, sat down on the pontoon, and leaned back, but since there are no seat backs on a dinghy pontoon he kept leaning right into the water. It was just like the water entry for scuba diving except that he was dressed in island formal wear - his dress shorts and a hawaiian shirt - instead of scuba gear. At this point Jeff and Angie began to think the Maitai count on the bill was probably correct after all. And our new sailing buddies, who had walked down the dock with us, had a new story to add to their repertoir.

The next day we went for a fantastic snorkel around some very large coral heads near the south west side of the island, then we motored up the lagoon and picked up another mooring at the Bora Bora Yacht Club so we could be closer to the town and get some errands done and do some scuba diving. We also had nice barbeque onshore with some other cruisers while we were there.

A few days later we had finished our town stuff and we headed over to the east side of the island, again staying inside the lagoon. Over on the east side sailing was a bit trickier because there are large areas of the inner lagoon that are quite shallow and the area is not charted all that well. With Jeff on the bow conning us through the really shallow spots we made it through OK all the way down the east side of the island until just before our final destination when the bottom of the boat kissed some sand as we went through one particularly narrow and shallow spot. After we were anchored in the truly lovely bay this spot led to, Fred and Jeff got in the water to check out the boat and found that we'd lost a bit of paint on the keel, but there was no real damage. Unfortunately, in order to leave the bay were were in, we would need to go back out through the same spot, so we dinghy'd over the next day to scope out the best route through it, but we couldn't find any way to go out that looked any deeper than where we came in. Let me make it clear that the chart does NOT show this place to be anywhere near this shallow, and we'd been encouraged to go here by some locals after we told them the boat draws 7.5 feet, so this was quite a surprise to us.

We spent the rest of the day anchored where we were and did some lovely snorkeling on the next motu. We took some stale bread with us (on the advice of some locals) and we were practically attacked by hordes of colorful fish coming after it. It was fun but strange to have them swimming right up to you. It felt a bit like swimming in someone's aqaurium. The water in this area was extroardinary. On the dinghy ride from the boat to the snorkeling area, we crossed at least 5 different shades of blue, and they didn't fade into one antother, instead there were very clear lines where one shade ended and another began. We'd not seen anything quite like that before.

The next day we left on the high tide but we still kissed the sand again getting out, but no worse than before. Whew. We thought we were in the clear then, but later in the day we managed to hit a single, solitary, little coral head that was sitting in about 14 feet of water. Jeff was standing up on the bow pulpit at the time, like he normally does whenever we are navigating through coral (his nickname is Eagle Eye, so who else are you going to put up there?) and he thought he had guided the boat around this coral, but we hit it, and the boat came to an abrupt halt, and suddenly Jeff was no longer standing on the bow pulpit - he was being launched into a sumersault into the water. Time slowed down enough for him so that he was able to watch his feet get farther and farther from the boat as he parted ways with it. We were going slow at the time in about 14 feet of water, so his landing was fine, and he didn't get run over by the boat even though he was swam right in front of it to retrieve his shoes that had floated off his feet. So all was well with him but we were all a bit rattled for the rest of the journey up the bay. After we got the anchor down in a safe spot Fred and Jeff dove on the boat again, and unfortunately this time they found a golf ball size divit in the fiberglass on the front of the keel that will need to be repaired at the next haul out, but we were all thankful that the damage wasn't any worse than that. We thought later about the excursion boat that was motoring near us at the time. There was only the boat driver in it, no passengers, but any of you who know Jeff can imagine the show that guy got watching him get launched into the air. Jeff said that if he had known the jolt was coming he could have gotten into a tuck and pulled off a one and a half before hitting the water, but Fred is NOT interested in repeating the scenario to see if he can actually pull it off.

We spent the night at that spot which was a lovely anchorage on the west side of the lagoon near a motu where some people appeared to live in ramshackly island style homes. These are quite a contrast to the luxury hotels that are only a few motus over, but it's nice to see that some of the locals still own and get to enjoy some of the beautiful spots on the island.

The next day we went back to the Bora Bora Yacht Club moorings and stayed for a few more nights while we reprovisioned the boat, made phone calls, did our banking and cleared out with customs. We also had a marvelous dinner at the yacht club one night. The yacht club, by the way, was not a big fancy building, it was a little open air restaurant at the base of the dinghy dock. There are no local boats that belong to the yacht club, it exists to take care of cruising boats and charter boats. The current owners are a young couple who've had it for a couple years now, and everything they've redone is really nice. The husband is from Tahiti and his wife is from Orange County, California. She came in on a cruising boat one day and decided to stay. Then her visa ran out and the moved to California for a bit and now have returned to Tahiti. The husband is the chef, so he and Jeff had a lot to talk about. From these conversations Jeff recommended that we eat there and we are really glad we did. It was island food with a French influence, done really really well.

Raiatea and Tahaa, Sep 13 - 16, 2008

2008-10-18T17:25:00.000-07:00

We had a nice, easy day sail over to Raiatea and picked up a mooring ball in Faaroa Bay. A mooring! We haven't seen one of those since leaving California. Picking up a mooring means you don't have to anchor - you just attach a line to a floating ball that's hopefully attached to good ground tackle. It's usually a safe bet that moorings are maintained well anyplace where there are charter boats (the charter companies see to it to protect their floating investments), and there are a lot of charter boats in this area, something else we haven't seen for awhile. These boats have nicely groomed people aboard as opposed to the cruiser boats that usually have lots of gear lashed to the rails and laundry drying on the lines and grizzled looking characters aboard - you know, like us.

It rained most of the night and more the following morning, but finally stopped long enough for us to take the dinghy up the river that empties into this bay. A jungle cruise of sorts. It was quite scenic even though there were plantations on each side, so it was a civilized jungle cruise, but it was still interesting to see the interior of the island. One small drawback of arriving somewhere by boat, is that you don't have access to a car unless you rent one or take a guided tour, so sometimes all we see of an island is the view from the water, so it's a nice change of pace to see the interior. There were some nice flowers growing along the banksof the river in some places and one stretch where the trees on either side met above us and formed an arch of sorts. Angie sang a bit of the "It's a Small World" song and Jeff took a lot of nice pictures while Fred navigated the dinghy through the shallow parts, and a good time was had by all. We made it back to the boat just in time to avoid the next tropical downpour.

After the rain and our lunch were finished we motored up inside the lagoon to the east side of Tahaa. Raiatea and Tahaa are two seperate islands that are close together and are surrounded by one reef that goes around them both, so you can do lots of inner lagoon sailing here, which we became quite fond of. It's nice to get all the tradewind breeze yet be sailing in water that's smooth like a like. Oh, and, as an added benefit, there is gorgeous scenery to look at while you do it. Things really could be much worse, and today luck was really with us because the clouds parted and sunlight came streaming down just as we arrived at our afternoon snorkel spot near a pass into the lagoon. We snorkled a little ways into the pass going around a really large, abandoned fish trap of some sorts. It was nets with buoys that were half sunk and was a bit eery looking. Then we came to spot where there were at least four and maybe six different Tahitian eels. Jeff kept seeing them and pointing them out, but he kept pointing in different directions and Fred and Angie weren't seeing the eels at first and began to think he was putting them on, but they were finally spotted by all. THen we followed a turtle into the deep part of the pass. Later we saw a lion fish out swimming around. This was a first for all of us. We had only seen them hiding in crevices before.

We anchored for the evening at the very end of Haamene bay, which was long and skinny and quite protected. We were about the only boat there and were about 100 yards away from the town dock which made it quite convenient to go in the next morning for more baguettes and phone calls. Next we did another lagoon sail around the north side of Tahaa where we wound up having an awful snorkel at a place called the river of coral. The guide book raved about this place, but clearly something bad has happened there recently because we saw more garbage than live coral, but hey, it's not a perfect world now is it. We left there and headed to the Taravana Yacht Club where we got another mooring ball and had an excellent dinner ashore at there restaurant.

The next morning we left for another short day sail to Bora Bora. It was quite pleasant despite the fact that we had to leave the lagoon playground we'd been enjoying.

Huahine, Sep 10 - Sep 12, 2008

2008-09-22T18:56:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Huahine at 9:30 AM. We decided to anchor just inside the pass offshore of Fare, the main village on the island. There were four other boats already in this area, one of which was Plan B, a large catamaran with a nice family aboard that had been part of our Moorea gang and had also just arrived in Huahine. Graham, the father of the family, soon came over to our boat and told us the not very nice story of their arrival. Seems one of the other boats there had a grumpy fellow aboard who thought that Plan B had anchored to close to his boat. He chose to make his opinion on the subject known by screaming over unhelpful comments and using language Graham thought his 7 year old daughter did not need to hear. Let me add here that anchoring a boat isn't quite like parking a car, you don't always end up exactly where you think you will because the boat is still drifting around while you are lowering the anchor down to the bottom, and how much it drifts depends on how deep the water is and how hard the wind is blowing and if there is any current. You could stop the drift by putting the boat in gear, but you want the boat to drift some so your anchor chain doesn't just pile up onto itself, so you drift a little bit anyway. And, at least for us, the wind usually decides to clock around some right when we are anchoring, so you don't necessarily drift in exactly the direction you thought you were going to. So, it's a fairly common occurance to wind up a bit closer to someone than you intended. Graham admitted that he was closer to the other boat than he meant to be, and said that if the fellow had just been a bit more civil he would have moved. But once the screaming started Graham decided that he liked his spot just fine (he only planned to stay there a few hours anyway). However, he really didn't want to argue with the guy, so he just pretended he didn't speak English. He said he was Russian. He thought there'd be a slim chance the guy knew how to speak Russian and he was right. The grumpy guy probably didn't believe the no English thing, he was yelling about the boat being a US boat (which it says on the back of the boat for all to see), but Graham just kept saying "I don't understand - no English" over and over again with his best fake Russian accent until the guy went away. We're all laughing at the story and thinking this is a clever way to avoid a confrontation with someone who clearly wants one, until the next day when Graham is on the radio broadcasting in English on the public channel. We got on then and said, "hey Plan B, sounds like you speak pretty good English after all", intending to make Graham sweat a little. He handled it pretty well, so we came back on pretty soon and tried to explain that it was us, but somehow Graham thought the grumpy guy had caught him until days later when we saw him in another bay and could explain the whole thing in person.

After the anchoring drama and an egg bacon and cheese sandwich breakfast, we wound up sleeping most of our first day in Huahine because we hadn't slept much the night before. We went into town early the next day and got some more baguettes and some fresh produce and then pulled up the anchor and headed south inside the lagoon along the west side of the island. We wound up stopping near this lovely little beach where another boat, Kaama, that was also in our Moorea gang, was already anchored. They'd been there for a couple days and had met the caretaker of the beach. It seems that there was once a small resort behind the beach, but it was wiped out by a big storm in 2000. After that the president of Tahiti bought the property and hired Siki to be the caretaker. Nice job if you can get it! Siki was very nice fellow, and I wished our French was better so we could talk to him more, but he did manage to give us a bit of the history of the place. The only remains of the resort were the skeleton of the kitchen, some really nice plantings, and the pool and spa areas which were half filled with swampy water, but still managed to look good. We also hiked up to an overlook point where we could look down at the boats, the water, the reef and over to the next island (it's always nice when you can see the next one - that means it's a short sail to get there!)

Siki also offered to show us how to cook breadfruit, which was something we'd seen for sale at some of the produce stands but hadn't tried yet. Well, Siki didn't get his breadfruit at no stand - no sir. Siki took us over to the next bay and then proceeded to cut a 12 foot pole about 4 inches in diameter which he leaned up against the breadfruit tree and then shimmied up using his feet and hands to reach the lower branches of the tree. Then he did what looked like a fun tree climb to about 30 feet, then he kept right on going to what looked like a scary tree climb to about 60 feet. Then he began pulling branches down toward him with the hooked stick that he had carried up with him. He used that to get the breadfruit close to him, then plucked them and tied them onto the other end of his stick with the piece of bark he'd peeled off it earlier. Needless to say, we were pretty impressed. After gathering the breadfruit, we trooped back to the main beach and Siki built a fire with some sticks and coconut husks and then got some small coconuts and split them open in about two seconds using a sharp stick he had hidden in a bush. Next he showed us an ingenious coconut shredding device that you put on a bench and sit on and the grater wheel sticks out in front of you between your legs. You put the bowl on the ground in front of you and start grating. We all took turns and the only tricky part was not kicking sand into the tupperware bowl during the personnel switch. Next Siki cut a few slits in the outside of the breadfruit with his machete and put them onto the fire propped up by more coconut husks. While they were cooking, Siki extracted the coconut milk from the shredded coconut by putting it all in a ball in a clean cloth and then twisting it over the tupperware bowl. After the breadfruit had cooked long enough it came off the fire and it's pulp went into the same cloth and then Siki beat it with a stick for a while. The final presentation was pieces of the mashed breadfruit in the coconut milk inside the coconut shells we had scraped clean. The texture was different enough that I can't think what to compare it to. The flaver was not strong but odd. But a little of it was quite filling, so I can see how it would be popular, particularly if you were living off the land, and while I'm not sure I'd climb a tree that high for that same dish again, I'd definitely like to try it prepared some more ways before we leave the islands.

We left the next morning for Raiatea.

Moorea Aug 26 - Sep 9, 2008

2008-09-22T18:33:00.000-07:00

When we first arrived in Moorea, we anchored in what they now call Cook's Bay. This was a very deep bay with striking rock formations around the inside edge. In fact, we thought just about everything we saw in Moorea was quite pretty and it wound up being one of our favorite stops so far. While we were there, we went on a very enjoyable island driving tour. We were picked up by a nice guy in a truck with benches built into the back and a canopy that he removed so we could stand up for better viewing in the interior parts of the island. Standing up was not allowed on the blacktop roads around the edge of the island. We really couldn't see what the difference was, but he was a nice guy, so we were happy to comply. He made lots of stops and pointed out many different kinds of fruit trees growing along the road and in people's gardens. We also stopped at a pineapple plantation and at the agricultural school where they grow LOTS of different flowers, fruits and some vanilla. There were also stops at some breathtaking viewpoints. We'll put up as many pictures as we can, but it's tough to do the place justice, so if anyone wants to see more our tour guide recommended two movies that were filmed in Moorea - the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty with Mel Gibson, and Love Affair with Warren Beaty. The guide also made us a little snack of pineapple and grapefruit using leaves for a platter and flowers for decorations which looked so good we took pictures of it - it could have graced a fancy buffet anywhere, except for the fact that the platter was in the back of the truck.

After spending a couple nights in Cook's Bay we got tired of the gusty winds and the murky water inside this bay, so we moved the boat around to a stunning anchorage just outside the mouth of Opunohu Bay. Opunohu Bay actually used to be called Cook's Bay, and is in fact where Captain Cook anchored when he was there, but apparently they decided to change the name because that bay is now in the midst of a reserve area and they wanted to funnel most of the visitors over to the other bay. We're glad the trick didn't work with us because our new spot was quite beautiful. The boat was in about 20 feet of water and we had wonderful views over the reef out to the ocean as well as a good angle on the sunset and a nice view of the public beach we were anchored off of. The water was so clear that on calm mornings you could see the ridges in the sand below us. the boat. It sometimes seemed as though there was no water and we were just levitating above the sand. Tres magnifique! We could also snorkel right off the boat in this anchorage, which is one of our favorite things. We saw an octopus, eels, eagle rays and tons of beautiful fish, but, just in case you think it sounds too good to be true, I will confess that the coral itself was not in great shape here. We were told by the dive guys that three years ago the coral was amazing and then an infestation of these huge starfish called Crowns of Thorn appeared and these creatures killed all the coral despite attempts by the dive guys to get rid of them. There are still quite a few of these starfish there, and let me tell you, none of us had ever seen a starfish that looked like that before! They are huge! And ugly. What a shame.

Once we got to this new anchorage, some other cruisers told us about a nearby stingray swimming site. Apparently excursion boats have been feeding the rays in this spot for so long that they are now quite tame. We were told to take stuff to feed them, but we didn't have anything we thought they'd like, so we headed over in the dinghy empty handed. We motored for about a half hour and were trying to figure out just exactly where the rays were supposed to be when we saw a few excursion boats heading our way and thought we'd just follow them. They came right over to where we'd been motoring around and seeing nothing, but since they had food for the rays there were soon rays everywhere. We got in the water, which was about chest high, and they swam right up to us. Some of the people from the excursion boats who were holding pieces of fish were basically being hugged by them. This amount of contact was a bit much for Angie, who only wanted to see and not touch 'em, but Jeff, Fred and Aimee all felt them and said they were soft but a bit slimy. Yuck. Most of the rays were about 2-3 feet wide from tip to tip, but a few of the bigger ones were 4-5 feet across. After the feeding was over, we got back in the dinghy, and the rays were swimming all around and underneath it, and just that part alone was well worth the long dinghy ride to get there and back.

We wound up staying in Moorea about a week longer then we originally planned because, on the day we planned to leave, the weather became bad for sailing, and stayed that way for quite some time. Luckily for us, this did not mean the weather was bad for hanging out in Moorea, and it continued to be beautiful there, although it was a bit gusty at times in the anchorage. We were not the only boat waiting out the weather in this wonderful spot. Early on in our stay one of the other boats organized a barbecue on the beach we were near, so we got to meet all our boat neighbors (and they were a particularly nice bunch) and this kicked off a daily meeting on the beach for "sundowners and nibbles" which included play time for the kids and chat time for the grownups. Unfortunately, we missed some of the sunset gatherings when first Jeff, then Angie and later Fred came down with a nasty head that moved right down into our chests and stayed there for awhile. Luckily Aimee managed to avoid the cold because, unluckily, her visit ended around this time and her long, long, long flight home would only have been made worse by the sneezing and coughing it produced.

Despite how much we liked Moorea, we eventually became eager to move along since our visa for French Polynesia would be running out soon and we wanted to leave ourselves plenty of time for some other islands, particularly Bora Bora. Our weather router's estimate of the good time to leave kept getting pushed back by the changes in weather, but after a couple other boats in our group left Moorea and reported back that the seas were uncomfortable but not as bad as the weather predictions were indicating, we decided to go ahead and leave too since our next leg was a short one. We estimated it would take between 15 and 20 hours to get to Huahine, so we left Moorea at 4 PM, along with 3 other boats, for an overnight sail that would allow us to both leave the pass in Moorea and arrive at the pass into Huahine with good light to help guide us through the entrances in each reef. Well, now we have a good idea as to what our weather router is trying to protect us from, because although the seas were not as rough as any of the forcasts would lead you to believe, they were in fact rough enough to make the trip uncomfortable. What happens when it's rough like this is that every single thing inside the boat wants to fly around unless it is put away properly. It also means that anything you want to put down for just a minute will go flying or sliding away, and you need to hold onto something any time you are standing up, so it becomes a challenge just to get a water bottle out of the fridge when you're thirsty - forget about trying to cook. In this case we knew what we were in for, so Jeff cooked our supper ahead of time and it was just a matter of putting it bowls (and trying to get them to the crew behind the wheel without spilling) so we did manage to have a nice dinner despite the conditions. Nobody managed to sleep much however, it was just too rolly, so even after trying to wedge yourself into your bunk with pillows on each side, everyone was still rolling a bit too much to get any long sleep. But it was just one night, and we made it into Huahine just fine, so no harm done, and we have more appreciation now than ever for Susan, our lovely weather router, who works to keep us out of that rough stuff - Thanks Susan!

Tahiti Aug 21 - Aug 26

2008-09-09T14:56:00.000-07:00

We departed Rangiroa on the 18th in the early light for a day sail over to Tikehau. The weather was perfect as was the wind. Unfortunately, the wind continued to pick up after our arrival and the anchorage in tikehau was less than ideal...in fact it was downright bumpy. We had planned on going for a scuba dive in their pass which was supposed to be quite nice, but when we went ashore on the 19th to sign up for a dive we found that the small resort where they were supposed to be seemed to be pretty much empty. We met the lady who ran the place on the beach, and she was quite nice and explained to us that their dive boat had broken down and now the only dive guys on Tikehau were at the big Pearl luxury resort hotel, which was quite a ways away. On our way back to town the small resort's dog followed us the entire way (about 10 mins), even after the resort owner came and tried to get him in her car. She explained that he thought we were her guests and so was escorting us. Everyone in town seemed to know the dog and all the kids seemed pretty excited to see him. I wanted to ask her why she seemed to have no other guests for him to escort, but couldn't figure out how to ask that politely. We also encountered two broken pay phones on Tikehau. One right near the dock and one right out in front of the post office. This seemed pretty strange given that EVERY Post Office in French Polynesia has at least one pay phone outside it, and every single other one had been in working order. We wandered into the store, killing time until 5PM when we could pick up the baguettes Fred and Aimee had reserved for us that morning, and the lady in the store said the closest working pay phone was at the airport - out past the seemingly deserted resort we had been to earlier. All this seemed a bit contrary to an entry in a guide book that said Tikehau was prospering in recent years because of it's desirable location on the route between Rangiroa and Tahiti. After we got back to the boat and found the anchorage still quite rough we decided to leave the next day for the big city in Tahiti.

Tahiti Aug 21 - Aug 26
On august 20th we departed Tikehau bound for marina taina just outside the capital of French Polynesia and the closest thing we will see to a city until our arrival in New Zealand. Our stay in Tahiti was fairly brief but productive. We sailed overnight and arrived in Tahiti midday on the 21st. For the first time since leaving San Francisco we were able to find an actual grocery store (all of the other islands have smaller Vermont country store type places called magasins). Here in Pape'ete there was a Walmart style store and it was initially a bit daunting, to be honest. We can see now why immigrants from other countries are sometimes overwhelmed in US supermarkets, but we quickly adjusted and proceeded to pack the boat full of all of life's necessities - food, beer & wine.

Another treat in Pape'ete was the market. This is where locals gather to buy and sell fresh produce, eggs, fish, meat and local handiwork. We took the opportunity to fill our vegetable hammocks which were quite empty after our stay in the Tuamotos where, since they don't have much land, they don't grow much stuff. We also got some delicious cooked pork from one of the Chinese vendors (Celestial's for any of you Deadwood fans out there) and took the opportunity to sample one of the dozens of varieties of strange, local fish that were on display. These were the kind we see in the lagoons, and will hopefully be catching or spearing later on, but we haven't ventured there yet for fear of fish poisoining which has been present in many of the lagoons we've been in so far. We did try to memorize all the fish at the market so that we'll know what to try to get in the future.

As there were a few things on our repairs list that we wanted to take care of in Pape'ete we chose to take a slip at the marina...something we also had not done since San Francisco. We had read that the country of French Polynesia has been marketing to the megayacht crowd these days and were not dissapointed as far as classy boat company goes. There were two giant, beautiful sailboats (both well over 100ft) as well as a huge motor yacht. This was also our first look at the european style marina which employs a totally different docking style to what we are accustomed to, but our anxieties about dealing with this new style were short lived as the marina told us we would be tying up the way we are used to - apparently all guests do, only the permanent boats do the "med" style anchoring, which was good news since we weren't sure how we were going to get on or off the boat if we docked the other way. The marina bathrooms also left a bit to be desired. I had been looking forward to a long, long, long hot shower (something we just don't ge many of on the boat), but the marina showers, which were tyled and styled nicely, had only one button to push and it produced cold water only AND if you went in the evening you got to share the bathroom with giant roaches - YUCK. Needless to say we all showered only in the daylight hours after that grim discovery.

By the second day in Pape'ete we had completely fixed a problem with our refrigerator; had our propane tanks refilled; and were well on our way to solving our rigging problems and our self steering problem thanks to a few of the locals Michelle, Mike and Patrick who were extremely knowledgeable and actually showed up when they said they would prepared to work on the projects they were helping with. How refreshing! And what a load off our minds that they not only tuned up our rigging but were able to explain why it broke in the first place and help us fix the cause of the problem. Hooray!

We also managed to squeeze in a bit of fun amongst all the work in Pape'ete. We had our best restaurant meal of the trip so far in a wonderful French place called L'o a la Bouche. Delish. We had Chinese food another night, which was also a big treat. There was also a bar at the end of the dock with a happy hour each evening where all the cruisers tended to gather. It was fun to go there and we made some new friends. We went out on the town Friday night with a gang of folks and had some pizza. After the pizza we listened to a local band and did a bit of dancing on a teensy tiny dance floor. Then we moved on to a "club" which was surprisingly like a "club" in the US - the lights were low, the music was loud and there was a big big dance floor. We didn't stay there long, but we came to regret that the next day when we heard what went on in our absence. The next day, one of our new friends, Paul, asked us if we had seen another new friend, Sam. These guys are young gents who are crewing on sailboats with people they didn't know before crossing the ocean with them (a fairly common practice). Paul said he and Sam had brought two sisters home with them from the club, but in the morning Paul found Sam's girl sleeping on the dock, and invited her in for breakfast, but he was curious as to what happened since last he'd seen them, Sam and his gal had been getting along quite well. After escorting the girls to a taxi, Paul found his answer when he saw Sam walking up the dock with his head hanging low. Apparently the word "sister" was used loosely, because the beautiful young gal Sam took home, was equipped with a man's plumbing! Oh, how we wish we hadn't gone home before the guys met the "girls"! ("Sam's" name has been changed to protect the no longer innocent).

PS - We've finally been able to add some pictures, and we've put some on the older blog posts also, so if you're interested you can check those out for more pics.

Tikehau, Aug 18 - Aug 20

2008-09-09T14:50:00.000-07:00

Manihi and Rangiroa July 30 - August 17

2008-08-19T07:27:00.000-07:00

Our trip to Manihi was very calm and uneventful. Manihi is like a skinny island ring with a big lagoon in the middle. It was very pretty and the people were very friendly. Fred did a little scuba diving while we were there. Some dives were for pleasure, and he saw an octopus and several manta rays, and one dive was for work - to free our anchor which was really wedged into some coral in about 50 feet of water.

We stayed in Manihi longer than we planned because of some rough weather. Fred flew out from Manihi to return to the states for the wedding of a good friend (congratulations Dave and Laura - we'll all be waiting for you at the hotel in Bora Bora!). While he was gone Jeff and Angie moved the boat to Rangiroa and began scuba diving training. Rangiroa is a very big atoll, we couldn't see the other side of the lagoon at all, and it is a fabulous place to learn to scuba dive.

Fred and Aimee flew back from the states to Rangiroa via Tahiti. They did a couple dives in Tahiti one of which was a wreck dive on an sunken plane and boat. Then they came back to Rangiroa and we all went diving together and we got to dive with dolphins! It was really amazing. At first the dolphins were playing with each other near us, doing what looked like a show you'd see at Sea World. Then they came closer and closer and Fred actually got to touch one and another swam right up to Jeff. It was incredible.

The coral reefs here also quite impressive. Most of the diving we did in Rangiroa was outside the atoll and the reef just goes on and on with no end in site and with lots of colorful fish and turtles and rays and eels and a few sharks. All very beautiful. We also really liked the people who took us diving and wound up giving them some of the Smith sunglasses we brought as trade items and they could not have been more pleased.

We hope to add some pictures to the blog when we get to Tahiti which should be early next week.

Leaving the Marquesas, July 26

2008-07-26T22:56:00.000-07:00

We are very pleased to report that we got our rigging piece installed fairly easily on Friday. Hurray, we are a sailboat again! And hurray for a project being easierthan we imagined it would be - for once!
On Friday we had the rigging installed by 10AM, then went ashore for a celebratory ice cream and made a few phone calls. Then back to the boat to stow as much stuff as possible for traveling. In the afternoon Jeff cooked up a bunch of food. It usually takes us a few days to get our sealegs back at the beginning of a passage, so it's nice to have some easy to eat/reheat food in the fridge. This time we have some chicken parmesan, asian style chicken wings, and pasta salad, and probably some other stuff I've forgotten.
On Saturday we got up at 4AM and went ashore for the weekly farmers market. We were able to get some nice fresh fruit and veggies, and we walked to the store and got a bunch of fresh baguettes (these are quite inexpensive here in French Polynesia - apparently they are subsidized by the French who must have learned their lesson about expensive bread). Then back to the boat where packed and stowed the dingy, the propane tanks, and a few other last minute items. We left Nuka Hiva at about 8AM.
We are now on our way to the Tuamotus, which are about 400 miles away. They are predicting light winds so we are expecting the trip to take 4-5 days. We will be submitting Yotreps position reports so you can follow our progress on that website, if you like.
We are excited to see something different. The Marquesas are tal, steep,l volcanic islands with very few reefs. The Tuamotus are low lying atolls. Some are just a ring of reef of around a big circle of water, some have a ring of land around a circle of water, and others are more like a low-lying island with a ring of reef around them. We'll report more later after we've actually seen em.

Taiohae and Anaho, Nuka Hiva, July 10-24

2008-07-24T20:00:00.001-07:00

On July 10 we motored back over to Taiohae Bay to check on the status of our rigging delivery. We were told it was in Tahiti and would arrive on Saturday or Monday, so we decided to hang out and do town stuff and enjoy the Bastille Day festivities that were going on all weekend. Sunday night was supposed to be the big night, but Fred still wasn't feeling great, so we made dinner on the boat and Jeff and Angie headed up to the big tent afterward. We got there at the tail end of that evening's dancing competitions (the festivities go on throughout the entire month of July). We saw a couples dancing competition and then some young boys doing what we refer to as Nuka Hiva break dancing. They mostly kept their lower bodies really still while doing as much as possible with their arms, while accompanied by some sort of strange euro techno music. I was reminded a bit of the dancing in Napolean Dynamite. It was great. Then there was a big pause which we didn't last through - we've gotten into the Marquesan habit of early to bed early to rise, although it seems lots of Marquesans broke that tradition this night because we could here the bass thumping through the wee hours of the morning.
Also on Monday we recieved a big package from Johnny C, who is forwarding mail to us in addition to helping us locate stateside items we can't get here (thanks John!). We were very excited to get the mail, but it turns out this package was the only one that had been in Tahiti for us and the rigging was still in Australia and it would be at least Friday before it could get to Tahiti, so we stocked up on fresh baguettes and headed for Anaho Bay.
The trip to Anaho bay, on July 16, was very rough, but definitly worth it. There are no roads to this bay, and only a couple houses on shore. The anchorage is great with a nice breeze most of the time, but very calm water. A welcome relief after Taiohae Bay, which is very rolly - so much so that it was affecting our sleep. Also, in Anaho Bay there is snorkeling, which I'm sure it's clear by now that we all enjoy. LUckily we were comfortable here, because Fred wasn't feeling well still when we first arrived, then Jeff and Angie also got his bug and everybody was a bit poorly for awhile. Because of that we didn't explore much here, but we did snorkel some and it was a great recovery spot.
We stayed till the following Monday when we were hoping to hear that our rigging had arrived in Nuka Hiva. No such luck, so we enlisted Tom and Amy's stateside help in tracking the package down (thanks!). Much, much confusion then ensued, but eventually the package was tracked down in Tahiti and we got our guy there to get it on a plane here and we drove from Taiohae Bay in a rental car over to the airport on July 24 to pick it up. It was a crazy drive. We went up and down very steep slopes on a very skinny road. It was easy not to get lost since the directions were "take the one road out of town and keep going straight". It's true, if you do that and manage to stay on the road, and not collide with any of the horses, cows or goats that are in the road, you eventually pull directly into the airport parking lot. We were surprised to see three Air Tahiti planes here, and were delighted to get the rigging into our own hands. It's up on the deck now straightening out some, and we're hoping to get it installed tomorrow.
We also wanted to let you all know that we have pictures to go with all the blog entries, but the internet connection here is way too slow to get them uploaded, so we'll have to add them later.

Daniel's Bay, Nuka Hiva, July 8-10

2008-07-24T19:54:00.000-07:00

On July 8 we headed over to Daniel's Bay. The guys caught another tuna just as we were heading into the bay. This time they got a bigeye tuna, which is a good catch! While in the throes of our excitement we invited everyone in the bay over for cocktail hour on the God Spede. It was great fun! The crews from Seabright and Flame were there, along with a couple other boats with folks we hadn't met before. There is sort of a natural progression here from one island to another and we keep finding ourselves in different bays with the same boats over and over again, and many of those boats met each other in Panama or the Galapagos and crossed over from there at about the same time. Anyway, our first cocktail party was loads of fun, we had the crew from Seabright and Flame along with a couple other boats whose people we hadn't met before. Everyone brought along nibbles and drinks and Jeff cooked up some shrimp and we got to trade sea stories and info on upcoming islands.

The next day we took a hike to the waterfall. It was two hours each way. The beginning was through a beautiful village that had a lagoon, and horses and great gardens, then we did our first river crossing and hiked through a rain forest looking place, then more river crossings and eventually the trail led into a box canyon with really high spectacular cliffs and dead-ended at the worlds third highest waterfall. There wasn't a lot of water coming down (this is the dry season here, although it does still rain), but the whole place was still pretty amazing. There was a pond at the bottom with a big eel in it, so we didn't swim although we talked to other people later who said they did, and they still had all their arms and legs, so maybe we should have.

Unfortunately, this was Fred's first day with a bug that we would all eventually get. About halfway up the trail he started throwing up, and didn't stop until we got back to our first river crossing and got in and cooled off. The only good thing about this was that since he was throwing up he was behind Jeff when Jeff slipped on a rock and wound up halfway off the trail. He would have been all the way off, and down a ten foot drop, if Fred hadn't been able to grab his leg and stop him. It was a bit scary, but all OK in the end. Angie also took a spill at one point, but was no more than shaken up. Despite all this crazyness we all agreed it was a great experience and one of the best days we'd had in a long time!

Taiohae, Nuka Hiva, July 4 - 8

2008-07-24T19:52:00.000-07:00

Our first stop at Nuka Hiva was in Taiohae Bay. This bay is home to the capitol city of the Marquesas islands. It's a pretty little town with nice plantings and the biggest bay that we have seen since our arrival in the marquesas. Big being a very relative term. Unfortunately, the water is a bit cloudy here and there are a lots of boats in the bay, and we are told there are sharks here, so swimming/snorkeling is not on the agenda. They do have a town landing that appears to be inviting from the anchorage, but upon closer inspection reveals a dillapidated ladder on an oystercovered seawall whose shells are just waiting to slice a neat hole in your dingy, that is if the bottom of the rusty ladder doesn't do it first... which it did to our English friends on Seabright. Nothing a patch couldn't fix. Once past the seawall things drastically improve. Right on the dock there is a small breakfast place (although we have no idea what they cook.. the coffee isn't bad though) and a telephone booth, and the nuka hiva extension of the yacht services company that we are using to process our visas, get duty free fuel, and receive replacement parts. This is convenient seeing as this is where we are going to replace our broken rigging. Said rigging is not slated to arrive until sometime next week so we will be touring the Island for some time. On certain days of the week a crepe and soft serve ice cream truck parks itself in front of the yacht services office and puts out a few tables in true french fashion...probably the best strawberry soft serve ice cream we have ever had as well.
As it was Jeff's birthday Angie and Fred decided to take him out to dinner on shore. We found a nice pension on the main road that had a beautiful view of the bay that served pizza from a brick oven as well as a full French and Marquesan menu all in French. Fresh vegtables are not readily found in the magazins here so we each orderd a salad (one salad would have been enough for the three of us). The main course consisted of pizza and some delicious muscles (jeff was able to decifer the menu for at least this item just in time) We hoped to follow dinner with a nice apertif...maybe some baileys and coffee? But as is the case here the full bar isn't really a full bar so we settled for khalua...about 6 ounces each and a cup of coffee..again we see our challenges with the french language. Needless to say it was a very interesting trip down the ladder to the dingy and back out to the boat, but we made it safe and sound.
On July 5 we managed to troubleshoot and fix the problem with the water maker. Turned out it was a bad electrical connection right at the electrical panel. we are getting much better at repairs than we used to be, but it's still exciting to get something big like this working again - especially since this is the one bay in the Marquesas islands where the water you can get on shore is not fit to drink because of the presence of goats and pigs in the water catchment area. No problem, now we can make our own again - yippee!
The bad news is that it doesn't seem like we'll be able to refill our propane tanks here. We have US style tanks that require some sort of an adaptor to fill from the local big tanks. One of the stores here that carries some hardware was filling our style tank up until last Saturday. Now they have stopped for reasons no one knows, and, strangely, they will not sell the adaptor they had to the yacht services people here. Seems we will have to buy one of the tanks they have for the houses here and figure out some way to hook it up to our system. We truly are NEVER bored. There is always something that needs figuring out.
On July 6 we got to experience the joy (fear?) of refueling here. There is a really tall concrete dock that is for bigger boats to tie up to. For small boats like us they have you put out an anchor med style where you put out an anchor off your bow and then back the boat up to the dock and you throw a line off the back of the boat and you sort of hover near the dock, and fill your tanks from an enormous fuel hose which drapes from the dock down into the water and back up on the boat. To make everything more interesting the wind changes direction in this bay every five minutes, but at least we have full fuel tanks again. Later we had a great curry dinner on Seabright with Jo, Dave and Beth. There was flatbread with it and we have been asking for the recipe ever since.

Ou Pou July 3 - July 4

2008-07-15T17:52:00.002-07:00

On July 3rd we left at 4:30AM to head for Ou Pou. It was a 65 mile trip and we wanted to make sure we had enough daylight to get there. It gets very dark, very quickly here at about 6PM. The trip got off to a bad start when we the watermaker would not turn on. At first we assumed it was a belt problem we had had before, but pretty quickly ruled that out. Seems like power isn't getting to the unit, but it was too rocky and rolly for us to do much after determining that.
Things got much much better however when we were motoring along the shore of Ou Pou, not far from our destination harbor, when all of a sudden the fishing reel started screaming. Jeff grabbed the reel and Angie slowed the boat down and Fred went below for the gaff. After quite a fight Jeff managed to bring the fish alongside the boat and Fred gaffed it like he'd been gaffing his whole life. And what do you know, it was a 10-12 pound skipjack tuna! Hooray! The guys got the thing bled and filleted pretty quickly. We were left with 2 big ziplock bags of beautiful red meat and a deck that was covered in blood. Really looked like a murder zone. About 3 hours later, Jeff turned some of that fish into a fabulous dinner of seared tuna with stir fried rice. It doesn't get much fresher than that.
However, Fred and Jeff were not very impressed with the quick trip they made into town after anchoring, so the next morning Fred went back in super early, got us some more fresh baguettes and we headed on to Nuka Hiva to have Jeff's birthday there.

Tahuata June 29 - July 3

2008-07-15T17:52:00.001-07:00

We all got up early on Sunday morning to get ready for the trip to Tahuata. Jeff and Fred went ashore to meet the bread truck (great baguettes are one of the bonuses around here). Unfortunately, their 6AM arrival time was too late, seems the entire town was there and had already put their orders in, but the guys got us some nice croissants instead. The bread truck also sold cigarettes, beer, wine and roasted chickens, and the guys say the beer was a big seller.
We had a rolly 7 hour ride to Hana Moe Noa bay, but it was worth it. This place was gorgeous! It had a big white sandy beach that was lined with coconut palms and very clear water in a nice protected bay. This was our first stop where there was no town at all and we really liked it. There was another little bay next to us and we took the dingy over there one day for some very nice snorkeling. We had a bit of a scare while snorkeling when we looked back and saw that a wave had reached up to where we had left the dingy on the beach and it was starting to get knocked around a bit. Fred's swim training came in handy here and he raced back to shore and got it before it was swamped or washed away. Whew.
This bay is also where we began making some cruising friends. We were visited by a really nice English couple, Dave and Jo, who are sailing with their super cute, red-headed, five year old daughter, Beth. We traded some books and they brought us some cake one day, and we spent a little time chatting in each others cockpits. We've looked forward to seeing their boat in other bays ever since.
We spent a really enjoyable couple days in this lovely bay. Fred swam each morning, then we'd have coffee and pamplemousse, and Jeff would make something delicious for breakfast, then we'd tackle a boat project, then go for an afternoon snorkel, then wash the saltwater out of our mouths with an after-swim beer, then Jeff would make something delicous for dinner, and Fred and Angie would do the dishes, then we'd watch a DVD, then off to bed then repeat again the next day. Very nice. Very relaxing.

Fatu Hiva June 25 - 29

2008-07-15T17:51:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday we had great weather for our trip to Fatu Hiva. This is the southernmost island and the only one travelers can not get to by airplane or commercial boat, so we were excited to see it. The bay there was truly spectacular with impressive rock formations sticking way up right at the edge of the bay. Story has it that the bay was originally called the Bay of Penises (and its clear why it would be) but when the missionaries came they added another vowel to it and now it translates to the Bay of Virgins. Interesting what one little vowel can do.
We barely had the anchor down before we were all in the water. It was pretty clear but also pretty deep and dark in that harbor. No snorkeling, but we definitely enjoyed the refreshment of swimming! The next morning Fred took a long swim, then we noticed a local boat in distress and Fred and Jeff got in the dingy and towed them ashore where they got no thanks from the people they towed, but another guy immediately began bargaining with them for the tow roap they used. Nice. Unfortunately the rest of our shore encounters here went about the same, but we've talked to other boaters who had very different experiences there, so maybe we just had bad luck.
As Jeff and Fred came back in the dingy they thought they saw some fish jumping around in the water near the edge of the bay and motored over for a look and were treated to a dolphin show that included baby dolphins! They said it was better than Seaworld and they could almost reach out and touch them. We saw them frequently in the distance, often while we were having our afternoon swim. It's cool to be in the same water with them even when they are about a half mile away. We had a nice relaxing time in the bay here and also got some crud scrubbed off the hull and a few other boat chores taken care of.

Hiva Oa June 22 - June 25

2008-07-15T17:40:00.000-07:00

I think we all a bit shell shocked our first day on Hiva Oa. We had made our landfall very early, so much so that we did circles with the boat outside the harbor waiting for good light before we went in, but after so many days at sea there was lots to be done to the boat before we went ashore. By the time we dealt with anchoring and digging the dingy out of the forepeak and blowing it up, and many other necessary tasks, it was early afternoon before we headed for shore. Here in the Marquesas that means it was quite hot and anyone with any sense is having a nap in the shade. I believe they call it the time of day when only mad dogs and Englishmen are astir. Well we were with them our first day. One of our cruising guides had said that it was quite easy to get a ride into town, even without putting your thumb out, but apparently that book is about 8 years old and things have changed. We couldn't get a ride with all our thumbs out, so we hoofed it about 2 miles over a big hill into town, panting and sweating the whole way. Just before town we found a small hotel with a lovely balconye with tables overlooking the bay. We gratefully sat in their shade and had our first icy cold Hinanos, the local beer from Tahiti - delicious. The kind folks there gave us our first pamplemousse, the local version of grapefruit. They are enormous and very sweet. We are big fans now and usually have one along with our morning coffee.
Next we wandered on into town, but found that everything was closed, since it was a Sunday, but we did locate all the stores, and the bank and post office and we enjoyed seeing the town. The houses were all pretty simple, but some of the yards are beautiful, with hibiscus and all sorts of other flowers, and fruit trees everywhere.
After our walkabout, we wandered back to the hotel balconey restaurant at about 3PM hoping to have a bite to eat, but they were not serving food until 6 PM. Fred voted for napping right there on their patio chairs until dinnertime, but I thought I might pass out from hunger before then, so Fred managed to talk the hotel man into driving us back to the harbor then and picking us up again at 7 PM, so we could return for dinner. We went back to the boat, had a snack, freshened up and returned to the shore at 7, waiting for our ride. We waited and waited and waited, until we became convinced that the hotel guy had forgotten us and we were tired of being dinner for the mosquitos instead of having dinner ourselves. Fred managed to bum us a different ride into town from Joseph (the first of about 6 Josephs we would eventually meet). When we got back to the restaurant they asked what we were doing there so early, and we found that we had not set our watches to local time correctly, and it was only 645 - doh! Anyway, we had a nice dinner, but barely managed to stay awake for the whole thing, and returned to the boat for our first full night sleep since leaving San Francisco.
The next day, Monday, was spent shopping and trying to figure out how to make phone calls and where one could get on the internet (it's at the post office here). This is when it became clear that Fred and Angie had forgotten more French than they remembered (Jeff says he'll help with the Spanish, but the French is up to us) and that very few of the locals speak much English at all. So things went a bit more slowly than we expected. This is also the day that we learned that pretty much everything closes from 1130 - 230, which is quite sensible here, but a bit inconvenient for boaters since the harbor is far away from the town.
ON Tuesday we officially checked through customs with the help of a yacht service Fred had arranged for ahead of time. That meant we got a ride into town, then did a few errands, then headed to the post office where we learned there was a 2 hour wait for the computer, so back to the boat we went. By this time we were really ready to get to a swimming spot. We had been advised against swimming where we were because of sharks, so we decided to head off to Fatu Hiva the next day.
That evening we had a bit of a surprise when the copra boat arrived. There are two copra boats which service the islands and bring goods in from Tahiti and pick up copra (dried coconut meat from which oil is extracted) and carry passengers. Inside the harbor they had a big area that you were not allowed to moor in because you have to leave room for these boats to maneuver to the dock. We wound up anchoring outside the breakwater because there was so little room left in the allowed area inside. It looked to us like the boats that were already outside had left an empty corridor that lined up with the entrance to the breakwater, so we assumed that was the path the copra boats would take. Wrong! We had just finished dinner on the boat and heard a strange noise outside and looked out to see the copra boat, which was much bigger than we had imagined, crusing right through the middle of the all the anchored sailboats. We weren't right alongside the path it chose to take, but it looked like they were about 10 feet away from some of the other sailboats, and they were just zooming right along. I think that if I'd been on one of those boats I might have dove off and tried to swim for it, sharks or no sharks!

The Crossing 5/30/08 to 6/22/08

2008-07-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

For those of you who do not know the distance from san francisco to the Island of HIva Oa in French Polynesia is approximately 3000 miles. For better or worse our first passage is also one of the longest that we will have to make on our trip around the globe. We departed from Pier 39 in san francisco on Thursday 5/29/08 at 1030 PST. It wasn't long before we lost the sight of land 6/4/2008 and only three days after that we saw our last ship...at this point we realized the pacific is a very big ocean..the next time we saw a ship...any ship was about 400 miles out from the Marquesas(june 19th).
The two black tie affairs during the crossing lived up to their billing. The first was held on the 8th of june (fred's birthday). Jeff and Angie managed to smuggle presents aboard; bake a cake; and make steak and goat cheese quesadillas accompanied by a nice bottle of napa cab which we had picked up in San Francisco.
The second affair was preceeded by a stint in the doldrums or Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). A few notable things about the doldrums: they didn't last as long as we thought they would; it was the first time we were able to actually go swimming off of the god spede (although we were very conscious of the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere); and the embedded rain squalls were as advertised...short and fierce...some not so short.
Crossing the Equator has always had a certain je ne sais quoi in the sailing community. Essentially you are supposed to sacrafice something to neptune (god of the sea) upon your first crossing: sacrafices were as follows fred- beard. angie- nothing. jeff- something. (angie is slated to be pierced by neptune's trident in the not to distan future) and no, Hughsie, jeff's something wasn't the providence college jersey.
The crossing party consisted of: shots chosen by the person on shift(jeff) who picked jim beam...which thankfully had been baking in the heat for the past several weeks and was an old favorite of fred's (june 8th 1998 the last time he had one) and then we continued to melt under the equatorial sun.
The last week of our trip is when we saw the only two problems. Our electronic self steering broke one week out which wasn't a big deal until the second problem occured. On 6/20/08 a piece of our standing rigging broke just before midnight. It snapped at the top just under where it was attached to the mast. When it broke it came crashing down into the companionway luckliy not hurting a soul. Unfortunately, with the rigging broke and the electronic self steering out of commision we were left to hand steer the last two days into the Marquesas. We arrived to a crowded harbor in the town of Atuona on the Island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas on 6/22/08 tired and very happy.

San Francisco Bay

2008-05-27T16:41:00.000-07:00

<-- Fred under the Golden Gate Bridge

It's been a long road to get here... We started out last year on a shakedown cruise to Alaska. We went from Seattle to Glacier Bay and had a great time and learned a lot about what systems on the boat to upgrade for cruising. We spent this spring in Anacortes Washington completing many of the upgrades and learning a LOT about the boat. Then we sailed the boat out the Straight of Juan De Fuca, and down the coast, under the Golden Gate bridge into Pier 39 (right next to the Sea Lions!) Spent some time enjoying San Francisco and sampling the wonderful food in Sausalito and are now finishing up the last few projects before heading out to the Marquesas.

We expect the trip from San Francisco to the Marquesas islands to take 20 - 30 days, depending on the weather. We've got tons of food and drink and floaty toys loaded onto the boat and we're excited and a bit nervous about the big trip. We've got a professional weather router helping us decide when to go and when not to go, and she's given us nothing but great advice so far, so we hope to have a fairly pleasant trip down.

Many people have asked us to keep them updated on our travels, so we're starting up this blog to try and do just that. We'll probably only update the blog when we are ashore, so it'll be a bit before anything new gets posted, but this will be the spot where it'll go once we get somewhere.

Below are some pictures of our adventures so far....

The boat in Sucia (one of Fred's favorite spots in the San Juan Islands)