Monday, June 20, 2005

Journal Entry June 20, 2005 Passage to Tahiti

Author: Pam

One mystery has been solved. In the early morning on Friday we passed another brightly lit stationary “city” in the middle of nowhere. We learned from Sally and Don after sharing our encounter on the crossing with the mysterious Atlantis like station that it was in fact a squid boat. Apparently they use bright lights to lure the squids into flying onto the boat or into nets. We are not sure how it works exactly, but it is strange to encounter one when you haven’t seen anything for days. Apparently they are very popular off the coast of Asia. We saw another one on Saturday night. We joked about stopping by to see if they had any ice to spare, since ours has melted.

It has been interesting being back to sea. We were both ready to leave Nuku Hiva and move on to the many other beautiful islands in the South Pacific. The weather has been a mixture of sun and clouds. The wind has been very good and we have averaged 6 to 7 knots of boat speed much of the time. We have also had the ever present waves to go with this wind. It was fairly calm on Sunday, but otherwise the boat has been rolling and bumping over, under and up against waves. We have once again spent a fair amount of time down below, it has either been too hot in the cockpit or too wet with the waves crashing over the rail.

We have both been fairly lethargic as well. We mulled this over on Sunday and decided though we had a nice time on Nuku Hiva it really wasn’t quite the relaxing landfall after 31 days at sea as we had expected, with the distraction of the engine, the outboard and of course our workout ferrying water. However, this does not mean we did not immensely enjoy our mini vacation on land. We have been reading ferociously, I read two books in four days, this may be a record for me. We also started reading “By the Grace of the Sea” by Pat Henry. We had the pleasure of meeting her in Puerto Vallarta. She was the first American woman to complete a solo circumnavigation via the canals. She left Acapulco, Mexico when she was 48 years old and completed her journey in eight years. It has been fun reading about her puddle jump and experience in the South Pacific. We have found we are having many parallel challenges and experiences and look forward to visiting the places she describes in the South Pacific and around the world.

On the critter front, it looks like there will be one for the duration of this trip. I have been nursing my many no-no bites. They found me quite tasty and they left nasty bites that takes quite a while to go away. There is no fish report, Scott has not thrown the line over yet. It looks like (though you hate to put it in writing) that we may finally have the dreaded coch roaches or coch roach in this case. I left the serving spoon for the rice on the counter and when I came back down below and turned on the light to wash the dishes something small, black and really fast scurried behind the stove. I would like to think it was a sun spot left over from the day, but it sure behaved like a shhhh don’t say it. Early on we learned there are two kinds of cruising boats, the ones that get bugs and the ones that lie and say they never have had any bugs. Perhaps I didn’t drown the coconuts for long enough. In any event we immediately put out four traps in our little galley, we figure more is definitely better and we have not seen another one since.

On the second night we ate our second and final fresh meal of the passage. I rubbed garlic, black pepper and olive oil on the four small pork chops and cooked them in a frying pan. They were really good, too bad it was too wild to BBQ. On the third night we had my favorite non fresh dinner, pasta with clams. I could eat that everyday, especially when it gets down to some of the other canned delicacies. Scott tackled one of the pamplemousse (note spelling correction) with gusto. He cut it in half and then cut around the edge to dislodge the giant portion of citrus. He basically dissected it in the end, but the pieces were large and very yummy. It is definitely sweeter than grapefruit in the states, I even thought it tasted a bit like blackberries. We are still uncertain of the proper way to eat this intriguing fruit, but it looks like we will enjoy the four we have left.

The nights have been absolutely beautiful, with a nearly full moon to guide us. Before leaving for the crossing I hadn’t given much thought to the terms “puddle jump” or crossing the “pond”. Now that I have experienced being out here I have become fascinated with feeling like we are always in the middle of a puddle, pond or a bowl as Pat Henry referred to it. You always feel like there is a perfect circle drawn around you. I wonder how much smaller our circle looks to us then someone with normal sight?

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