April 20, 2023
Eclipse day. The day we’ve been anticipating since our friend Bob told us it was coming. We’ll tell you all about it, but spoiler alert… It didn’t go exactly as we’d hoped it would.
First hurdle: how do you look at an eclipse without solar filters or eclipse glasses? We could have made a pinhole projector out of a cereal box, but wait, we didn’t have one, and it’s kind of lame anyway. Instead, we took a bic lighter to a pair of scuba masks and coated the lenses with a thick film of carbon. That worked great.
It was also a two-for-one deal because one mask was pretty new, and although I’d washed it about a dozen times with various cleaners, I still couldn’t keep it from fogging up. The lighter trick is a time-honored method among scuba divers to finally get all the silicone residue off of the lens. It’s the silicone that causes the fogging.
We’d planned to sail about a hundred miles to get directly in the path of the total eclipse. We abandoned that plan when all the weather models called for heavy cloud cover during the eclipse. Forecasts called for only partial cloud cover at a nearby island, where we’d still be able to see almost the total eclipse.
While it was only partially cloudy, as soon as the eclipse began, they thickened and moved directly between us and the sun.
We did manage to get a few shots when the clouds thinned enough to give us a peak.
We never saw the sun when it was at its point of greatest eclipse. Oh well.
Now, while we had been sitting at anchor watching this event, the wind came up a bit and it got pretty rolly. We pulled up the anchor and headed to a nearby town called Debut. It was not an idyllic ride.
We had squalls hanging out in the distance, all day long. Once the moon blocked the sun, they seemed to really spring to life. We ended up in a major squall with rain so intense that we couldn’t keep our eyes open—or see anything even if we did.
We had two scuba masks sitting within arm’s reach that could have stopped the pelting rain from stinging our eyes, but they were rendered useless due to the earlier addition of carbon to the lenses.
To make matters worse, we found there were about a thousand buoys on our route to town. Above is what a few of them look like on a much nicer day. Now imagine poor visibility and hundreds of these strings. They are probably for some kind of aquaculture, perhaps seaweed farming.
Cyndi had to head up to the bow to try to guide us through the maze of floats. She found a path through them and we made it to town without any disasters. (She’s my hero!)
Now I’ll explain the title of this post. We have a friend named Frank on a boat called Another Adventure. We were sitting in his cockpit while in New Caledonia, talking about future plans. Frank was leaning towards hanging up his cruising hat as he’d been at it for quite a while.
We suggested that perhaps he should go on to Australia. Thinking I was being clever and playing on the name of his boat, I said “It’ll be another adventure!” His response, sounding like a tired and hungry six year old was “I don’t want another adventure!” Cyndi and I have been using this phrase with each other ever since.
Today, when Cyndi came back to the cockpit from the bow, soaking wet, we both looked at each other and said in our whiniest six year-old voices: “I don’t want another adventure!”
-Rich
