Author: richwest3

Underway (still!) (Passage from Marquesas to Tuamotus)

June 21, 2012

We’re still underway from the Marquesas to the Tuamotus and it’s been a long, strange and kind of hard trip so far and last night took the prize for strange. We saw phantom boats on our instruments, I saw phantom lights ahead of us, and there were strange flashes both in the water and on the horizon.

The strange flashes in the water are about the only part of that we can explain. There are creatures living in the water that emit light when disturbed (bioluminescense). Our boat passing disturbs them. But these are not like the tiny bioluminescent plankton we’re used to – these are huge flashes. The individual flashes seem to range from about a six inch disk to an eighteen inch disk. It seems sometimes there may be many together making a flash that is several feet in diameter. Sometimes these greenish flashes are so bright we wonder if they don’t have there little fishy flash cameras out to take our picture as we pass – it’s like a strobe going off.

Maybe this bioluminescense explains some of the other strange things we saw last night but I don’t think so. For now, we’re going with UFO. -Rich

Imagine this: (Hakamaii, Ua Pou, Marquesas)

June 18, 2012

You want to drive from San Diego to San Francisco to visit your Aunt Mavis. You really want to go tomorrow but you can’t because the wind isn’t blowing. Let me explain.

Your car only goes five miles an hour – that’s 120 miles a day if you drive 24 hours a day for around five days. You probably have enough gas to get there, but you a pretty sure there are no gas stations in San Francisco so once you leave San Francisco, you’ll have to drive to Portland to get gas.

Because of this, you need the wind to blow from behind or thereabouts so you can turn off the engine most of the way and coast with the wind. If it doesn’t blow, you might make it with your engine, but then you’ll be stuck there for a long, long time and how much sourdough bread can you eat?

We wanted to leave for the Tuamotus today. Our equivalent of Fritz Coleman told us the wind should be good for the next five days but he lied –they all lie. There were rain squalls today and no wind.

We had a little same-bay-too-long fever so we motored about 10 miles to the west side of Ua Pou to a bay called Hakamaii. We’re now anchored in our first uninhabited bay and we’re the only boat here. It’s really pretty and we’re 10 miles closer to the Tuomotus (only 415 miles to go)! We’ll try again tomorrow if the wind comes up, if not, we’ll be forced to sit around for another day, read and eat. Darn! -Rich

Banana Management (Marquesas)

June 2012

Who knew that managing bananas was both a skill and an art.  I wish I’d taken classes in school.  First, you need to know how green a bunch to get then you soon learn they all ripen at once.  You also learn that if you cut the stalk, it leaks a clear, sticky fluid that turns dried-blood-red-brown the next day and refuses to come off no matter what you do (this is why the bunch is hanging where it is).

Our cushions and dingy now look a little like a brutal crime scene.  We have been told that the stains fade in the sun – we’re still waiting to see if that’s true.

Bananas are so plentiful here that they aren’t even sold in the stores.  Why would anyone need to buy them?  Why wouldn’t you just go to your front yard and pick a bunch?  Because our front yard is small and bananas won’t grow on fiberglass (at least not yet).–Rich