Places
updated Jan 28

We sailed up a river 15 miles to anchor off Kumai, a small town in Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. We came to see a national park that has orangatan's and monkeys. From the water, Kumai looks like a long collection of wooden shacks on stilts, with large motoried Noah's Ark cargo ships tied alongside. We couldn't tell any of the shacks apart, and wandered down the line of them, to pick a good one to park beside. On our second pass we figured out that one was a police station. The officer and his family live in the station, and waved for us to tie up to a half sunken fishing boat in front of their office. We anchored instead, and visited them when we got settled. They were really nice, gave us coffee, cookies, cigarrettes, directions around town, offered us dinner and a chance to take a bath. They told us five local boats had been lost at sea during the near gale we had just come in out of.

In town lots of people waved and smiled, or yelled "HELLO MEESTER! HOW ARE YOU!", then laughed if we said anything back. We couldn't say much in their language, either. It was Ramadan, so most people were fasting during the day. A woman fainted in line at the bank, and sometimes people would stare when we drank. The mosques blasted their call to prayer over loud speakers every couple hours, starting at around 4am. Volume counts more than being able to understand it; most of the speakers were blown or clipping out every second. There were several mosques, so the distorted singing came from everywhere and made the sleepy town sound busy, maybe a little insane.

Kumai feels like a wild frontier town, with dusty roads and a gold mine that turns the river black. It's mostly lawless: people have guns and die in street fights. They burned down the park office when the government said they couldn't cut down trees in the park. We met a translator who seemed to hang out at the police station for protection; he had death threats from people that don't like what he translates. He kept insisting it was safe for tourists, but we hadn't said anything to him about safety.

But Kumai has a strange charm. It grew on me. Walking home to the dinghy dock one night, after watching TV at a friends house, I thought: "This is a nice place to live." This still surprises me, and I can't explain it. Though there's sometimes more garbage than water floating in the river, or dirt in the street, there's something homey and comfortable about it. The people are caught up in a lot of difficult situations, but they remain happy and likeable. Though still cowboy rough and dangerous.

(Long boat pulled up to Mary Frances / Hiking with leaches / Cruising the river / River bend sign)
We rented a long boat for three days, to go up the river and see the monkeys in the park. We hiked through the jungle, played with monkeys, watched orangatans eat and climb around, took Launch exploring jungle-swamp, hung out on the long boat, and swam. I decided orangatan's are smart when one climbed a tree and tried to poop on a park ranger who was being a twit. Erik has vague maybe plan to save up for a long boat (less than $3000 new) and cruise the rivers of Borneo.

There are police stations specifically to "Stop Illegal Logging and Gold Mining", but they just aren't trying. The loggers have to row up the narrow river, past the police station, with their saws, run their chainsaws within earshot of the stations, then pull the logs back down the river past the police station. Maybe it has something to do with the burned down park office. Or the police fee's we had to pay to visit the park. Bad luck for the monkeys; for some of them this is their last habitat before extinction. At least industrialization hasn't hit the river jungle yet, so the logging isn't at a modern scale or speed.

(Cooking in the long boat / Orangatan's being fed / Monkey that woke us up to play)
We motored almost the whole way from Kumai to Batam. There enough wind to ghost along, but a short swell was on the nose and prevented us from getting into a groove. We didn't mind at all, though, since this was much much better than the icky packed swell and fresh beating on the passage before. We were afraid that would last all the way to Singapore.

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I enjoy the enthusiastic capitalism in Bali; people on the streets offering everything, dozens of small shops in a line all selling the same thing, bargaining implicit when you buy anything. Us whiteys really stuck out, and through the mysterious exchange rate we were millionaires. With pocket money we could hire cars with drivers, stay in fancy hotels, and eat at nice restraunts. We didn't know the fair prices and were novice bargainers: What's a couple thousand rupia, anyways? The merchants knew this and really wanted to get our attention and business. Sometimes the aggressive capitalism detiorated to shameless fraud. I had to visit five money changers to find one that didn't have a rigged calculator or try to 'reshuffle' money that'd been counted. An engine mechanic made a fuel line for me, broke an injector in the process, then tried to convince me the resultant knocking was a worn crank shaft bearing (expensive)-- because I read the dipstick wrong! Of course, money changers and mechanics are supposed to be dishonest, but in Bali the boundaries are different. People tried to sneak 20% service charges into the fine print. Though others might view it as a challenge to buy the cheap crap and not get cheated, for me it made recreational shopping unfun. Farther away from the touristy cities, we were treated more like normal people and were left alone.

The cities near the Marina didn't appeal to us. They were crowded, and it seemed the only things to do were shop and go to the beach. Our second day Erik took the initiative and rented a car and driver. The 7 of us from Mary Frances and Coco took off into the interior of the island, first stopping in Ubud. There we saw Balinease dancing, hiked around the countryside for a day, ate wonderful food, visited a bunch of temples, and poked around art galleries. We stayed in empty houses in a family compound.

(Packed into the rental van / The volcano at sunrise)
The next day we visted a small volcano. We planned to walk to the top just before sunrise, to see the valley before the fog rolled in. However, before we could get out of the car, we were surrounded by people insisting that we take them as guides for the 45 minute walk. "We are in control. We have the Guide Committee and no one can hike without a guide. You are 8 people, you need 2 guides." We didn't have enough money for a guide, and they wanted to start negotiating from a price four times the cost of all our hotel rooms. We tried driving to other entrances to the trail, but were followed by cars full of guides, flashing their lights and honking their horns for us to stop and talk or follow them. When we parked they'd surround us: "We are in control. You can not hike without us." Soon the fun went out of being there, and we decided to do something else.

(Gede's uncle playing the Gamelan / Eating dinner with Gede's family / Swimming at the waterfall)
That something else turned out real cool. Our driver invited us to his house. His huge extended family lived in a big compound, their houses closely clustered together. They played the gamelan, a bamboo xylophone thing, for us. His aunt and uncle were busy making aluminum take-out bowls by hand, denting the bottom and side together with a knife. The kids took us to swim in a waterfall, just before the heavy afternoon rain. We went to the market and they made dinner for us; I learned how to kill a chicken with no fuss.

On the way home the next day we saw monkeys and more big temples. I was really glad we went inland, since I would have had a very different memory of Bali if we had stayed in the tourist cities. The day after we got home I had a fever for two or three days, the first time I've been sick this trip. I think I'm immune to the South American cooties, but not the Asian ones, and have to be more careful with what and where I eat.

Indonesians believe that spirits can't make right angle turns. If they drive their boat at you, then make a sharp turn away at the last second, the bad spirits will fly onto your boat. Somehow cutting close across your bow works the same way. We had atleast a dozen boats do this to us (sometimes huge freighters!) before the roller furler broke. Thats when I started to take it seriously, so one night while someone, yet again, was trying to unleash their demons on Mary Frances, I spun around and gunned the engine, to unleash ours on them. It worked- nothing important broke again on that passage. The demons loosened two set screws on the Profurl rope drum, causing the long tube to slide down, the halyard swivel at the top came off the tube, and the sail ripped. Happy to have an inner forestay, so losing the roller furler isn't a problem. In port, Erik was a superstar; he pounded the aluminum clip thingy that got bent back into shape and put everything back together at the top of the mast. Allison sewed the top of the sail back together. The other problems were minor: a hank on the working jib started to pull out in a squall. I was really sad when I thought we broke a batten in a squall, but it was just a chafe patch peeling off. The fuel filter clogged with thick sludge when I fed from a tank that hadn't been really used since crossing the Pacific: I've got to stop using them in the same order, so that one doesn't go stale.

It should have been a bad passage. But afterwards I liked having a change from the steady and mellow sailing vibe. I felt lighter afterwards, like I'd stretched or something, feelings flowed easier (now you're thinking: he's insane) after I got wrapped up in stress of worrying about the engine or sails, relief when something that could've gone bad goes well, frustration with our slow progress, anger at the Indonesians who cut it close, adrenlines detached clarity and focus, being overcanvassed in a squall, pride in teamwork with friends, the plain "this sucks" feeling, unanticipated overblown laughter at small things, strange unfounded boredom, then relaxing and really appreciating the mellow sailing vibe when it's over.

We spent four weeks in Darwin. Unintentionally, of course. I'd planned to stay only a week, just long enough for a trip inland. But it took a few days to settle in and find a good spot to park the boat, almost a week to zip around and see some of the outback, two weeks to do a bunch of lingering boat projects that were easily solved with Darwin's great chandleries and "exchange rate blowout 50% off on everything sale", a few days to reprovision and get the boat ready for sea again, a day to leave, another day to come back with a broken engine (a shear pin inside wore out), a week to fix the engine and wrap up some more little projects in the mean time, another day to pack up and leave.... It didn't help that there were all the luxuries Western Civilization here: good book stores, cheap international phone calls (2 hours for $10!), just about anything we wanted could be found and bought. So wonderful and different from the South Pacific.

(Campervan we rented to see the outback / Waterfalls / Trail / Cave)
A few days after we arrived we rented a campervan with Chris and Stephanie on Osprey. We took it into the interior for five days and saw termite mounds, kangaroo's, big spiders, snakes, big iguanas, road trains, and rural Australian towns. It was really fun, and if I ever have the time it'd be cool to stop in Australia for longer, get a car, and see the country. I met some sailors who were doing that while waiting for the hurricane season to pass.

The next two weeks we worked on the boat in the mornings to early afternoons. Darwin is a great place to get work done; there's a lot of boat and industrial type stores, the city is quick and easy to zip around looking for something wierd. The exchange rate was also very good for me, so things were half price. Even an outboard motor made in Japan(?). I had two great people helping me tackle the projects. Erik, Hillary, and I slipped into a groove for several days where we just seemed to be zipping through the list and accomplishing much more than I thought possible. If one of us got stuck, bogged down, and discouraged in some icky boat project fiasco, it was a great boost to know that the other two were chugging along and making real progress on other things. It also left each of us with the mental energy to do our little part of the project really well; zip tie and lead the wires neatly, label things, whatever. In the heat of the afternoon we'd quit for the day, take cold showers at the yacht club, and go into the city to play. Working together on different parts, the three of us were able to install an electric anchor windlass in 3 days, which is much faster than I thought possible. Even with the usual set back: I drilled the holes in the deck to mount it backwards.

I can't remember everything we did, but among them we replaced the whisker pole that'd broken, fixed up the sails, rewired a new GPS antenna, fixed all the nav lights, ran thick electrical cables to the alternator and starter, and installed an electric anchor windlass (waka-waka-waka!) with both UP and DOWN buttons. Yeah! It's a huge change in my lifestyle: I go to where I want to anchor, then press DOWN. No more of this taking apart the manual hand crank windlass thats packed with grease when it breaks every month and starts running backwards and trying to flip the catch to stop the chain from pouring out without getting my finger caught. Now just push the UP button. Yeah. The rust spots on my solar panels were growing every week, and their output was falling, so I sold them to some suckers. Well, ok, my friends on Osprey, who operated on them and think they fixed them and stopped the rusting. I bought an 85amp alternator with the money. Our mooring was far from land, especially for 3 people in a 1.5 person dinghy that goes 3 knots. It was time to get a new dinghy: Launch, a 12' long aluminum super dinghy with an 8 horse motor. I'm in love with it.

(Low tide at the Dinah Beach Yacht Club. The dock usually floats. / Swimming and cleaning the hull mid passage / Downwind)
The tides were huge, up to 30'. On the way to meet Allison for the first time, the dinghy got stuck in the mud as the water drained out from under it, only a few meters from the dock. Hillary decided to crawl for it on her hands and knees, and sunk up to her elbows and thighs as she wallowed through the soft mud. Erik and I stayed in the dinghy, to wait for the water to come back in, until we got bored and figured out that we could lift and slide the dinghy with the oars. Allison stood on the dock, laughing at us. She jumped on the boat a few days later.

It took 11 days to get to Bali. Boats that had left ahead of us said that they didn't have any wind, and had to motor almost the whole way. We left thinking that we'd also have to motor the whole way, and weren't sure if we carried enough diesel fuel to go 1000 miles. Luckily, we had light winds on and off for various parts of the trip, and were able to sail about 60% of the trip. I was trying to learn Perl scripts, but was out of practice concentrating. So I read more science fiction, though I had traded books poorly: for some reason it was all vaguely pornographic.

About halfway to Bali we caught up to some friends on another boat that had left a day before us. We were bored, and started steering so that we'd meet in the middle of the ocean. We met the next afternoon, tied the boats together by the bow (and set Mary Frances to idle in reverse, to keep them apart). After 5 days at sea, our world became confined to our boat and the 4 people on board. It was strange to have 3 more people in the cockpit, eating lunch and laughing. I think everyone felt this way, since our guests left abruptly when we finished eating, and once we were sailling again the universe felt back in balance.

A couple hundred miles from Bali the engine broke. A high pressure fuel line had broken off at the little nipple thingy that fits into the injector, I think because it was resonating at certain engine RPMS and wiggled back and forth till it broke. Erik found a brass compression sleave that fit the metal fuel tube, and we screwed it down onto the injector. It worked, but I didn't know how long it would last. So I decided to only use the engine to enter the harbor, and sail the rest of the way to Bali. This was a blessing in disguise: without the engine, we all got back to our sailling roots and really enjoyed those few days. The joy of drifting in a calm wind and seeing ripples spread toward you, showing the approach of a light wind that will heel the boat slightly and start her moving. It helped that the winds were workable, and never calm for more than a few hours. There were a couple light squalls every day, as they approached we'd stand outside and wait for a cold shower in the heat of the day. Under the sails is the best place to stand, where the water sheets off onto us. It was a really good passage, the kind you don't want to end.

We arrived in Bali three days later. The harbor bouys were a little confusing in that 3rd world way, but it was still easy with super computer charting and cruising sailor gossip text files (with GPS waypoints!).

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Vanuatu

(The Market in Port Vila / Coconut crabs for sale / Matt eating a cooked tuber stuffed with Spam / Squeezing the Kava Juice)
We stayed in Efate for 5 days. The people are mellow, friendly, wonderful. They smile. Friends hold hands. The women at the market sit on mats with their babies, laugh and play games. They're handsome, too; neatly dressed with this great sense of style. I've never seen such great afro's or dreads. It was fun try to read the signs in pidgen while surrounded by beautiful, happy people. It rained every day, sometimes the whole day. We felt at home with the tourist town luxuries: nice places to eat, internet cafe's, and shopping. Port Villa has a pretty cool sailor scene. The anchorage has a picturesque calm river feel to it, and there's a nice dinghy dock with attached bar/restraunt. With no copyright laws, there's lots of cheap pirate software, videos, and music.

There's good, strong kava in Vanuatu. The effects are very different from alcohol; it's uplifting and mellow. I like it much more than being alcohol buzzed or drunk. It also makes your mouth numb and hits your stomach with a queasy "you just drank a bowl of mud" feeling. Apparently they opened more kava bars "because there were too many fights in the alcohol bars, and with kava, no one fights. They just go home." Too bad it's going to be criminalized in America. We each drank two bowls during the happy hour special, then wandered into the upstairs restraunt lounge of Club Vanuatu. It felt like home in Las Vegas: super cold air conditioning, slot machines, loud large screen TV, tinted windows with a view of the Port Villa skyline, and vinyl swivel chairs. We ate pizza, then stopped by the bar for another bowl of kava before going home. At night the bar had a much different feel. The only light was a dim flourescent above the plastic bowls, neatly stacked beside the vat full of muddy kava. People skulked slowly in the shadows of the large room, talking with low voices in small groups, sitting on wooden benches, spitting on the dirt floor. "no talking during The Game" was painted at regular intervals on the concrete walls. I didn't learn what 'The Game' is.

I met lots of Australians sailors that'd recently started their trips, which reminded me of myself in Mexico. They still got excited and wanted to talk about their anchors and the "special chain which happens to weigh three times more than every one elses chain, therefore the caternary effect is...." It's nice to have something in common with other sailors. Complete strangers can have a spirited conversation about some nerdy boat detail for hours, especially if there's no women around. Maybe this is part of being male, and later I'll move on to talking about video cameras and cars. However, I'm very glad that as people spend more time out they start talking about normal things again. These kinds of conversations are tricky to thread around sensitive feelings and strong opinions, much more than politics. It's easy to offend while talking about anchors, a subject that's mild compared to the "seaworthiness of various hull shapes", which is openly hostile. By the way, my primary anchoring setup (snort), is a sixty-six pound Genuine Bruce (spit) with three-hundred feet (swallow) of 3/8's inch BBB chain. Now what do you think about that (spit)?

I like Vanuatu and would have liked to stay longer. Roaring into town, pillaging the market, seeing a movie, eating out, gassing up, and zipping back out to sea before you get comfortable being a land lubber is fun, but I should save doing that for dumps like American Samoa. The other islands in the group would've been neat to see: bungee jumping started in Pentecost, and Tanna has an active volcano. We were free to leave after I filled out the customs form, the five page double sided one twice.

We had a bit of bad luck the first day on the way to Darwin, Australia: the engine started 'funny', I dropped a pencil/dipstick in a diesel tank, we ran aground leaving the harbor, and the whisker pole mysteriously folded in half a few hours out. Mary Frances must've gotten confused by the international dateline, and thought that we were leaving on a Friday (which it was in San Diego). I feel bad about running aground-- I should have looked at the chart closely. Instead I was being a smart ass, sailling off the fuel dock, and tried to follow path we came in. As we were passing an anchored boat some folks on board warned us away, but we misunderstood which way to turn. I was cutting close behind the stern of another anchored boat, thinking "no one would anchor 15 feet off a reef".... We bumped up and ground to a tilting sideways halt. We came off in seconds with the sails sheeted in tight and the engine in full reverse. It's lucky the rudder didn't back into something as we came off. It's not as strong as the keel and would've been creamed if it hit something. That would really suck. Anyways, Erik and Hillary were cool and made the whole rigmarole quick and easy; I wouldn't want to run aground with anyone else. Mary Frances took it like a champ, there were just long scratches in the paint along the bottom and front of the keel (what was I saying about the seaworthiness of various hulls? Just kidding).

In Darwin I found that two friends ran aground in the same place, one with considerably more drama getting off. But there's a funny ending: they had a flotilla of dinghies pulling on their masthead. Once they came off and started going 5 knots sideways, they realized there was no 'stop pulling' signal to everyone. Another friend almost hit in that spot; they watched their depthsounder dive and held their breath for a second. I reread Tania Aebi's Maden Voyage, and she hit a reef while in the bay, returning to the anchorage. Sounds like the place. That'd be cool, if the 'green bouy' that's black and looks like any other mooring has been menacing cruisers for over a decade.

The first 12 days we had 25 knot tail winds and quartering seas, which were more pointy than usual. Fast, wet, and lurchy. A few inches of water often sloshed around in the cockpit, and with the windows closed the cabin grew fragrant with stale taro and onions. It's good none of us get seasick. We played scrabble (I won every time!), I painted aliens (you don't have to worry about getting the colors right), and of course, we cooked huge meals. Then binged on them until we couldn't eat a single bite more. We had to broad reach without the whisker pole; the extra work and lost VMG was a little annoying. But it was still great to have good wind and make good time. There's something special about going downwind in pointy seas for days on end. Hanging on all the time, dancing with the motion of the boat, talking loud over the noise, bracing yourself while doing the dishes, cooking, or just sitting... The days blend together more and you're really aware of being at sea. I love it. The warmth of the buttoned up cabin and the bare intimacy of good friends, the only other people in the universe. Then outside there's a beautiful epic seascape, where everything contrasts wonderfully with being down below. The cold fresh wind makes you feel clean and rejuvinated, the grimy layers of salt on everything you touch makes everything feel more real, and the occasional warm slap-kiss of an out of sinc wave brings you back to reality. Then go down below and start dancing and stumbling again, to stand at the sink and laugh at little things while you do the dishes, catching occasional glimpses of the horizon through the porthole to remind you of the magic outside.

We got bored and riveted the whisker pole back together, so now it's half as long. A reaching strut. Maybe. I've never had a reaching strut before, and can't figure out how to make this one work. The spinnaker ripped in half for the 3rd time in just 10 knots of apparent wind. I've used it less than 6 hours since it ripped the first time, and am not going to sew it back together again. I think it got weak after it ripped the first time. Maybe there'll be something fun to do with all the nylon.

(Torres, man. (by Erik) / Plotting through narrow channels / Techno sailling / Techno Navigation / Current assisted Warp 9)
The entrance to the Torres Strait was surreal. The seas calmed and turned that shallow blue color, the swell eased and yielded to wind waves. We paid tribute to the Pacific Ocean, thanked it, and promised to return. Though the strait was good clean fun, we were tired afterward and glad it lasted less than a day. We were lucky: perfect wind (we were going 7 1/2 knots for a big chunk), strong favorable currents (a 4 knot turbo boost for the last 30 miles), and few boats. Well, almost: Hillary had to dodge eight closely spaced fishing boats with confusing lights on one of her watches. It looked like a windswept doomsday K-Mart parking lot with all the fishing boats flood lights backlighting the spray blown off the top of the chop. In the tricky parts we had one person down below plotting the position, watching radar distances and depth, while another person was outside sailing and keeping track of lights and other boats. Once through the tricky part, those two would sleep for a few hours while a third brought us within a few miles of the next tricky part. At times it felt like a techno video game (pictured). With two people it would've been better to anchor at night. Next time I'll have electronic charts and know the currents, so navigation will be less involved and we'll be sure to time it right to blast through at warp speed again. The WH autopilot wasn't working (WH has twice sent it back broken), so we learned how to get the windvane to hold a more precise course than ever through the channels by super balancing the sails. We also put big blocks on the steering lines to cut down on friction, which has made a huge difference in light winds.

We often talked with folks on other sail boats. It expanded our world beyond the boat. Chris and Stephanie on Osprey were about two weeks ahead of us. They told us the details of what lay ahead, which made it fun to anticpate the future more. To kill time on night watch I read a dozen bad science fiction novels, a lot of them old Star Trek episodes in novel form. I got self conscious about it when I realized they are written at a 6 or 7th grade level. Later I moved on to playing with this web page, then better fiction, and finished the passage learning how to use Photoshop to make pictures funky. That's really fun, like finger painting for grown ups. We often got so wrapped up in playing with it that we'd lose track of time and pull extra long night watches.

It took 22 days to get to Darwin.

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American Samoa

(Pago Pago harbor / Dinghies parked during the Semi-Formal Book Trade Party / The book trade as seen from above)
On the way from Suwarrow, I decided to skip New Zealand and go to Singapore. This meant picking up the pace to get through Indonesia before the NE monsoon kicked in. There's no time to visit Niue, Tonga, and Fiji, which I'm sad to do, but now there'll be new places to go if I'm in the area again. We stopped in Pago Pago because it was on the way from Suwarrow, and to wrap up some boat details: there's US mail service and you're not forced to buy someone a ticket home when you kick them off the boat. People were friendly, but I had the feeling that something strange was going on behind the scenes that no one wanted to talk about. It's more than the sweatshop filled with teenage Vietnamese girls, imprisoned by the company store and barbed wire, for their protection. "Made in the USA", a territory anyways, under a corrupt government thats unwilling to interfere with near slaves who are raped and beaten, "as long as they don't leave permanent marks"! The nightly citizens curfew enforcement militia, wearing red skirts and wielding large sticks, is definately unique. As well as the 6pm silent prayer bells outside the city, enforced by beating and/or stoning. The locals were very concerned about preserving their land for future generations and maintaining their culture. One was proud that no outsiders are allowed in his village, "so you don't see people just walking around." All the foreigners I met that lived there long term were very critical of the Samoan culture, including a Maori that'd been there most of his life. Someone who recently moved from Saudi Arabia felt that people have more personal freedom in Saudi Arabia. Maybe it's as some Samoan's believe, that they are more authentic and traditional than the other [more well adjusted and open] South Pacific nations. Or maybe this is how American culture mixes with Polynesians. Or maybe they've always been screwed up.

I was rowing Erik home after he'd been camping in the mountains. "While you were gone, I had a fire on board. Maybe it was an explosion." I was converting a water tank to a diesel tank. A few days before I'd pumped out the water, and was wiping down the inside with acetone on a rag. I don't like the "I'm giving you cancer now" cold tingling feeling of strong solvents; I'd used less than half a 1/2 liter can. I guess that the 6" access hole isn't "adequate ventilation"; a parrafin lamp 2' away lit the fumes. A 4' flame thrower shot up to the ceiling through the access hole. It made a jet engine whooshing sound, and I could feel the heat on my back as I grabbed for the fire extinguisher. I kept pumping the trigger with one hand as the other hand fumbled to pull the safety pin. A short squirt immediately killed it. The inside of the cabin was hazy and smelled disgusting; I had to stick my head out the hatch to breathe, then hold it as I worked inside to turn off the smoke alarm. An idiot, I tested my "I wonder if it's hot" hypothesis by touching the metal tank. It was hot. There was little damage: a rubber gasket on the tank, some nearby varnish, photos on the wall, and a little spot of paint on the ceiling had melted. I'm glad there was a fire extinguisher mounted close at hand, so that the flame thrower didn't last long. A little longer and the cushions might have caught fire. I've used acetone on a lot of projects, mostly fiberglassing. Now I'm more cautious with things that say caution: extremely flamable. I moved some fire extinguishers to better places, so there's more at hand, ready to grab. There's already an automatic one with the engine, and maybe I'll put another in the lazarrette by the batteries and a chunk of electrical things. I got this idea during my other fire story, which is electrical: the binnacle compass light shorted out on the way to Nuku Hiva. Water had corroded a splice, the wires fell onto a piece of metal and shorted. The wires melted away a few inches of their covers without tripping the circuit breaker.

We had a "Semi-Formal Book Trade" party on board the last Sunday we were there. I'd forgotten how fun it is to have a party. There were a lot of sailors in Pago Pago: we distributed invitations to over 40 boats. I still worried that no one would come. Afterwards we went out to the Mexican restraunt where they play movies during dinner on Sunday nights. Its hard to eat during a loud movie gunfight.

(Lazy downwind sailling / Painted Matt / Painted Hillary)
One of our neighbors hit the jackpot and pulled up a mattress with his anchor. We atleast got some bicycle rims and fishing lines. The passage to Vanuatu was very mellow, one of the best I've had. Mary Frances slipped through the calm seas so quietly that it felt like we were anchored. There was usually just enough wind to keep the double headsails drawing at about 5 knots. It was warm, the kind that makes you feal cozy and real. We cooked huge, elaborate lunches for the pleasure of doing something and eating well. Afterwards we'd take down the sails and swim, to cool off and to feel the water and experience something different. We scrubbed the bottom of the boat, jumped off the ratlines, and eventually just floated and looked up at the sky. Becalmed one day and bored out of our minds, we painted ourselves. We were having so much fun that we didn't feel in any hurry to make landfall. I made this web page when I got bored with my bad science fiction novels. Hillary and Erik started exercising, and planned to have abs of steel by Bali. Lucy even mellowed out and let us pet her, sort of. We didn't know it, but this was the last effortless downwind passage for a couple months. We arrived in Vanuatu on the 11th day.

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Suwarrow picture gallery

(Erik playing the guitar at sea / Drying out the cushions, sheets, clothes after getting soaked by a wave / Gratuitous Sunset Photo / Eating ashore with Rhys & Cathy)
I met Rhys and Cathy in Rarotonga. They were looking for a ride to Suwarrow to count birds and be caretakers. I was planning to go to Niue, but Suwarrow was only 5 days out of the way, and their enthusiasm for the atoll was contagious. Telling me pirate stories and lending me Tom Neales book helped, too. We loaded their gear on board: a couple months of supplies in four big plastic drums. Three fit in the forepeak, the fourth on deck. It was a boring passage, sloppy with light winds and a lot of motoring. The fifth night the barometer rose 5mb in 3 hours. The shrouds sang in the gale as we ambled downwind at 6 knots with just 3' of jib out. It was hot, so I left the companionway and a few windows open. We got thoroughly soaked by a wave that came on board. Cathy's new video camera was wrecked when the cockpit drained into their aft cabin through an open window. Friends on another boat lost their ham radio and laptop that day when water poured through a dorade vent. There were a few more waves from a bad direction, but with the windows closed they were anticlimactic, so it was fun to sit in foulies and watch them come. My Dad used to sit on the porch and watch big thunderstorms. The next morning the forecast was that it'd get worse, the forecaster actually said "you'll get creamed", so we hove to with the trisail outside the pass. It was fun to watch the waves churn and foam on our wake, and look down into the deep wells of the swell as we rose to the top of a crest. It quickly turned into one of the worst passages I've had; sitting, sleeping, and living in the salty, spongey, rolling wetness. It sucked. Being new to sailling, Rhys and Cathy were superstars, and had the optimistic "atleast we're not dead" attitude of veteran sailors. Especially with the frustration of seeing land and not being able to come in. We waited until the day after that for it to mellow out before entering the pass.

Special nerd section: I had a lot of time to play around, so someone with a similar boat might be interested. Mary F is a 40 footer with half a full keel with a skeg rudder. The kind where the bow blows off quickly but then it doesn't drift downwind fast. Sheeting the trisail a little leeward of the centerline and the rudder about 2/3rds to hard over was the best. It held us about 50 degrees off the wind. In the gusts we came up to about 20 degrees off the wind. The keel and rudder made pretty swirls and gurgles on the surface as we drifted at about half a knot. The slick was about 20 degrees aft of dead upwind, further aft in a lull or if a wave had recently twisted the bow downwind. More upwind in the gusts. We'd fall off and end up beam to the seas with the rudder hard over. I think the third reef in the main would have been better: held us closer to the wind and more comfortably heeled. But the trisail was already up and keeping us comfortably parked. Over a day and a half we drifted 12 miles dead upwind of the pass, and had to beat back. I was surprised that Mary Frances loved beating with the 110 jib and trisail in 25 or 30 knots. The helm was very light and responsive, and we were barrelling over the swell at a good clip. I think we had to tack through about 110 degrees to have any speed. It felt better than combinations I've used before in that wind, and since that day I've used the trisail more often. We don't have a wind meter, but people in the anchorage said it averaged 40 knots the day we waited outside, gusting higher of course. I was guessing only 30 from the the waves, but the singing shrouds were definately loud down below.


(Anchorage Island from aloft / The outhouse / Rhys and Cathy going to camp and count birds on another motu)
We spent three weeks in Suwarrow. I loved it. It's the only deserted atoll I've been to. The water is transparent, the coconut and hermit crabs huge and abundant, and there's thousands of nesting birds that aren't afraid of people. The sharks were also abundant and not afraid of people: we didn't swim much at Anchorage Island. We'd catch a fish soon after throwing the hook over, but we'd rarely get it to the surface before a shark had taken it. The first few days we anchored farther away from the pass, where there weren't sharks. The snorkelling was the best I've seen; the coral was so much more alive and healthy than any other place I've been. This was my "South Seas Deserted Tropical Paradise" experience. We layed around reading in hammocks, husked coconuts, and explored the island. Sometimes we'd build a fire at night and cook dinner ashore. I tried to catch wild chickens with a big spear. I took a shower every day with an endless supply of buckets of cool cistern water. Rhys and Cathy moved into Tom Neale's old house. I was really impressed when Rhys built an oven and started making bread. He knew a lot about of the history of the atoll: the pirates, ghosts, buried treasure, and people tieing themselves to trees during a hurricane, which made exploring the island more fun. They took their inflatable dinghy across the lagoon to camp and count birds.

There's plans to put a pearl farm in the lagoon. That would be sad. A couple hundred people would live on Ancorage Island, which'd wreck it; there's not enough room. It'd get dumpy like Manihi (Tuamotus, French Polynesia), where the houses have this 'projects' feel of being tightly packed with concrete walls between them. The people there hadn't caught on to living in a pretty place: the inside reef had a lot of garbage caught in it, and looked dead. There weren't birds or coconut crabs.

The trip to American Samoa was easy. The spinnaker ripped for the 2nd time, in light winds, so we motored a little more than we would have otherwise. The passage was strange: there was an unfriendly on board. On Suwarrow I discovered that a crew person had stolen 150 pain killers out of the medical kit. I wanted to kick him off immediately and be done with it, but that would've left another boat to take him off the deserted island. Once in Samoa I made a mistake and felt a cosmic pity for him being in the karmic position of an old drug addict. I bought him a ticket home and let him stay on board til his flight out, which I regret, since I had to kick him off the next day when he was doing lines of coke on the nav table and threatening me. In retrospect it's easy to see that I should've taken some good advice to kick him off months before at the first signs of trouble. But he's a cousin, and this was supposed be a chance for him to reinvent himself in a new life without drugs. That I thought sharing this life and a new setting would cure him shows naivete about the nature of a lifelong drug addiction. I think I knew better, but was hoping for the best. I've got to stop doing that.

Special nerd section: Sailling is not drug rehab. Be active in crew relationships, don't hope for the best.

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Rarotonga

(The quay / Ana / Ana)
I like Rarotonga. We stayed three weeks. I especially appreciated it after three months in French Polynesia: people are relaxed, friendly, and speak English. I was a normal again: I could talk to people and afford things. We got lost, and before we could ask for directions someone opened up a drinking nut and climbed a tree to pick papaya for "a snack later." Since it's associated with New Zealand, the exchange rate was wonderful: effectively a half price sale on everything. I lived the high life when Ana came to town: a rental car was $14/day, and a house on the beach was less than an American hotel. There's a harbor fee, but the quay with a hose into your boat and the hot showers are worth it. The anchoring is soft, silty, and open to the North. If you paranoid about that, you can make a super mooring by tieing a rope to a big chain that's runs across the bottom of the harbor. We celebrated the 4th of July there; I brought one year expired flares to celebrate, but only one of six shot out of the gun.


(Ana Matt / Ana Matt / Ana Matt)
Ana flew in to visit for a week, the first time we'd seen each other in six months. She's busy in graduate school and doesn't want to come sailing. We had a lot of fun doing things around the island. We slipped right back into life together, but of course it was different from when we were together continiously for two years. We'll get together again in December or January.

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Leeward Societies
From Tahiti we zipped over to Moorea for a week, back to Tahiti, then up to Raitea, then Huahine. Dig Huahine and Tahaa. They've got this rural and friendly vibe. Hitchikers get rides, visitors are invited to join the basketball games. Raitea was similar, except for the main town, which was a dump. Good spot to reprovision, though: a free dock to pull up to, with a big grocery store across the street. Provisions in Huahine were the cheapest I'd seen in French Polynesia. There's a Moorings charter base in Raitea, and it was fun to meet people off the charter boats, people that had been teleported in from America a few days before. There's a lot of anchorages, so it was easy to pick an isolated one. A lot of the anchorages in this area were silty, so much that we often had to try several times to get our super anchor setup (a 24# danforth on 15' of chain thats shackled to the crown of a 66# bruce) to set and hold, which was a first. With our manual windlass it's a chore to haul everything back on board and try again, so I learned about trying to pick a spot thats not downstream of a river and less likely to be silty, sometimes using a leadline to make sure. On a motu off Tahaa, I helped build a sweat lodge and keep it active during a friends three day fast. A neat experience, and I'm sorry he turned around and sailed to Hawaii afterwards. He gave me sage, which I put away and forgot about. Months later I remembered the sage after an unfriendly departure of a crew person. I burned some to clear the air of the lingering bad vibes. I could feel a big difference; Mary Frances felt cleaner. This surprised me; feeling that burning incense cleared away demons is a new experience for me. I'm not used to that kind of thing; I majored in physics. Maybe the smell reminded me of the happy, introspective vibe that accompanied those days of making and using the sweat lodge. Who knows, it worked.

We didn't stay long in Bora Bora. There was a large community of sailors there. For some reason a lot of them were waiting weeks for a perfect weather forecast. At that point I was ready to get out of French Polynesia, and only stopped to pick up the bond money. The police didn't mind that we were a week or two behind the schedule on our paperwork.

The trip to Rarotonga from Bora Bora was pretty good. It's about 500nm, and there was a steady 25 knots of wind, so it flew by. It was a little squally and wet, especially when we were reaching. Steve on Sojourner was on top of the weather forecast the whole way, predicting the wind shifts. It was great, he saved us from beating for a few days; we just stayed on a reach and gradually got more on course as the wind swung around. Some day I'd like to learn how to predict the future from weatherfaxes that well. The wind died for a week the day after we arrived: I was glad we left when we did.

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Marquessas, Tuamotus, Tahiti
The Marquessas and Tuamotus are my favorite area of French Polynesia. And the South Pacific, so far. Once I got there I learned that there was no reason to wait until March to leave the Galapagos/Mexico area; hurricanes don't hit the Marquessas. Next time I'll leave in January, since the Marquessas might be my favorite area in the South Pacific. Daniel's Bay, Nuku Hiva, is probably the coolest place I've been. You can hike through the jungle, past old ruins, to a base of a huge waterfall. Exotic and deicious fruits are ripe for the picking along the way. You have to swim for the last part. It was amazing. When it rained (several times a day), waterfalls would start in the cliffs surrounding the little anchorage. Daniel and his neighbor gave us a ton of pamplemouse, star fruit, papaya, bananas, and other things I can't name. The bay immediately to the east of Tahiohea is really cool, and there's some wonderfully friendly people there that also gave us a ton of fruit and showed us around.

I would have liked to spend more time there and in the Tuamotus. I had to get to Papeete in 30 days because I didn't pay my bond in Nuku Hiva. Papeete was the first city I'd been in since Acauplco. It was fun to get caught up in the city: anchored off the quay (with our stern a few feet from the sidewalk), Mary Frances turned into a funky downtown apartment. It was great zipping around on my bike and doing things. We listened to techno a lot. I ate out at the food trucks almost every night. I think I was there for three weeks, and left just when I started to get really sick of it.

Moorea was fun. I had both bikes then, and it was great to zip around the island, sometimes past a cattle farm and up a big hill to see old ruins. Jose bicycled around the island one day by mistake (he thought I was in front of him). It was fun to be so mobile; we anchored in a more remote bay, then would zip into town for a slurpee and sandwhich. Unfortunately, one bike got stolen in Tahiti, and the other disintegrated by the time we reached Rarotonga (it was on its way out when I bought it). If I ever clean out the shower enough again, I'll stuff more bikes in it.

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Galapagos
I had a really good time in Galapagos. We stayed for about five weeks. The main town has a really good vibe to it, the people are real friendly, helpful, and wonderful. I didn't get the feeling I had to pay for anything that anyone did for me, as in Mexico. The owner of the pizza restraunt left packages of fruit from his farm on every boat. Jose, owner of the best bar in town, the Galapason, crewed with me to Tahiti. I'd love to see Jose again and am thinking of stopping in Galapagos or Equador on the way home.

Of course, the wildlife is fantastic; 6' by 3' turtles, 5' marine iguanas swam by the boat, lots of birds and dolphins. I took a boat tour to see the other islands. I rode a horse for the first time with Renee of Mainow Real Adventures. With him I saw giant tortioses in the wild, and hiked through a lava cave.

There's not much there for provisions, but cheap diesel is available (ferried out to your boat and siphoned into your tanks by entrepneurs). The port captain is crooked, and I payed about $60 in bribes that I didn't really have to, mostly for staying over the 30 day limit. Others played dumb or looked mean and didn't pay anything. I couldn't get worked up about it, because everything else is "so cheap it's free." We ate out constantly, since it was less than $2 for a good meal. We picked up two used mountain bikes, took the wheels off, and shoved them in the shower for later.

The passage to the Marquessas was pretty good. It took 26 days, and we motored for 5 days. We didn't hit steady winds until about 6 degrees South. I felt like a retard when we tore the spinaker in a squall (crew not paying attention) and chafed through some halyards. But when we got in I found not so much broke compared to most peoples first big crossing. Two halyards chafed through, 2 sail slides broke, spinaker tore, compass light shorted out, broke the handy billy, and the toilet started leaking. Except for the spinnaker and halyards, the list has looked pretty much like that for long passages; half a dozen little things. I'm glad I worked on the boat for so long in San Diego, because now I have a big enough junk box that I can fix a lot of things that come up without having to wander around town looking for some wierd boat part. Anyways, it was a really fun passage. Jose didn't have much fun; he was seasick the entire time, which may be a record. My cooking didn't help; at the time I think there was something wrong with me, my tastes were just really, really bad (canned jalepeno's stuffed with tuna!). There was all kinds of different weather and vibes that passage, lots of light squalls and wind shifts, so it felt epic, and there was a feeling that it was really special.

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Mexico
Mexico was cool. I'm glad I did the Baja Haha sailor rally, mostly because it gave us a good deadline, with plenty of motivation to rush the last few days to wrap up everything and leave the day we set. We could have wasted weeks in San Diego doing stupid boat things and spending more money to get every last detail perfect. As it was we left with the forepeak so stuffed with last minute food and junk that we couldn't open the door. I was nervous about forgetting some important spare part or boat doodad. It sounds so silly now, but I was really preoccupied with this for weeks before leaving San Diego. I didn't have enough experience to see that it was time to go, that riding the inertia to leave was more important than anything left behind, and that most things aren't very important. There's almost always a way to make do until you get somewhere where it's easy to find the thing or get it in the mail. The folks at Downwind Marine in San Diego have been a great help. Many times I've been in the middle of nowhere, and Sailmail'ed them something like: "oven temperature probe thingy for a princess stove" or "a big rubber band boom preventer thing." They've always been quick to turn that into the right part number, find it, and send it to the next place with mail or someone that's coming to visit.

Things that seem really important can usually be worked around: I've used the watermaker pump as an engine cooling pump, patched a high pressure fuel line, substituted bungee cord for springs, pounded little metal thingys back into shape so they fit reasonably well back in. It's part of the fun. The gold star goes to the folks on Skimmer. Their autopilot hydraulic pump went out between Galapagos and the Marquessas. They hooked a bilge pump motor up to the autopilot electronics and connected it to the wheel. It took a week to carve reduction blocks out of wood, experiment with different reduction ratios, and make plastic bearings for the pump shaft. Hand steering for weeks sucks, and it really is worth just about any effort to have a working autopilot or windvane. Though new windvanes are a rip off, I'd still get one before a ham radio, autopilot, watermaker....

I also liked the Baja Haha for how we glided down Baja at a relatively furious pace, and for some reason I was so scattered from leaving and saying goodbye that I was glad to have a preset plan of where to stop. With so many other boats, there's bound to be a few weirdo's, and I think we met all of them. In fact towards the end of the rally we were pretty glad to be pealing off from the pack and heading out by ourselves. Later, most of our best friends in Mexico say they were also in the Baja Haha. We just didn't meet them until farther down the road.

I spent too much time in Zihuatenejo at the expense of the really cool spots like Tenacatita, Chamela Bay (there's sea caves around the big island), and Melaque/Bahia de Navidad (anchoring in an 8' deep river). I feel at home in the smaller communities where I know some folks ashore and most of my sailor neighbors. Other places in the world are more beautiful and exotic, but Mexico had a nice low key and relaxed vibe. All the locals seemed down to earth and well adjusted. I loved rowing ashore and eating dozens of 10 cent tacos on the beach in Chamela bay, or exploring the mangrove swamp river in Tenacatita, and meeting people in the remote anchorages. There was a cool sailor vibe, too, since no one was really going anywhere for atleast a few months. Unlike the South Pacific, where there were so many wonderful different places to see, so you have this feeling of not wanting to stay in one anchorage for a month, in Mexico people were unwound and would hang out for a really long time, since there was really no where else to be. That was cool. I'm looking forward to going back there, though I've also been thinking about seeing the Galapagos and Marquessas again, then Hawaii and San Francisco, on the way back to San Diego. It was fun to get excited with the other sailors about our first big ocean trip. For some reason no one else we met we met was going to Galapagos, though it is a common stop for people leaving Panama.

Matty P and Ryan, who had left San Diego with me, flew back to America a little after the new year. Maybe there is a point in cruising when the excitement fades and your new life isn't quite complete and sufficient, but your former life still is. I met Will and Debrah, who were taking a semester off from college, at the Zihuatenejo Cruisers Christmas Party. They stayed with me till Galapagos.

Acapulco was a good place to jump off the coast. Theres good food shopping, even a Sams Club. There's also a daily harbor tax that you only have to pay if you check out of the country, and I actually got a receipt for the 'tip' to immigration. People were popping 8' fiberglass dinghies out of molds there for $150! I christened mine Mini-Super, and it stood up very well to my bad habits with reefs and rocks in the South Pacific. When I sold it, there were so many gouges in the gel coat that you could see through parts of the hull. Though it was tough, it didn't have enough freeboard and so was really only a one and a half person dinghy. I replaced it in Darwin with a bigger aluminum dinghy, Launch.

Sailing from Acapulco to Galapagos took 11 days. That was my first long passage, and it was emotional to pull out of the harbor in Acapulco and head out to sea. A week later it felt like I'd been at sea for years. It felt longer than any of the long passages I've done since. It was a good passage, though. I had Will and Debrah on board, who I liked and were good company. We had most kinds of wind from all the directions, and the weatherfaxes were usually completely wrong. Even though we swung a wide arc around the Gulf of Tehuantepec, we still hit a near gale 200nm out during one of it's trade wind funneling things. The seas were steeper than the gale I was in months later, possibly because the wind was much stronger closer to the gulf. It was a close reach, and I learned about keeping enough sail area up; life on Mary Frances was much more comfortable if we were heeling well and charging along instead of fumbling and rolling around. There was enough wind to slip along at 1 or 2 knots in the ITCZ, but we were antsy to get there and ended up motoring for a little less than 4 days. I'm glad that I had an opportunity to do a short-long passage before the long-long passage to the Marquessas (26 days). A little bit more experienced, I enjoyed myself more and it didn't feal as epic and tedious as it would have if it were my first long passage.

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The End. matt@qbix.net