En Route from Pago Pago 14 Oct 2010 14.2735S 170.6953W
I’m cheating and putting this morning’s position in Pago Pago harbor since I just realized that I never sent an “arrived” message. Once again I left you hanging as soon as we made landfall. It was a busy nearly 3 weeks, but we now have more reliable refrigeration, a new wind vane, and a new watermaker, as well as the latest Pokemon for the DS, a new electric toothbrush and snacks and supplies to last another 6 months. We should probably stay away from land that long to give our cruising kitty a rest. A huge thanks to Marc for all the shipping and ordering assistance, we’d have been stuck in Pago Pago for months without your help.
We made good headway on school, did many loads of laundry, filled up on salads, beef and fries, tackled a number of big and small boat projects, but we lost lots of precious time to visit Tonga. It does not look like we’ll make it back to Niuatoputapu as we’d hoped, and there’s no way we’ll see all that we hope to see there. But there’s always next year.
While you’d think our schedule should be wide open, we have this looming event without a precise date called “hurricane season.” Our goal is to leave the tropics before it starts. Generally they do not occur in October, but have occurred on rare occasions in November, and the rarity goes down December, January February, then they start getting rarer again in March. The trip to New Zealand is a balancing act with a departure date squeezed between the beginning of hurricane season here, and the end of winter storm season there. They’ve had a long and late winter, but that can change quickly, and there seem to be some indications that hurricane season could start early here. I’m sure the two are related, and all is related to the end of el Nino, and a predicted La Nina year ahead. Frank’s been reading about this in depth. I’ve been trying to pay attention, but knowing Frank is on top of it, makes me less academic in my own research and education. Originally he’d said we need to start watching the weather patterns carefully starting October 25…now only 10 days away. In my own ignorance it seems a bit like reading the tea leaves; I know there is a science to it, but weather is never an exact science. It does amaze me that in our short stay in Samoa we went from lots of strong east trade winds and only some rain, to light winds from a variety of directions with lots of rain. The potential, that we may now only have 10 days in Tonga is depressing. But with all these boat projects done, maybe we can spend some time exploring the beautiful cruising grounds of New Zealand, before diving into major maintenence mode again. And who knows, it could turn out to be another month. We shall see. What’s the saying from Karate Kid, “Bend like a tree grasshopper”? Well I need my own, “Migrate like a mackerel Mo”
Do mackerel migrate? My own walking Google, Capt’n Fraingck, is sleeping while I’m on watch. It’s 1:30AM October 14…or maybe 2:30AM October 15, I’m not exactly sure where that dateline is, it does a weird jog between Samoa and Tonga. I don’t think that means I get to wake him up early, but I can brag about having the longest dogwatch ever. Yes we’re going back to the future.
xoxomo