Taiohae, Nuku Hiva, Marquises, French Polynesia 11 Jan 2012 08S55 140W05

We said our goodbyes to our guest Leo last week after a month of epic explorations, good conversations, and even some quiet contemplation. It was good to have a girlfriend onboard to balance our slight list to the masculine side. And it was definitely a vacation month – even though we did skip the holidays. We’ve now rolled up our sleeves, and are tackling our chores, readying ourselves for a departure to Hawaii end of the month or so. For the kids that’s finishing the final days of their math book – Yoopie! No rest for the weary though…I already have the next book waiting in the wings. For Frank and I the big chores are polishing the fuel tank (OK that one is Frank’s), resetting the salon windows, (a.k.a. ports), and tenderly patching our 20 plus year old sails and taking tedious measurements for new ones. We’re hoping these sails will see us through another 2100 miles or so (distance from here to Hawaii). The jib and the staysail are showing signs of extreme stress in the clew corner. You may recall we popped a clew on the jib last year; Frank’s softclew replacement repair has held together beautifully for 8200 miles, but little lacy stretchmarks are appearing in a radial pattern a couple feet above the clew on both sails. So yesterday we slapped on a couple big sail patches with 5200 (flexible silicon glue), and are hoping to baby these sails along a bit longer. We didn’t want to sew the patch on, fearing a line of little needle holes might behave too like perforations on a pad of paper and we’re on our last sheet of the pad for sure.

Frank has a story from when he was a kid of a cat they had on board who loved to sleep in the sail locker. One day they brought out the spinnaker and sent it flying. As the spinnaker filled with air and rose against the sky, he recalls seeing a million little holes just before a Fourth of July explosion. The spinnaker ripped along all those little perforated lines sending spinnaker confetti flying into the sky. You can just imagine the content little feline kneading her nest in the softest sail in the pile. He’s told the tale often enough, that I have a very clear picture in my mind of what that would look like, and unfortunately the image comes to mind more and more often when we unfurl our jib and staysail. Needless (or needleless) to say, I dislike the notion of needles and piercing these delicate, suncooked, but reliable old rags. We already reinforced the entire leech edge of the main, and we do have our stormsails as a backup, but we wouldn’t go very fast with those, course we don’t usually go much faster than jogging speed anyway. Still and all these sails have pushed and pulled our 20 tons an impressive distance these past two years, roughly 18,000 mostly carbon neutral miles – too bad we can’t sell carbon credits to replace our sails.

Is it true that 2012 snuck up on us a little over a week ago? Happy New Year!

xoxomo