Syzygy Sailing

(refers to events on July 9th)

The dinghy has provided a constant source of amusement for us.  Matt and Karen probably would chose a different word from ‘amusement’.  Like ‘hatred’.  This has only increased since I arrived.

Since we have an inflatable dinghy, it does not deal with rough water well.  A hard bottom dinghy would do better. In rougher water with larger waves, larger being over 6 inches,  a blast of water will spray up over the boat.  The spray only increases with speed and wave height.  Luckily our dinghy, handicapped as it is by a poor engine, never goes very fast.

I’ve noticed up until this point that to combat this spray, Matt or Karen will stand at the bow and pull up on a line connected to the bow.  The idea is that you pull the bow up so that a: waves more easily pass underneath the dinghy and b: even if they don’t a higher bow will block some of the waves.

Now, I generally thought this dubious at best.  The bow, in my opinion, seems to get pulled up about one inch.  Better to just grin and enjoy the spray, a reminder that we are not cooped up in an office, working our 40 hour weeks, dressed in slacks and a button down, and paying lots of bills.  However, on one fine day in Rangiroa, I decided to give my hand at trying this, if for no other reason than everyone else on our boat was doing it, so I wanted to be cool too.

As we pulled away from the dock, I grabbed the line and stood up.  Another boat passes by.  I note the wake (the waves eminating from behind the boat) they create, and think: not a problem.  Their wake reaches us and rocks us side to side.  I then think: this is a problem.  I stumble from side to side, and as there is not much room side to side on our dinghy, I proceed to be clipped in the calf by the sides of the dinghy and tumble backwards overboard.

Man Overboard!

I am perfectly O.K. save a bruised ego, and once Matt has ascertained this he immediately starts laughing.  I am not laughing.  Not yet.  I am frantically trying to get things out of my pockets that I don’t want to get wet.  Money.  My journal with months of entries I don’t want ruined.  Two long letters to Allison.  If those get wet, oh I would be so upset.  Hence my franticness.  However, the journal and letters are in a waterproof bag that I had remembered to seal, and the money was in a ziplock.  After fishing those out of my pockets and realizing they were fine, I too laughed at myself, treading water and just laughing.  Two cheapo glasses I had bought so you could look directly at the sun during the solar eclipse are within reach and I grab at them.  The third has already started to float under.  I pull myself back into the dinghy, sopping wet and laughing.

I take inventory and as Matt is starting to pull away, I realize I’m missing something.  The handheld VHF radio.  The extremely-nice-christmas-present-from-Matt’s-parents handheld VHF.  Matt is displeased.  Both of us without even telling the other simultaneously start trying to take a bearing on land.  If you line up two points, say a pylon and a tree, then you return to this spot you can again line up the pylon and tree and know that you have returned to somewhere along that line.  Do that with another 2 objects, preferably two which form a line perpendicular to the first two, and you have two lines which can only intersect in once point.  Theoretically you can return to the same spot.  As long as you don’t use a mooring ball which might move with a shift in wind and current.  And you don’t forget what you used.  Both of which happened to me.

After going to the boat to pick up snorkeling gear, we return to where we think I might have fallen in.  I flop out of the dinghy, and swim around, frequently diving down to the bottom, it’s only about 15 feet, looking around.  Matt moves around in the dinghy to scan a larger area, dunking his head in the water periodically.  Ten minutes of searching.  Twenty.  Thirty.  It seems inconceivable to me that we can’t find anything.  I know other things fell out of my pockets.

And then I see the pair of glasses that had had been out of reach and sank to the bottom.  Here’s the right spot!!  Ten more minutes of searching.  Search time no longer feels fruitless.  The VHF must be here.  I find a coin, 100 francs, about 1 US dollar, bright and shiny.  This must have also fallen out of my pocket.  And there is a AA battery I bought for the GPS.  it must be here.

And finally there it was.  A swell of relief first then a swell of apprehension.  Would it work?  I pop up out of the water.  The smart thing would have been to take it back to the boat, rinse it with fresh water, let it dry out thoroughly, open it up and continue to ensure proper drying.  I didn’t do that.  It was still on, and so as soon as I popped up on the service and waved to Matt and pushed the boat to call Karen back at our boat.  “Syzygy, Syzygy, this is Jon.”  Karen replied.  It worked.  Thank you to Matt parents for buying such a nice VHF that it withstood being in 15 feet of water for over an hour!  Misadventure part 1: a success!

Finally, this is a current post, written and posted in the present right here now. I wanted to bring everyone up to date with our wanderings, right before we drop off the map again for another couple of long passages. We need to be in Australia by November to avoid the cyclone (hurricane) season down here. We have been in the south pacific for three months already; we have less than three months remaining. Examine on the map how far we’ve come in three months and how far we have yet to go, and you’ll see that we really have to get our act in gear.

From Huahine, we intend to sail in more or less a straight line to Tonga, with three possible stops on the list: Palmerston atoll, Beveridge Reef, and Niue. We may stop at all three or none of these. Palmerston is in the middle of nowhere and has only a handful of people living on it. Beveridge reef is even more remote, and unique: it doesn’t actually have any dry land whatsoever–it’s a reef that rises straight out of the ocean floor and comes within a few feet of the surface. It would be surreal to anchor on a reef in the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight for hundreds of miles (this will be possible if the weather cooperates). Niue is large enough to have some civilization there, a town and supplies and maybe even internet. But who knows, we may pass up all three and just pop back up on the map in Tonga, 1300 miles west of here. Like I said, we need to put some miles under the keel prontospeed.

We’ve had lots of rain since we arrived here in Huahine. Refreshingly, the island is less developed (i.e. less touristy) than either Tahiti or Moorea. We picked up our last remaining provisions for the upcoming passages, and need only a jerry-can worth of gas for the outboard before we’re all set to go. We’ll probably get out of here in two or three days, weather permitting.

Unrelatedly, my cousin Derek is getting married today, perhaps this very moment, and I feel strange (and somewhat guilty) not to be back home attending. I wish him the very best–congratulations to Derek & Lauren!

Karen’s mom and my mom booked a vacation together to come visit us.  I love my mom and I love Karen and now I love Karen’s mom and so I’m glad they came halfway around the world to visit us. Thanks moms.

They flew into Tahiti and spent the night outside of Papaeete; the next day Karen accompanied them across to Moorea on the ferry while Jon and I sailed the boat across.

Jon and I anchored the boat just outside of Oponohu Bay.  After tidying up the boat, I set off in the dinghy to find the hotel.  It got dark and I encountered an obstacle course of reefs.  I was paddling, and pushing off coral with my foot, cringing when the bottom of the dinghy would scrape on coral, and constantly raising and lowering and turning the outboard off and on to avoid banging it on the bottom.  It took an hour and a half, the hotel ended up being about 2 miles away.  That part sucked.

But then the moms treated Karen and I to a few nights in the hotel with them, and that was simply fantastic.  It was wonderful to be off the boat, in a real bed, with a hot shower.  It had been over 90 days since our last hot shower in Mexico.  We ate good food and relaxed in front of the pool.  Heavenly.

We took the moms back to see the boat in the dinghy.  I should have learned from my trip the night before, but I have a short memory, and I’m stubborn.  It was daytime for this return trip, but it was also up into 15 knots of wind.  That dinghy isn’t too fast with four people on board.  Everyone was drenched inside of five minutes from the spray splashing over the bow, and it took an hour to make it back to the boat.  We had to bail the entire way.  It was a bit more than the moms had signed up for, I’m sure:

Later in the week we took the moms out to an area full of docile stingrays (the hotels have created this situation by regularly feeding them fish).  It was really, really incredible, to have stingrays come rub up against you looking for handouts:

(post-dated: we arrived in Tahiti July 16)

Rangiroa was our last atoll in the Tuamotus; the passage from Rangiroa to Tahiti took a day and a half.  Tahiti is the administrative center for all of French Polynesia, which includes the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, and the Society Islands (Tahiti is in the Societies, along with Bora Bora).

The passage from Rangiroa to Tahiti was tedious.  We were very fortunate to be sailing a beam reach, because the wind conditions were highly variable, from 20-30 knots the whole time.  Usually a squall is temporary–from a minute to an hour–but eventually it goes away and leaves better conditions.  This passage was like being in and out of squalls, back to back, all night long.  Wet, cold, and lots of work.  I was on-call all of the night to trouble-shoot various situations; twice the main got backwinded against the boom-preventer in big shift of heavy wind.  Jon stayed on watch most of the night, and I woke up whenever I was needed, thus we handled the division of work.  The waves were short and steep–every 10 minutes a wave would give the boat a good smack and spray the top of the wave all across the deck and cockpit.  We had a close call where one wave came in through a portlight across the cabin and managed to cover the computer station in spray–I was concerned that my laptop had been ruined, fortunately not.

In Tahiti, we tied up to a mooring just off of the “Tahiti Yacht Club”, north of Papaeete.  For $13/night we got the mooring and hot showers.  The water was opaque, dirty and frequently stinky.  No swimming here!

We used our time in Tahiti to take care of business, the first two priorities to find a new outboard motor and get lots of food at the grocery store.  Additionally we had to take care of the official check-in/out from French Polynesia.  Even though downtown Papaeete is a standard busy trafficky dirty and especially expensive city, it was still fantastic to have the resources available to us (here I’m thinking mainly of restaurants and bars and cafes).  We bought parts, new masks and snorkels, machetes, you know, the usual.  Naturally, we ended up staying longer than anticipated.

post-dated:  this refers to events on July 11

(for background, see this previous post)

We observed the solar eclipse from the atoll Rangiroa in the Tuamotus. It occurred around 10 in the morning, which is why in the pictures below Karen and I both look like we just got out of bed (jon was up at dawn). Jon found these cheap dark glasses for safely looking at the sun, which is why we all look like we’re watching a cheesy 3D movie.

It was great to observe a solar eclipse, though it was admittedly less dramatic than I had hoped for. The viewing party lasted about 30 minutes, so it wasn’t as rapid as I had expected, either, which gave me some time to drink my coffee, wake up a bit more, and appreciate it.  We were just outside the area of the total solar eclipse; on Rangiroa we had something like a 93% totality, and it turns out that 7% of the sun is a hell of a lot brighter than you would expect.  At its darkest, it had a magnitude of illumination equivalent to the sunset.

Originally we had planned on being farther south, in the path of the total eclipse, but it turned out to be incompatible with all our other route-planning considerations.  I do not regret our choice.

As a photographer, I was most fascinated by the color temperature of the light.  At sunrise and sunset we describe the light as very “warm”: when the sun is very low in the sky, its light passes through much more of the atmosphere before it illuminates our surroundings; as a result more of the blue wavelengths are filtered out, leaving a more orange, or “warm”, illumination.

–ignorable aside:
The expression “color temperature” comes directly from physics: as an object is heated, it gives off radiation (this is called “blackbody radiation” fyi).  The temperature of the object determines the wavelength of radiation.  At room temperature, objects give off long wavelength radiation, in the infrared spectrum (which we cannot see, except with the help of special goggles anyway).  When the object gets hotter, say a couple thousand degrees, the wavelength of radiation becomes shorter, and it gives of visible light that we can see (think of a piece of metal glowing orange in a forge).  The hotter it gets, the shorter the wavelength. Orange light is longer wavelength, bluer light is shorter wavelength.  As a piece of metal heats up in the forge, it goes from orange towards blue in color.  So, strictly speaking, blue is hotter, orange is cooler.  However, photographers got it backwards and refer to orange light as warmer and bluer light as cooler; admittedly this seems more intuitive.  Since it is rare to find a photographer who pays any attention to physics, we’ll have to forgive them the mistake.
–end of ignorable aside.

During the eclipse the sun was high in the sky, and so even though the amount of light felt like a sunset, the illumination it provided had the color temperature of the mid-day sun–far “bluer” than we observe at sunset.   In fact, it felt exactly like moonlight–this makes sense because moonlight itself is only reflected sunlight.

So if you want to understand what it was like, imagine a sunset with moonlight.