Anniversary and other milestones

Today, Saturday the 29th, is our 17th wedding anniversary. We will be having a gourmet dinner at Chez Maggie Drum and might even have a glass of wine with dinner - which we normally don't do underway. We also put our 10,000th nautical mile under the keel of MD out of Anacortes starting at the first week of September in 2004. We also had about 3500nm from cruising around Washington and British Columbia, including going around Vancouver Island, that is not included in the 10,000nm. BTW - these are GPS miles under the keel, not rhumb line miles. That's kind of a milestone for us and we are proud to have traveled this far. MD has been great for the most part, which you would hope after all the refitting we did before we left.

We are especially happy that MD is mostly dry, thanks much to the great job that our friend Buzz did in putting in our new portlights. So many other boats out here have leaky hatches or portlights and they want to just sell the boats and quit because of it. Of course, it would help if I would completely dog the hatches when I close them as we found out this morning as Cindy was trying to nap down below. It got really, really rough (again) last night after a fantastic, picture-perfect sail yesterday. The wind picked up to 30kt with huge (for us) seas of 10-12ft coming on our beam. Neither one of us sleep last night. So it started sprinkling this morning and I closed the main salon hatch but only dogged the two handles across from the hinges and did not dog the two on the sides. A big wave crashed over MD later and water poured in under the "closed" hatch like it was open right on to Cindy, the table, the rugs, our cushions and bedding - everything. I heard this cry from below right after the crash of the wave. Needless to say, Cindy was not happy to be awakened by cold salt water. We cleaned it up but now have the difficult problem of how to get all the salt water out of everything with our limited supply of fresh water. Oh well, the cruising life.

The seas and wind stayed up for most of the morning but started going down and we got in some awesome sailing until just a bit ago when the wind died off and we are now flopping around again.

Cindy just got her travel itinerary and will fly out of Neiafu on Vava'U on the 10th and be back in Denver after flying by way of Fiji to LA. 463nm to go to Vava'U.

B-T-W: we have had trouble getting connected to Winlink on our SSB radio to send in our position reports. I did just send off some for this trip and will try to keep them up to date as possible.

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