Ups and Downs on the Ocean

Well, when you push off out of a nice, even though very rainy, harbor and head out on a long passage you have to be ready to take what comes. We were kinda, sorta. We started off from Vila on Tuesday morning (US Monday) with a weather forecast for some blustery conditions that would settle down and allow us to miss a nasty previously forecasted squash zone a little over half way to New Zealand. But it ended up being much nicer than that and we had a great sail and could even get some easting in to help avoid the nasties even more farther south.

However, the weather gods changed their minds. About 11pm the first night we had a dramatic wind shift which made us change our heading from southeast to south around Tanna instead of going north of Tanna. Yesterday morning it changed again though, around 9am, right after the morning radio nets. Our friends are scattered all over this area of the world with most of them going to Australia to park or to sell their boats and head on home. We had to deal with the conditions here though. The wind picked up, then picked up some more, then yet again. And, it was right on our nose of course. It was obviously a squash zone between a high and a low. I was hoping it would be a quickie so we adjusted course to go slightly north of east so we could make a little good towards our goal, but the seas got rougher, the waves wetter coming over the board over and over again, I got sick and we were just having a great time thinking of the promise of nicer weather any time soon.

That was not to be so about 3pm we decided to go up the east coast of Tanna. It took us from 9am to 3pm to go 25 miles and it was 21 miles back to the anchorage at Port Resolution on Tanna, where we originally started our visit to Vanuatu. It only took us 3 hours to go the 21 miles and we got there at the tricky entrance guarded by reefs just as it was getting completely dark. We had waypoints setup on our GPS and chartplotter though but almost managed to screw up any way as the wind was still blowing quite hard even across the end of the peninsula that forms the outside edge of the harbor. After some nervous moments we got in and the hook set the first go. There are two other boats here who had just got in from a hard passage from Fiji but there was lots of room to find a spot.

It is now Thursday morning and I am still feeling weird from the Scopalomine anti-seasickness patch I have on but with an excellent nights sleep. That is a real luxury when you haven't slept for two days running. Have I mentioned lately how much fun it is cruising about in your sailboat with lush little palm-tree covered islands and friendly natives and sand beaches, etc.? You have to earn all that the hard way though by getting from here to there and back again. We are reevaluating the weather situation right now. It does not look like we can leave here for a couple of days to go south anyway. We could go around and back towards New Caledonia which would mean checking in and out of a new country and more delays. Or we could stay here and wait it out. Since we checked out of the country we would either have to go check in at Lenakel (35 miles each way of four-wheel drive road in the back of a pickup on board seats) or just sit it out and hope the Van navy or Australian patrol boats don't show up and fine us. We have always prided ourselves in keeping 100% legal as far as each country requires. Lately we have been violating that position. May be once a criminal, always a criminal. Right now my head is too fuzzy and I need more coffee and will mull it over. Probably we will wait here a couple of days and leave later.

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Starter is Fixed - One More Time - We Hope

Today was a red-letter day as I picked up the newly re-rebuilt starter from Bodium Engineering (that's what they call any shop that does mechanical or metal related work). They had rebuilt ours over a month ago and we had problems with it intermittently and could not get it working at all last Friday which I probably already described in a previous blog. Well, after tearing the whole ignition and battery cable system apart several times, cleaning all terminations with sandpaper and checking every wire with both continuity and voltage load tests for voltage drops, and not finding any problems, we were pulling our hair out and not sleeping well. On Friday, Bodium pronounced the starter in top form and that the problem obviously had to be on Maggie Drum.

I was suspecting the start battery which was over 5 years old, which is a good life for a start battery, but it was a high-quality spiral-wound Optima battery and I was not sure. But without a proper load tester I could not do a simple, direct test. Bodium had me so pointed in the wrong direction that I went out and got a new start battery (not cheap here) and tossed the old one since we don't have room for a spare battery running around, and that did nothing to fix the problem. This, despite the house batteries not cranking the engine, which I convinced myself was because they were the same age and running down. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It was in fact the starter and it was an intermittent problem caused by a hanging brush and a damaged commutator. I won't go in to the technicalities but it can result in an on again, off again, problem, which is what we had, although ours was mostly off. And when it did try to turn over, it was groaning like it was a weak battery. I finally got it put to bed by finding some battery jumper cables in town after a lengthy search and jumpered direct from my new, and presumably top notch and strong, new battery. Nothing! So it was the starter, so once again I took it off and back to Bodium.

P.S. - Bus rides are an interesting adventure here in and of themselves. You can flag down one of the numerous buses that go by every few minutes, or seconds sometimes, and if they are going in your general direction, they will take you right to the door of where you are going. That goes for everyone on the bus, which is a passenger van, so that you go to some amazing places on roads that donkeys might have trouble with. A direct drive to Bodium might take 10 minutes but you might be on a less direct path taking 45 minutes or more. You see areas that most tourists would never see I can tell you that, and there are zero street signs. I am not sure how the passengers tell the driver where they are going as they speak fast in Bislama (pigdin English) so I can't make it out, but they do and they go and make turn after turn up roads that you are sure will just peter out and die. You go past the shacks that people call home here - no doors, dirt floors, chickens and dogs and pigs running around, everyone barefoot, wood stoves in "kitchens" that are just smaller and more run-down shacks next to the bedroom shacks. The people sleep on mats directly on the ground. You see them picking lice off the children's hair, or off each others hair. Some yards are tidier than others, many with ornamental plants in organized gardens, but almost none have grass yards, just hard-packed dirt. And, they all seem happy as clams, weeping sores on their legs and all. And, we really like these people. They are great!

I buy a local Vila paper every morning I can from Jimmy. Jimmy has had some kind of accident and one arm has been amputated clean with the shoulder. He carries a stack of papers every morning and stands in front of the Department of Finance for Vanuatu, which I am sure is a major good location for selling papers, right across from the main market on the main street. After I had bought three papers from him and said hello, he asked me my name and gave me his and I grabbed his good hand in a "shake". He lost his right arm so it is not a normal right to right shake. Great guy and well known around town.

Well, it is blowing up a near gale out here in the mooring field and the rigging is howling and the boat rocking. We don't even pay much attention to that any more. We don't see a weather window until next Tuesday (today is Thursday here). Every day I order wind and pressure charts over the radio email that go out 10 days. You pick a target date and watch what is happening with the high and low pressure systems. If a big high gets close to a deep low, you can get a dangerous "squash" zone of very high winds and big seas between them, and this can last for several days for slow moving systems. The idea is to go to NZ when a High is directly south of here and the winds are blowing more out of the east than out of the south or south-east, which is the direction we have to go. But you need to make sure you don't run in to one of the squashes or worse weather once you are committed and on your way south as there isn't any place to go hide when you are 600 miles from anything. BTW - we felt the latest earthquake in the boat day before yesterday morning - a first for Maggie Drum. We were both laying in bed and awake at 5 minutes after six o'clock and a dinghy was going by outside, but the boat started shaking in a funny way, a way we had never felt before. Just a minor shake but definite. You notice those kind of things after being on the boat so long. Neither one of us discussed it until later and then I found out on the internet that the quake was centered south of Fiji towards NZ and way deep in the earth. No tsumani, no other damage. Very weird. We are in the Pacific Rim of Fire area so earthquakes, volcanos and tsunamis are par for the course. Thankfully, tsunamis are fairly rare.

We plan to go to New Caledonia and check in and out of Noumea. We will only stay long enough to get duty-free fuel and wait for another weather window. It looks like we could go all the way to NZ with the weather shaping up for next week but need fuel and we can't get it here duty-free as we officially checked out last Friday and don't want to check back in and out which we would have to do to get the good price. Lots of boats here are going to Australia on an annual rally called the Vanuatu to Bundaberg (Bundy for short) rally. That is a shorter and much easier passage from here and we have really considered it but still want to go back to NZ to deal with the car, but mostly because marinas are too expensive in OZ. Everything is more expensive down there. The US dollar keeps dropping in value which makes everything more expensive (and cars and trucks and gas in the US too) everywhere.

We'll post a new blog just before or after we take off. It is a short 400nm passage to New Cal which will take just over 3 days. Then the trip to NZ will be about 700nm and potentially nastier but with the shorter duration than from here, the weather is easier to pick.

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Catatonic in Vila - Oct 8th

We have not written updates for the last few days. We are in "stable horse back running back to the barn" mode. We went from Lolowai on Ambae in one long day and arrived at the Segond Channel and picked up a mooring ball at the Aore Resort across the big wide channel from Luganville on Espiritu Santo Island, or Santo as everyone calls it. The mooring was nice, as was the resort. It was in the lee of Aore Island which meant a nice quite night after a long, tiring passage and it had a very nice restaurant that unfortunately was very expensive. The mooring cost $12/day and everything else was extra, including trash, but they had free spring water at the very nice dinghy dock. We left the next morning for the anchorage across the channel (the cheap seats) which was good holding but very windy and rolly at times. It is at the Beachfront Resort which has a good beach for dinghy landings but is totally exposed to the long fetch across the channel and wind. We got soaked the first time in and out.

Luganville was actually a reasonably good town to visit. Much smaller than Port Vila, it is the second largest town in Vanuatu and the secondary "capital" of the northern islands. The main drag is long and hot and 4 lanes wide. It was a big staging point for hundreds of thousands of US troops and navy during the big push to destroy the Japanese in the South Pacific, with airfields and quonset huts everywhere, many in use still today. The resort anchorage is a moderately long walk in to town which we did several times or we took a cab for $2 each way, or mixed it up. Internet was available but glacially slow. Lots of small stores and shops with three banks but we had to stand in line at the Wespac to withdraw money as they don't have an ATM there. Everyone was friendly and said hello as you walk down the sidewalks. It is a mecca for scuba divers who come to see the USS Coolidge which was a large luxury cruise ship that was converted for troop carrier duty during the war. Coming in to the channel it hit a friendly mine and sunk in about 150 feet of water and it is now a premier deep dive site where you can explore the passages underwater and see the engine room, ballrooms, etc. at about 120-140 feet (very deep for your average dive). There is also the Million Dollar Point where the US drove off hundreds and hundreds of tanks, jeeps, trucks and other equipment rather than give it to the locals after the war. The locals figured the US would just leave it anyway so they did not bid on it and the colonel or whoever got mad and threw it in to the drink. It is now an excellent dive site as well. We did not dive on any of this - a sacraledge in some divers' minds but oh well - not in the budget. I was getting over my food poisoning or whatever any way.

We stayed a few days and had to say our goodbyes to our good buddies, Bob and Dianna on White Swan. They will stay around the Santo area before departing for Australia (OZ to everyone out here) with the Bundaberg rally later in the month. We had cruised with them since Zihuatanejo off and on and rehooked up with them full time in Fiji this year. Safe Passage to them!

We had to get going to get back to Port Vila to prep for going south to NZ again. We are of mixed minds about going there and don't know if we will continue cruising, sell the boat, ship it back to the US or just keep going. We need to work to restock the cruising kitty though so will have to do something. Along the way we stopped two places on the island of Malakula, which is a large island with much to see and do. However, we were in movement mode and only stopped for overnights. The first leg was a long slog fighting adverse currents, winds and waves. It took us hours longer than planned and we got in to this tight little inlet right at sundown with reefs ahead and on both sides in shallow water. The anchor would not set well after three tries so we just left it and hoped that it would be OK. Not your best situation and I did not sleep well. The wind came up in the middle of the night and we held but I came up twice to make sure. There was a large and relatively unshy dugong there that we saw several several times that night and in the morning before we left.

We left thinking that our next leg would be short and sweet - only 20 miles. It was another bad trip with even worse winds and waves on our nose. It took us over 6 hours to go that far and we were beat by the time we got in to the beautiful, large anchorage at South West Bay. There was supposed to be a custom village festival there that was a makeup for one that did not happen a month ago but we could not stay. The holding was good and it was well protected so we had a restful night. We woke up in the morning to find White Swan about 200 yards from us anchored out. They tried to get to the little anchorage we did the night before but got there so late it was dark and did not trust it to go in so went to SW Bay which is much easier to get in to. Never fun coming in to a strange anchorage in the dark, especially when you are tired. Many a boat has been lost that way, and many brain cells have been wiped, along with stomach lining.

We left the next morning though as it looked like the weather was going to moderate and turn more easterly making it possible to do the 100 miles to Vila a cake walk - wrong!!! It was another slog, this time all day and all night. We sailed all of 20 minutes then motored the rest in hard winds, waves, big swell, rain and lightning all day and night. We obviously did not get the weather we hoped for. But all was well and we got to Efate Island just as the sun was coming up in the east. We had some small dolphins during the day and went up to the bow to watch which was a trip as it was bucking up and down like crazy. We had to hold on tight to the rails to keep in the boat. On the way back I thought of reminding Cindy to be careful but thought she would know to do that and all of a sudden I hear this big whump and Cindy has fallen backwards on to the anchor at the windlass on her tailbone. She has scrapes and bruises and a very sore tailbone as I write. Next time I will go ahead and say something.

So here we are in Vila. I had about 2 hours sleep last night and Cindy had about 4 so we are almost catatonic and sleep walking. It was good getting in though and we checked in with Customs, the internet cafe (slow), and got some fresh gas for the outboard and generator for our trip south to NZ. We have a long list of things to get - diesel, water, food, laundry, propane - and some things to fix and do. I think my starter battery is going (an Optima spiral wound which should not be going right now) but the starter is holding up. It will be a potentially rough passage of 1200nm to NZ with possible very nasty weather so we will do our best to look for a good weather window before taking off. So far that looks to be at least 10 days out which is as far as I can get forecasts so who knows. We will leave in the next two weeks in any case.

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