Day 136, Year 2: A Sailor’s Delight
Date: Friday, September 7, 2007
Weather: Sunny Day, ENE 15
Latitude: 16 degrees 28.408 minutes
Longitude: 167 degrees 49.215 minutes
Location: Gaspard Bay, Malekula, Vanuatu
If the early bird catches the worm, we caught it this morning. We pulled up anchor from behind tiny Suaro Island and motored between the mainland and Uri Island to the pass that would take us back out to sea. The sky was blue with puffy white clouds on the horizon and wispy white clouds above. And the sun was shinely brightly. Right away we put up the mainsail without any reefs and as soon as we were out of the pass and on course for Gaspard, we rolled out the full Yankee headsail. We were on
a perfect beam reach with fairly calm seas. Our course was 220 degrees and the wind was coming from just east of North at 120 degrees. The difference gave us an almost 90 degree angle to the wind and we enjoyed the ride. We put out the staysail for a couple of hours, but as the wind moved a little more behind us, we had to roll it in. For at least two hours we had the perfect sail. Mark said he thought it was the kind of sailing he had thought we would have been doing on our 3,000 mile trek
from the Galapagos to the Marquesas, but that just didn’t happen. We don’t get many days like this, so we really enjoyed it. We could see Ambrym Island with it’s volcanic cones topped with clouds and Penecost Island off to port. Penecost always seem to have low-lying clouds over it which makes it look a little foreboding. As the day progressed, we could Epi Island, little Emae Island, and even Efate, our final destination here in Vanuatu. It was a beautiful day with the full range of sailing
opportunities–beam reach with a full compliment of sails moving along at six to seven knots; broad reach with headsail and mainsail moving at about six knots; and finally a downwind sail with just the headsail poled out moving along at five knots. We had a favorable current with us the entire day and didn’t have to turn on the engine until we were ready to enter the pass that would take us to Gaspard Bay.
We arrived in Gaspard Bay just before 3 PM, had a very late lunch, and then launched our dinghy. We have had continued problems with the dinghy motor, and Mark had worked on it during the trip today and wanted to try it out. It is running better, but still not at full capacity. This is an old engine and we hope to baby it along for sometime to come, but right now it definitely needs some tender loving care. We took the dinghy out and ran it full tilt. It was certainly better than yesterday,
but not quite back up to speed. I then drove and took Mark out to the shallow reefs nearby. He jumped in to check out the underwater world. There wasn’t much to see, but he found a piece of dead coral he could stand on and washed his hair and bathed in the salt water. We had taken shampoo and soap along in case this was a possibility. When we got back to Windbird, he used the solar shower to rinse off with fresh water. We are doing fine with our water making, but we have been trying to do a
better job of conserving water. Salt water wash-offs conserve water and work fine as long as there is fresh water with which to rinse.
We have spent a lot of time this evening looking at our future cruising schedule. We will arrive in Australia in November, stay there through the cyclone season, and then work our way up the Coral Coast and across the top of Australia to Darwin. In July (2008), we will leave Darwin with the Sail Indonesia Rally. We spent time tonight trying to find the various ports that are part of the rally. We don’t yet have charts of that part of the world, so we were using a world atlas and our electronic
charting. What we discovered is that names are spelled much differently from source to source, so we still have a lot of searching to do to find all of the ports. Once we return to Port Vila on Efate we will be able to search the internet to fill in the blanks.
We plan to spend the day here tomorrow and hope to take the dinghy back up to Sakao to snorkel the reef across from the island. Late in the afternoon, we will take off on an overnight to Port Havannah on the north end of Efate. We can see it from here, but it is almost 80 miles away. Once there, we will spend a few days and then head on around to Port Vila to prepare for our passage to New Caledonia.
News Flash: We don’t get many news flashes out here, but we did get an email from our daughter Heather late today saying that she and Jed are actually going to be able to close today on a home they have been trying to buy. Closing had been put off due to some lack of documentation in paperwork, but it miraculously appeared today and closing happened instantly. So, congratulations to Heather and Jed. Now you just have to figure out how to sell the house, buy a boat, and sail around the world.
It’s the greatest!
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| 070907 Day 136 Malekula, Vanuatu–Port Stanley to Gaspard Bay |
