Day 268, Year 5 Thinking of Katie
Date: Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Latitude: 13 degrees 18.060 minutes S
Longitude: 048 degrees 10.727 minutes E
Weather: Beautiful Day, 10 Knots of Wind-Perfect Sail
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar

We’ve been thinking of Katie all day today. She is my niece’s daughter, in her late twenties, and she has thyroid cancer. She had one operation last year, but some more nodes appeared and today she had surgery for the second time. Katie, we are thinking of you and hope all goes well. Katie is a brave young woman and has met each challenge with strength and grace, and we know she will do that again.

We are starting to get the hang of the land breeze-sea breeze thing here on the northwest coast of Madagascar, at least for the month of July. I’m sure it won’t stay the same, but for now it is pretty consistent. We waited to leave Russian Bay until the afternoon sea breeze started to kick in and we had a glorious afternoon of sailing. We only had ten knots of wind but it was right on the beam and then moved a bit behind us, but it was enough to move us along nicely. We only had to travel eighteen miles and it took us five hours, so it was slow but peaceful and calm. There’s something to be said about that! And I finished naming and organizing all of the Madagascar photos to date, so I am celebrating tonight!

Now the serious research begins on the best way to get ourselves to the Ankarana Special Reserve inland and north of here. There we will see the limestone pinnacle karst called tsingy, caves, and a forest full of critters, mostly lemurs of different types, chameleons, geckos, more ground boas, and birds. We’ve read the books we have about travel in Madagascar and tomorrow we will talk to John at Sakatia Towers. It could be that we will be going as soon as Friday, but probably we will wait until Monday. We are hoping that John can look after Windbird while we are away. When we return we will have to make a decision on which way to go from here. Some people leave here, go to Mayotte in the Comoros, and then hop down the Mozambique coast. Others leave here and continue the day hops to what I call the end of the northwest crescent and then hop over to the Mozambique coast and down. And now we have the new idea of continuing to follow the Madagascar coast much further south before heading across to Richards Bay in South Africa. We talked to Ed and Lynne tonight and both of us will continue to gather information. It is a real toss up, so what feels right to us might not be what feels right to them. One thing is for sure, we will both end up in Richards Bay no matter which way we go. Lynne’s infection is getting better. She has only been on the antibiotic for five days, so in a week when she is off the antibiotics she will know more. But things look good at this point.