Day 273, Year 5 Second Madagascar Full Moon at Sakatia
Date: Monday, July 26, 2010
Weather: Perfectly Beautiful Day, VERY Light Winds
Latitude: 13 18.089 S
Longitude: 048 10.666 E
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
Sakatia Towers has become our home away from home. We celebrated our first Madagascar full moon here ion June 26 which was our grandson Jonah’s first birthday. And here we were again tonight sitting on the gracious deck at Sakatia Towers to watch that most glorious orb rise above the craters on Nosy Be. John Sheppard’s hospitality and the comfort of his huge deck is just so comfortable. It is wonderful to have such a welcoming place to sit and meet new friends. Tonight we enjoyed the company of two South African couples who are doing a boat delivery. One couple is from Cape Town and the other from the lovely port of Knysna, northeast of the Cape. Everyone raves about Knysna, but the entry is notoriously difficult. But now we have friends there, so if we decide to go in, they can help us with local knowledge. Both couples are considerably younger than us, one with a ten year-old and the other with a seven year-old aboard. They were quite interested in our up-coming inland venture and are anxious to hear how it goes. They have not been brave enough to attempt inland travel. Since I don’t think of myself as brave, I thought maybe I’m just being stupid to think that we can make this work with no way to communicate other than hand signals. But I trust that it will work. I’m hoping to be able to report to them that it was a wonderful trip. We shall see.
Unfortunately the winds today were non-existent today so we motored the thirty miles back ‘home’ from Nosi Iringa. Dream Catcher, the South African boat that did the repairs on Constance, was here in the spot that we had hoped to anchor in so we went closer to land than comfortable and dropped the anchor. That spot just didn’t seem right, so we came back out and anchored on the outside of Dream Catcher. But this spot doesn’t seem like the right spot to leave Windbird, either. So tomorrow we are hoping to swap anchorage locations with Dream Catcher. They will be here for a couple of days and the folks we met tonight will be in and out as well, so hopefully they can help keep watch on Windbird while we are away. We’ll work out the details tomorrow and take off at 6 am on Wednesday. We are really looking forward to our explore in Ankarana Special Reserve. We just hope the transportation and lodging reservations all work as planned.
