by Judy Handley | Sep 14, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 323, Year 5 Ninety-nine Years of Birthday Wishes
Date: Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Weather: Sunny Day with NW Winds 10-15
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
Our son Justin is thirty-three years old today and Mark’s brother Steve is exactly double that. 33 + 66 = 99 years. That’s a lot of living. And tomorrow Mark’s sister Jeanie will be sixteen. Well, sixteen plus a few decades. So . . . .
Happy Birthday, Justin!
Happy Birthday, Steve!
Happy Birthday, Jeanie!
We talked to Justin on the phone last night and he, Jo, and Ziggy are back home in New Mexico after an extended stay in England with Jo’s family. So welcome home, JJ&Z. The US government has allowed Jo to return while they decide whether or not to approve a ten-year unconditional Visa for her. So at least for now, all is well. Ziggy talked to us on the phone by making various animal sounds on cue. We’re anxiously awaiting a new batch of photos on their Picasa website so we can see just how much he has grown this summer.
It was another low key day making granola, doing laundry, and all of the same old, same old. We did try to snorkel in the same area as yesterday but the water was much higher today. The same beauty was there, it was just far below us. Tomorrow Mark and Bruce and Tristen of Pioneer are going with John from Sakatia Towers back down to the village on the south end of the island to cut up the donated spinnaker to make pirogue sails. The one prototype that Mark made has been trialed and got a thumbs up from the locals, so now they can safely cut the rest of the sails and Mark can get them sewn before we leave here next week. I’ll stay on Windbird and try to name the remainder of the underwater photos and come up with a “Best of.” Madagascar folder to post.
Ed and Lynne of Constance and Carla and Pieter of Odulphus came over for sundowners tonight. Carla called it the Captains’ Meeting as the purpose was to make plans for our trip south and west to South Africa. Odulphus is leaving tomorrow and will check out the end of the month in Majunga. We plan to check out sometime before the end of next week and start our trek south. I think Constance will be leaving at about the same time, so the three boats will keep in touch via a radio net at 5:45 pm each evening. Hopefully we will all reach a point in southern Madagascar at about the same time and head across to Richards Bay in South Africa at the same time.
by Judy Handley | Sep 13, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 322, Year 5 The Land of Giants
Date: Monday, September 13, 2010
Weather: Cloudy & Rainy Early, Then Mostly Sunny
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
The weather this morning was unusually dreary. A dark cloud hung around for a bit and then dumped some rain. Usually the sun would come out after a little downpour, but today it just stayed dreary. So our plans for a mid-morning snorkel were cancelled. There was just not enough sun for underwater photos. So I continued working on naming fish pictures while Mark was on the computer linking photos to the website. We were able to access the Goldstone Picasa website and see summer photos of Jonah and Sam I know I’m prejudiced, but they are really beautiful little guys. We haven’t heard from Justin and Jo yet but we certainly hope they are home. They have promised to put up new photos of Ziggy and we can’t wait to see those.
Around noon, we saw that Nadine, Bruce, and Tristen of Pioneer were in the channel between Nosy Sakatia and Nosy Be just south of the Sakatia Towers anchoring area snorkeling. Yesterday when we returned from our way too shallow snorkel we noticed for the first time that the shallow area just south of us is full of coral. Previously we thought it was just a shallow sand bank. Mark got in the dinghy and went down to find out what Nadine and Bruce were seeing underwater, and he immediately returned and told me to get my suit on. In two minutes we were in the dinghy and two minutes later we were in the water. What a delightful surprise. This shallow area is full of various types of coral, sea fans, sponges, and small fish that are way bigger than we have ever seen. Bluegreen chromis which are usually no more than two inches long are more than double that here. These normally benign little fish were all of a sudden absolutely beautiful when mixed with bright orange and raspberry pink Anthias. The last time we saw Anthias was in Vanuatu, but here they are bigger, more numerous, and just beautiful. All of this was mixed with giant pink fan corals, white star fish with bright, bright red trimmings, the biggest clams we have ever seen, and a few fish varieties that just aren’t in the identification books. Conditions today were just perfect. We’ll give it another try tomorrow as there are just so many things to see. And we finally saw a nudibranch. Yeah! And Nadine saw a lionfish that was as big as a bushel basket. We’ll definitely look for that tomorrow. I don’t know what makes the fish so big here, but we do feel like we are in the land of giants.
Tonight Bruce, Nadine, and their daughter Tristen came over for a make-your-own pizza dinner. I had the pizza shells pre-cooked and Tristen had a great time building a pizza for herself and one for her mom and dad. We did a little slide show from today’s snorkel and just generally had a wonderful evening together. Bruce, Nadine, and Tristen will be flying back to South Africa on Saturday. Their trip here on Pioneer was a boat delivery and now they must get back to life on land in Cape Town, but I think they are already planning their next family sailing adventure.
by Judy Handley | Sep 12, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 321, Year 5 Quiet Sunday
Date: Sunday, September 12, 2010
Weather: Mostly Sunny Day
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
Today was one of those days where you find yourself constantly busy but accomplishing nothing major-just one little job after another. Mark got both of our bilge pumps working properly once again and put new stuffing in the stuffing box around the prop shaft. So the constant trickle of water that was coming in has stopped. I did some gardening. I pulled up all the basil, cut the tops off, put them in water to root, and then took a fork and turned the soil in the pots. I have six little pots, now four with arugula and two with basil. We use the arugula like lettuce on sandwiches and that is why we need more of it. I went through all the onions and garlic and learned that I have about two pounds of red onions from India that are still good and about six pounds of Madagascar red onions. The size of an onion has shrunk quite dramatically since Thailand. There you could buy onions the size of most you buy at the store in the US. In India, we would sort through bags and bags of onions at the market to come up with the biggest they had which were always smaller than a tennis ball. Here in Madagascar we are down to red onions the size of a golf ball! Surely onions will get bigger again once we are in South Africa.
Mark also spent a good deal of the morning trying to get photos uploaded to Picasa on the web and then linked to our website. The process is excruciatingly slow and very expensive. By tomorrow he hopes to have the “Best of.” folders from Moramba Bay up, so if you want to see those go to Days 293 to 299. We’ll try to get a “Best of Madagascar Underwater” folder uploaded, but then I think we will stop trying and just wait until we get to South Africa to do the rest. The whole episode of trying to get photos uploaded has just been so frustrating. After the photo frustrations, we had yet another frustrating experience. At 11 am we took time to go for a snorkel and it was a total bust. Low tide should have been at 12:30 pm, but there was already a south setting flood which caused the water to be cloudy and the current hard to fight. Ed and Lynne went snorkeling at the same time and Lynne did see a large cowry with its mantle out. Mark found an octopus in a hole in the coral, but it didn’t come out to play. And I just fought with the dinghy trying to keep it off the shallow coral. We have had so many wonderful snorkeling days that I guess we were due for a bad one. Mark went up to talk to John at Sakatia Towers this after and he showed Mark a particular mangrove tree. When the water is just at the base, it is time to go snorkeling. I guess local knowledge goes a long way. So tomorrow morning we’ll use the mangrove indicator and see if things are any better.
When Mark went up to Sakatia Towers in the afternoon to talk with John about a few things and I stayed on the boat and named more underwater photos and called our daughter Heather and family. We needed to find out if our new boat documentation has arrived and it has. So now Heather can send this to South Africa so it will be there when we arrive. It was so wonderful to hear Sam playing a harmonica concert and to hear Jonah talking. He says “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” (the name of an Eric Carle book), momma, daddy, and football. He loves balls of all kinds and once he said football, he just said it over and over. He is also quite good at making kissing sounds over the phone. We will wait and call Justin, Jo, and Ziggy tomorrow as they might still be traveling. I’m hoping we’ll get an email telling us that all went well when they went to get on the plane in London this time. I know they will be happy to be home.
by Judy Handley | Sep 11, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 320, Year 5 Underwater Fantasia
Date: Saturday, September 11, 2010
Weather: Overcast Early, Clearing; Winds 10-12 NNW
Latitude: 13 18.079 S
Longitude: 048 10.715 E
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
You just never know where you are going to end up at the end of a day of cruising. Somehow we gravitated back to Nosy Sakatia which is home base in Madagascar for us. We are here with Constance and Far Niente from the US, Kea and another catamaran from France, and Pioneer and Dream Catcher from South Africa. So it really is like being back home after a week’s vacation of snorkeling. We started our morning in Hell-ville by going to shore one more time. We decided that we should buy beer for our trip south, so we took in the empty plastic crates of HEAVY bottles to shore and traded them in for full cases of cans. Cans are twice as expensive, but they will be able to be recycled in South Africa. If we took bottles south we would have to Deep Six them and that is environmentally not a good thing to do. As soon as that deed was done, we upped anchor and headed for Tani Keli even though it was totally overcast. We were hoping for a miracle of blue skies and no wind so our snorkeling would be perfect. And we got what we hoped for. We had an incredible two hour snorkel under clear, sunny skies in crystal clear water. We saw a couple of fish we have never seen before. We swam with a school of hundreds of neon blue fusiliers. We swam with silvery white, round pompanos with glistening yellow fins. This was just amazing. There were hundreds of these fish and they just hovered at the surface as we swam through and around them. We didn’t see any turtles today but we did see a huge octopus that let us observe and photograph him for quite some time. I saw the octopus and went to get Mark so he could photograph it. I pointed to it and Mark could not see it. He was right above it, but it was so well camouflaged that he really could not find it. I kept pointed and then the octopus changed colors and Mark zoomed in. This guy was twice as big as the one we saw in Mitsio and it put on quite a show for us. Mark and I both wonder how the octopus senses the color of the coral around them. This particular octopus is a common one of the species Cyanea. It is a deep maroon color in the natural state and then totally transforms to look like the surroundings. Watching this has just been amazing for us.
After snorkeling we were supposed to be headed to Russian Bay and then to another small island that is supposed to have incredible snorkeling. But just before we left Tani Keli Mark asked if I would mind if we returned to Nosy Sakatia. We have had a number of boat repairs that we have had to attend to in the past few days such as replacing the impellor on salt water pump on the engine and turning the gypsy on the windlass around so we can pull up our anchor chain without having it slip terribly. And now our bilge pumps are not working quite right and the packing gland around our prop needs to be replaced as it is leaking badly. Mark said he would feel more secure working on these problems where there are other boats around to help out if we have problems, so off we went to Nosy Sakatia.
And here is one more amazing thing that happened today. We went up to Sakatia Towers for sundowners and I sat down beside a young woman I had not met before. She introduced herself as Carmen. She and her husband Olivier are on a catamaran from France that we have seen in Mitsio and Hell-ville over the past few days. The amazing thing was that she is an environmental engineer working on climate change with the UN and many nations from around the world. Our daughter has just launched a blog site in the US dealing with climate change and Carmen was quite excited to see the blog. Carmen and Olivier have a thirteen year-old son and a six year-old daughter onboard and will be rounding South Africa and arriving in Brazil about the time we do in March. Our daughter Heather and her family are planning to meet us in Brazil, so we might be able to get Carmen and Heather together. It is just such a small, small world.
by Judy Handley | Sep 10, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 319, Year 5 Another Day in Hell-ville
Date: Friday, September 10, 2010
Weather: Most Cloudy, Morning Rain
Location: Hell-ville, Nosy Be, NW Madagascar
We’re still in Hell-ville but will leave early in the morning and head for Tana Keli to get in another snorkel in Madagascar’s clearest water. From there we will probably go to Russian Bay for the night and then out to a small island that both Pioneer and Constance have told us has spectacular snorkeling. By Monday we should be back at Nosy Sakatia and just hang out for a few days while getting ready for our trip to South Africa. At least that’s the plan for now.
Our second day in Hell-ville was productive. We started our morning by getting six more jerry jugs of diesel. That’s 120 liters of diesel and we pay 294,000 Ariary ($150 US). That means we are paying $5 US per gallon which is outrageous, but it doesn’t get any cheaper in South Africa. We just need to sail more and motor less. Yesterday we took the dinghy to a little landing area to the right of the main wharf. It was high tide and plenty deep and we were greeted by the infamous Tu-pac, AKA Johnny I. He was good to us and we were good to him. He actually got us a better deal on a taxi into town to get fuel than we were expecting. This morning we went back to the same area and this time we were greeted by the younger Johnny. We’ll call him Johnny II. We have met him before and he comes highly recommended, but actually the cost of the taxi this morning was higher than yesterday, and that was after strong negotiations. Johnny II did tell us to make sure we came to the main wharf when we returned, but we were not sure why. That became evident later in the day. When I took Mark back to town we went to the main wharf as Johnny II had told us to do. He met us and Mark took off with his computer to get the English versions of Microsoft Office and of Avast, the anti-virus protection we are now using, installed. He also went to the market to get fresh veggies. When I went back to pick him up the tide was very low and we now understood why Johnny II told us to come to the main wharf. The area where we had entered earlier was totally dry. Later in the afternoon I took Mark in one more time to get two more jerry jugs of diesel and the bananas that I had forgotten to put on the list earlier. By this time, it was obvious that we were not leaving the harbor today, so we settled in for another night here. We have been surrounded by boats we know from India and Chagos-Koukouri that we first met in India left today headed back to Southeast Asia, Armelle T from Brussels that we met in Chagos is still anchored beside us, and Single Malt, a Swiss boat that we have known since Sail Indonesia is still anchored behind us. We are surrounded by friends and all seems safe. Hell-ville has a terrible reputation, but cruisers this year have not found that to be the case. Hope that lasts until we are out of here!
by Judy Handley | Sep 9, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 318, Year 5 Lots of Good News
Date: Thursday, September 9, 2010
Weather: Sunny Day; Winds Not Cooperating
Latitude: 13 24.474 S
Longitude: 048 17.064 E
Location: Hell-ville, Nosy Be, NW Madagascar
Mark’s brother Steve is a grandpa again. We received an email from Steve today saying that we should already know about the birth, so somehow we missed the earlier message. But the happy news is that Steve’s daughter Kristi gave birth to Caleb Stephen on August 23rd. Congratulations to Grandpa Steve and to Kristi, Nathan, and first born Hayden. We are very happy for all of you.
And while on the subject of babies, I will mention that we went to Nosy Komba today to see if the Black Lemurs had any babies yet. We were told in August that the babies would be born in September. Only one has been born and we were so lucky to see the mother with her little baby girl. Female Black Lemurs are brown with an off-white ruff around the face and the males are black. We were told today that both male and female babies are dark brown when born. The baby female lemur we saw today was definitely dark brown and looked more like a newborn kitten than the baby Cockerel Safika lemurs we saw in Moramba Bay. The Black Lemur babies are not as cute as he Safikas, but it was VERY special to have the mother with her baby holding onto to her tummy hop on our shoulders and heads. We thought the mother would not come near us with the baby, but not so. Our guide today was a good one. We could tell, and the animals could tell that he loved them. In addition to having the mother and baby lemur hop on our heads and shoulders, we were able to wrap the Madagascar boas around our necks and we had chameleons crawling on our heads. It was a fun trip through the lemur park. We bought some pieces of recelet (Komba embroidery) and went to Chez Yolanda’s for lunch. We had first heard about this little restaurant in the Lonely Planet and then we heard more about it from John Sheppard at Sakatia Towers. Yolanda and her husband are sailors and when she is in Komba, the seafood served at her restaurant is the best. When we arrived today her two daughters who speak absolutely no English were the only ones there. They went to find a young man who could translate for us and he explained that Yolanda was in Hell-ville. He said he could prepare the food, but that we must understand that the food would not be prepared by Yolanda. That was fine by us and as reported, the crevettes (shrimps) were absolutely delicious. We ordered crevettes l’ail which is shrimp sautéed in butter and garlic and crevettes en sauce (tomato). The shrimp were huge. And just as we were finishing, Yolanda appeared. She wanted to make sure all was okay and it was.
We returned to Windbird and motored against wind and current to Hell-ville. We were hoping to get the English up-dates on Mark’s computer and to get fuel. We will be able to get the computer updates tomorrow morning and we did get six jerry jugs of fuel late this afternoon. We will get another six jugs tomorrow morning and that should just about fill us up. I had hoped to be out of here in time to snorkel at Tani Keli tomorrow at low tide, but I don’t think we will make that. So once again, I’m not sure where we will go tomorrow after the computer up-dates are completed. If it is too late, we will just stay here and go to Tani Keli the next day.
Now for the other really good news . . . our son emailed this afternoon to let us know that Jo learned late yesterday that her paperwork has been received and is being processed so that she can return to the United States. It will take up to a year for her to hear the final decision on whether she will be granted a ten-year unconditional Visa so she can stay in the US, but at least for now Justin, Jo, and Ziggy can get on with their lives.
