by Judy Handley | Aug 6, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 284, Year 5 Lost in the National Forest
Date: Friday, August 6, 2010
Weather: More Perfect Weather
Location: Lokobe National Park, Nosy Be, NW Madagascar
So much for a small compass! Tina, Barry, and their youngest son Devin, Ed and Lynne, and Mark and I went to shore this morning, found a South African camp where a boat is being built, and arranged for a young man to lead us through the national forest to Ampasipohy, a village to the northeast. We knew that the resort called Jungle Village is there and that it is a tourist destination. We wanted to walk there on the hope of seeing lemurs and birds as we walked through the forest, but we had only two wildlife spottings. One was a beautiful black and blue butterfly that I have seen showcased on post cards here and the other was a very young panther chameleon that I almost stepped on. I saw something white underfoot and hopped to avoid stepping on it. We then saw that it was a young chameleon and were able to pick it up and let it crawl up our arms. But we saw no sign of lemurs or birds on the way across. We stopped and had a cool drink, looked at the items the villagers had for sale for tourists, and then confidently started our walk home. Being confident was the first mistake and I’m not sure what was the next mistake, but somehow we found ourselves not on the path from which we had come. We used the compass and tried to find our way but in the end we walked for about two hours in the wrong direction and found ourselves on a beach on the east side of park when we should have been on the south side. Thankfully we had cell phones with us and Barry and Tina’s older children had cell phones back on their boat. Once we knew where we were, we called and their older son Michael came to rescue us. We learned a couple of lessons. One is when you know you are not on the path from which you came, go back and find the right path. The second is when there are guides available, don’t be cheap. Pay them to lead you.
Barry and Tina of Dream Catcher and Ed and Lynne of Constance came over for sundowners tonight. Barry and Tina, along with four of their children, left South Africa in April and have made it this far. This is there first long distance cruising experience and they are trying to decide whether to continue on around the world to the east or whether to return to South Africa and then across the Atlantic. Tomorrow we are pulling up anchor and going across to Nosy Komba so I can have my lemur fix, but then we will return here tomorrow evening and are going to show the Dream Catcher crew our PowerPoint presentations of our trip across the Pacific. That should be fun.
The news update on our son Justin and his wife Jo and baby Ziggy is that Justin is on his way back to New Mexico and that they have hired a lawyer who says he can get Jo and Ziggy back into the US in five weeks instead of six months. The whole situation seems surreal and we have recommended that they contact their Senators and Representatives to see if there is anything they can do. In the meantime, we now have absolutely no internet connection as the virus on Mark’s computer has gotten more invasive. So we are back to only HAM radio only for communication. That means we can only receive and send emails very early in the morning and in the 6-8 pm part of the evening. If you have sent messages to our website, we cannot read those. Hopefully, we will figure out how to deal with this virus soon, but in the meantime we are a bit handicapped. Bear with us.
by Judy Handley | Aug 5, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 283, Year 5 Wild Shopping Spree in Hell-ville
Date: Thursday, August 5, 2010
Weather: More Perfect Weather
Latitude: 13 24.798 S
Longitude: 048 20.287 E
Location: Lokobe National Park, Nosy Be, NW Madagascar
Staying on the boat in the Hell-ville harbor overnight turned out to be just fine. The place has gotten a really bad name with cruisers as theft has been common, but we have everything locked down tight and we had no hassles. Everything was going fine until we checked our email this morning. Yesterday I had written to our son Justin and his wife Jo and Ziggy to welcome them home to New Mexico after a month’s visit with Jo’s family in England. Justin wrote back explaining that they are not home but are still in England. When Jo went to get on the plane to come home they wouldn’t let her on as there is problem with her Green Card. Evidently it expired while she was out of the country and as of this morning’s email they don’t think she will be able to return for at least six months. We haven’t heard an update so we can only hope that something could be worked out to let her return.
After receiving the email, I didn’t have long to sit and worry as Barry and Tina of Dream Catcher arrived in their dinghy to pick us up before I could even get an email sent back to Justin and Jo. The taxi was waiting on shore, so off we went. We paid 10,000 Ariary or about $5 US an hour to have the taxi driver stay with us, wait while we shopped or filled up fuel jugs, take us back to the dock to deliver fuel to the boats, wait while that load was delivered, and then take us back into town again. We got six 5-gallon jerry jugs filled three times, Barry got three 6-gallon jerry jugs filled two times, we got propane for Ed and Lynne and Barry got propane, and Tina and I filled huge bags with fresh veggies and eggs and then carried those bags to the SuperMarche. We then realized we had no way to contact Mark or Barry and Tina didn’t have enough money with her to check-out. We waited and waited and the taxi never came back for us, so I finally left Tina with all the bags of food and walked back up to the fresh market. It is in the center of town and I figured I’d see our white station wagon taxi eventually. The strategy worked and I found out the reason for the delay. The guys had to go out of town to get propane for Barry because he had a tank that he was trying to return and the taxi driver took them to a place that might take the tank. So while they were filling the tank, the taxi driver came back to look for Tina and me. But other than that little glitch the morning went brilliantly. In three and half hours we were back on the wharf with cases of beer (these plastic cases are HEAVY with twenty BIG bottles of beer) and bags of food to be returned to the boats. Barry and Tina’s son Michael was doing all of the shuffling back and forth in his dinghy and we are truly grateful to him for that. We couldn’t have made this work without him. But we still had one more fuel run and Ed and Lynne joined us at that time. We did the last fuel run, sent the fuel out to Windbird with Michael, paid Samuel the taxi driver, and then Ed and Lynne, Barry and Tina, and Mark and I went to Nandipo for lunch. This is a small restaurant/bar in Hell-ville that is the favorite hang-out of the local sailors and ex-pats. We had a great lunch, stopped to get ice-cream cones on the way back to the boat (a real treat), and then pulled up anchor and motor sailed the four miles to our present location. Tomorrow we are hoping to walk in Lokobe National Park and on Saturday will move over to Nosy Komba to revisit our lemur friends. Someday we are going to slow down, but not just yet. We are having too much fun.
by Judy Handley | Aug 4, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 282, Year 5 Anchored in Hell-ville
Date: Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Weather: Another Beautiful Day
Location: Hell-ville Harbor, Nosy Be, NW Madagascar
We moved to Hell-ville today and tomorrow is our mega-shop morning. Dream Catcher and Windbird have a taxi reserved for the morning and we will do fuel runs and food and beer shopping runs until we drop. Everything closes at noon so we have to be done by then. If all goes well, we will leave the harbor just after noon and go to Nosy Komba or around the corner on Nosy Be to Lokobe National Park.
I stayed on Windbird this afternoon while Mark went into town to the internet café. He was trying to download updated Norton Antivirus software but it was going to take 46 hours to download. I guess that won’t be happening. So his computer is giving him fits and there is no way for us to upload photos to the website until he somehow gets his computer virus-free. We have a copy of Norton 2005 onboard with the virus protection updated to 2008, so he is now doing a scan of his system with the old virus definitions. If this doesn’t work, we just have to wait until we get to South Africa to upload any photos. In the meantime, Mark’s computer runs incredibly slow but it does run. He is still able to get on the internet with our modem and download and send email. However, doing searches on the internet are just impossible. He has spent hours working on this with no positive results. What a frustration!
by Judy Handley | Aug 3, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 281, Year 5 Cooling Down
Date: Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Weather: Beautiful Day
Air Temp: 74 degrees F
Water Temp: 78 degrees F
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
It is winter here, but it feels more like a lovely New England summer. Mark, Ed, and Lynne have been remarking about how cool they are and I thought they were being rather silly as I am very comfortable. But when I checked the air and water temperature this afternoon I realized that the water temperature is about ten degrees cooler than when we arrived in Chagos (although it cooled down a bit there as well) and the air temperature is fourteen degrees cooler. Most of the time in Chagos the temperature hovered around 80-82, sometimes going down to 79. Today we went snorkeling with Ed and Lynne and after a fairly short time, Mark, Ed, and Lynne headed home because they were really chilly. There’s nothing really dangerous in the water here, so I stayed in and snorkeled alone back to Windbird. And I was not chilly when I got out of the water. So I guess this is one time when body fat comes in handy!
We got an email from our friends Alan and Helaine Kanegsberg today and they sent an article from the most recent Cruising World as an attachment. The article was by Fatty Goodlander and it was about Wild Card’s trip through the pirate-infested Gulf of Aden. It was so much fun to read the article and see the names of our friends that went that way. Fatty didn’t mention Robert and Tina of Shirena who were in his same convoy, but we also got an email from Robert this morning. Shirena is still in Israel while Robert is back in Australia recovering from the heart attack he had in Egypt. He and Tina are hoping to be cruising the Med by his time next year, but it will all depend on his recovery. In Alan’s email he also mentioned a fellow Concord Yacht Club friend who just had a heart transplant. Our thoughts are with Mike and Gretchen Coughlin as Mike recovers from his surgery and with Robert and Tina as Robert continues the rehabilitation program to get his heart back in shape.
In mid-July we started a trek to explore the islands and bays south of here. We planned to be gone about three weeks, but when Ed and Lynne had to return because of Lynne’s skin infection, we ended up coming back and doing our land travel. Now we’re going to try moving south again. We will sail to Hell-ville tomorrow to get the heavy stuff like fuel and beer that is really difficult to transport across the island by taxi and then by motorboat. We have tried to avoid staying the night in Hell-ville, but other cruisers have been doing it and finding there is no problem with theft as long as you have everything under lock and key. So we will spend one night, do our shopping, try to send photos to the website from an internet café, and then head out on Thursday afternoon. We’ll revisit Nosy Komba so I can have another lemur ‘fix’ and visit Lokobe National Park on the southeast corner of Nosy Be. Our plan is to then go back to Nosy Iranja to try and see the turtle hatchlings and work our way down to a place called Moramba Bay. Everyone that cruises to Madagascar says Moramba is their favorite anchorage, so we want to go spend a few days there and enjoy the beauty. Ed and Lynne are going with us but plan to return before we do. We’ll probably get back here sometime the first week of September, so after the next couple of days we will be back to HAM radio for email and no cell phone until we return.
Tonight there were no guests at Sakatia Towers, so the cruisers in the anchorage invaded. Barry and Tina of Dream Catcher from Richard’s Bay in South Africa, Bruce and Nadine of Pioneer from Cape Town in South Africa, and Ed and Lynne and ourselves spent our evening on the Sakatia Towers deck. Lots of cruiser business transacted. John assured us that we would be better off to book his driver Anatole to do our mega shopping on Thursday morning, so he called and made those arrangements for us. Tina and Barry need some sewing done of one of their sails and we think we can do that for them, so they will follow us to Hell-ville so we can do the sewing.. Bruce and Nadine want to head north in early September and would like to tag along with us when we do that, so we planned to meet them back here the first week of September. We shared information about different anchorages and just generally had a great time talking together. The Sakatia Towers deck is truly a meeting place and we truly appreciate John Sheppard’s hospitality. I know we will be looking forward to returning here in early September.
by Judy Handley | Aug 2, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 280, Year 5 A Day in the Life
Date: Monday, August 2, 2010
Weather: Rain Overnight, Still Cooler Than Normal
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
Today I did a mammoth laundry and continued to work on the Ankarana photos. Mark spent his entire morning trying to get some photos on the website, but he had no luck at all. He thinks he has a computer virus that he can’t get rid of with Spybot and it is slowing things down to a snail’s crawl. Heather and Jed put some great photos on their Picasa site, but we can’t download those either. We can only view them in thumbnail size but can never get the enlargement. So something has gone awry. We’ll keep working on that but photos might have to wait until South Africa. After striking out with his efforts to post photos on the website, Mark cleaned the fuel filter and changed the anti-freeze in the engine. In the early afternoon, Ed and Lynne came over to see photos from our inland trip and we spent the whole afternoon looking at photos and just generally checking in with one another. Lynne and I had fun looking at some of our underwater photos from Chagos and from here. Mark and Ed spent time studying our fuel polishing system. Then it was time for us to go visit with Bruce and Nadine on Pioneer. We met them on the Sakatia Towers deck last week and they really wanted to hear about trip inland. Bruce is British and Nadine is Italian but they are now from Cape Town in South Africa. They crewed on boats in the 1980’s and 90’s together and Bruce did some serious racing, but eleven years ago they settled in South Africa and had Tristen. She is a beautiful ten year-old and we really enjoyed our evening with them. They are on a catamaran that they delivered from South Africa. They will be here until late September when they will fly back to South Africa. Tonight we shared information with them about our inland travel and they shared information about their trip from South Africa to Nosy Be. It was a delightful evening and we hope to talk to them more tomorrow before we both leave here headed in different directions.
We will stay here tomorrow and then we think we will head to Hell-ville to refuel and replenish the food supply. From there we will go back to Nosy Komba to visit the black lemers. From there we will cross the channel back to Nosy Be to Lokobe National Park where we have learned from Bruce and Nadine that we can do a nice two-hour walk and get fresh water for laundry. By the weekend we will be headed south for about three weeks. We are really looking forward to that explore.
by Judy Handley | Aug 1, 2010 | Madagascar, Sailing Logs Year 5 |
Day 279, Year 5 The Meeting Place
Date: Sunday, August 1, 2010
Weather: Nice Day, Cooler Than Normal, Cloudy Late Afternoon
Location: Nosy Sakatia, NW Madagascar
It was a good day. I worked on naming photos from Ankarana and Mark worked on his computer. It has gotten sooooooo slow, so he worked to clean it up. I have created the Best Of. all of our Madagascar photos and we had hoped to get those on the website today. BUT even the internet connection was slow today, so we will try again tomorrow. I had so hoped to have a few photos from Ankarana on the website by tonight, but that will have to wait as well. We saw such wonderful things and we want to share those with you as soon as we can.
We jumped in the water for a snorkel in the early afternoon. After being inland for a few days, it was good to be back in the water. We saw Lionfish hiding in soft coral and a juvenile Emperor Angelfish that is dark blue with concentric ovals radiating from the rear to the front. We saw adult Emperors in Chagos, but we have never seen a juvenile, so that was a thrill. Ed and Lynne came over in the afternoon and we talked about our plans for the next six weeks in Madagascar. By the end of this week we hope to be headed south for a three week tour. By the end of August we would be back here and then head north for a couple of weeks before checking out and heading for South Africa. It was good to share plans and ideas. After Ed and Lynne left, we called our daughter Heather. It was great to hear Jonah and Sam talking in the background and to get an update on what is happening in their lives. We then headed into Sakatia Towers to thank John Sheppard for looking after Windbird while we were gone. It is so wonderful to have someone like John to be there to watch over us. His place is truly the “meeting place.” Tonight we met a dentist from California who is here with his teenage daughter, a friend of John’s from Germany who lives on Nosy Be working on agricultural projects, and two of the crew from a BIG sailboat from the United States that is being delivered to Mayotte where the owners will come aboard. When I say big, I mean a sailboat that is more than a hundred feet long with a crew of six plus a skipper and his wife. The crew members we met tonight were from Italy and South Africa. Sitting on the Sakatia Towers deck in the evening is certainly an international experience. I do believe that when we complete our circumnavigation and look back at favorite places, Sakatia Towers will be in the Top Ten.
When we got home from Sakatia Towers we called Justin, Jo, and Ziggy in England. They are leaving there in two days and heading back to New Mexico. We were having a great conversation when the cell phone beeped telling us we were out of time. We didn’t realize that it costs twice as much to call England as the US from here. Strange! But we will call them again later in the week when they return home. The weather has been wonderful in England this summer and Ziggy has so enjoyed being where there is grass instead of desert sand.
We will spend the next three or four days here and then start our trek south. The last time we headed south we ended up coming back, but this time we really hope to get down to a place called Moramba Bay. There are lemurs, strange limestone formations, and loads of baobabs. And while on the subject of baobab trees, I must admit to a huge error. I thought we were seeing baobabs in bloom when we arrived in Ampanasia Bay in the far north and again on Nosy Ankarea near Nosy Mitsio. But we learned from Goulam that what we were seeing were a type of Elephant’s Foot (Pachypodium rutenbergianum). We now know the difference but without good identification books, I was definitely confused.
